Kevin Drum 🕸

Melania Trump is hawking a $600 gold necklace these days while Donald is peddling a Trump commemorative coin—to go with his sneakers, his picture book, his NFT, his Bible, and pieces of the suit he was wearing during his debate with Joe Biden—to go with pieces of the suit he wore at his mug shot ...continue reading "What’s up with all the Trump merch?"

This is a sad story in the Wall Street Journal today. Michael Bloomberg wanted to help bright but disadvantaged kids get into good colleges, so he teamed up with two outfits, CollegePoint and the American Talent Initiative: Billionaire Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $140 million over the past decade to get tens of thousands ...continue reading "It’s not easy to get more poor kids into college"

This week New York magazine has a long profile of Ta-Nehisi Coates that reminds once again of why I'm puzzled that he's held in such extraordinary esteem. It all started with "The Case for Reparations," his first big hit, which struck me as sort of a bloated term paper mostly cribbed from Wikipedia—and which fizzled ...continue reading "The miseducation of Ta-Nehisi Coates"

What are Kamala Harris's economic plans? For that matter, what are Donald Trump's? To start, we can assume Trump has ordinary Republican opinions and Harris has ordinary Democratic opinions. Beyond that, here are their specific major proposals: Trump Harris Taxes Extend 2017 tax act 20% tariffs across the board Reduce corporate tax rate Tax-free Social ...continue reading "Trump vs. Harris on economic policy"

The FBI released full-year crime figures for 2023 today, and officially they say murder was down 11.6%. However, if you look at the murder rate, it's down 12.3%. The Crime Data Explorer has also gotten a makeover and now shows crime figures monthly: (The 2021 figures are grayed out because they're unreliable.) All the numbers ...continue reading "The murder rate dropped 11-12% in 2023."

This is another sand dune at the Cadiz Dunes Wilderness in the Mojave Desert. I've got a bunch more, so don't worry that I'll be running out anytime soon.

Ben Dreyfuss tweeted last night about a study showing that Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to believe in conspiracy theories. This struck me as historically unsupported, but who knows? Maybe it's true today. So I took a look at the study and discovered something odd. The top three conservative conspiracy theories are COVID, climate ...continue reading "Republicans and their conspiracy theories"

Let's start out the week with a brief reminder of what the federal government spends its money on: Your goal is to find $1,700 billion in either spending cuts or tax increases to balance the budget. Generally speaking, most people agree there should be no cuts to defense, Social Security, Medicare, or veterans, which leaves ...continue reading "Can you balance the federal budget?"

I like this passage from a Washington Post article yesterday about the insane chaos now surrounding the Trump campaign: By early last week, Trump and his No. 2, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), found themselves trying to reverse-engineer evidence of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, arguing they were simply trying to draw attention ...continue reading "The GOP is a reverse engineering virtuoso"

After failing to pass a stopgap spending bill because of opposition within his own party, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has bowed to the inevitable: Pressed closer against the Sept. 30 shutdown deadline — and mired with disputes within his conference — Johnson brokered a deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House ...continue reading "Republicans cave in yet again on the budget"

Inspired by a story in the Wall Street Journal today, here are all the spots in California where the wholesale price of electricity is currently negative: The Journal explains that this is all due to the rise of renewable energy, mostly solar and wind, which is already widespread in Europe: The changes sweeping Europe’s electricity ...continue reading "“Too cheap to meter” is finally getting close"

I don't really understand how you can conduct a poll in a place like Gaza, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research says they can do it. Here's one result from their latest survey: After nearly a year of the most brutal pummeling imaginable, only 28% of Gazans still think Hamas can win ...continue reading "Gazans are starting to give up on the war"

Here's the growth of mobile cellular subscriptions in a few selected countries: Note that this is per 100. Most rich countries have more cell subscriptions than they do people. The top region is Hong Kong at 292 (China as a whole clocks in at 125). The United States is a hair above the world average ...continue reading "Raw data: Cell phone subscriptions"

Here is the number of murders each year in Springfield, Ohio, both before and after the large-scale arrival of Haitian immigrants: Daniel Driscoll, the Republican top prosecutor in Clark County, adds this: During the time that I’ve been with the prosecutor’s office, which is 21 years now, we have not had any murders involving the ...continue reading "Raw data: Homicides in Springfield"

Here's a funny thing. The Wall Street Journal, searching for a trend based on Kamala Harris's debate revelation that she owns a gun, says that Democrats are suddenly buying lots of guns. Their data for this comes from NORC at the University of Chicago, but so does mine and it's not the same: According to ...continue reading "No, Democrats aren’t suddenly gun nuts"

Here's an odd thing. With my old camera and old flash unit I could never take a picture of Hilbert. Charlie was fine, but Hilbert's eyes always came out pitch black. This happened even though I always use bounce flash, not direct flash. But with my new camera and new flash everything is fine. As ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 20 September 2024"

Here's the blaring headline at the top of the Washington Post this morning: In a hyper-technical sense this is true. The new Georgia rule doesn't require a hand count of how people voted, but it does require a hand count of the number of ballots to make sure it matches the machine total. The Post ...continue reading "When is a hand count not really a hand count?"

Alex Tabarrok points today to an interesting RAND study of prescription drug prices. It turns out that we pay much higher prices than other countries for new, branded drugs, but other countries pay much higher prices for older generics: But I found this even more interesting: U.S. prices for brand-name originator drugs were 422 percent ...continue reading "Why are generic drugs unpopular in Europe?"

I don't remember why I got curious about this, but earlier this evening I looked up the word colorway to find out where it came from. Why did the folks in the sneaker industry invent this odd word? They didn't. According to the OED, the earliest use is 1941 in the Guardian. Another source places ...continue reading "What’s your colorway?"

The New York Times celebrates the stock market's record high today with a standard chart showing the S&P 500 since the year 2000. Nothing wrong with that. But if you really want to know how the market is doing, you should do two things. First, adjust for inflation. Who cares if the S&P is up ...continue reading "The stock market is doing great"