Kevin Drum 🕸

Here's a headline in the New York Times today: This highlights a problem either with journalists or with economists. I can safely say that economists aren't "skeptical" of Trump's tariff blather. They think it's straight up bullshit. So is the problem that economists are too polite to say so when a Times reporter calls? Or ...continue reading "Tariffs are not as nuanced as the New York Times says"

Here's the Vienna Opera House at night just as a performance is starting to let out. I believe this was the setting for a big part of one of the Mission Impossible movies.

The FBI reported yesterday that cryptocurrency fraud in the US amounted to $5.6 billion in 2023. This is a 45% increase since 2022.¹ Nearly 40% of the fraud was perpetrated on people age 60 and over. This all makes the United States the crypto fraud capital of the world by a very wide margin. Here ...continue reading "America is the crypto fraud capital of the world"

The government's fiscal year ends on September 30, which means FY25 begins on October 1. That's three weeks away. Naturally we need a federal budget in place by then, but that's a laughable impossibility with Republicans in charge of the House. The best we can hope for is a continuing resolution to keep the lights ...continue reading "Voter ID: Solved!"

In addition to new poverty figures, the Census Bureau also released new annual income numbers today. Real household income was up 4.0% in 2023: Household income was up for all races and all income groups. It increased the most for the poorest 10% of workers. Note that this is "money income" as defined by the ...continue reading "Income rose 4% in 2023"

We got new poverty figures today from the Census Bureau, and the news was mixed: Using the old, official measure, the poverty rate was down 0.4 percentage points, dropping from 11.5% to 11.1%. However, using the shiny new SPM, the poverty rate was up 0.5 percentage points, rising from 12.4% to 12.9%. The SPM is ...continue reading "Chart of the day: Poverty in America"

TIL that members of Congress are allowed to use their franking privilege to buy TV ads: Love a good franked TV ad that looks indistinguishable from a campaign spot and airs in the midst of a competitive election *just* until the blackout date 60 days before Nov. 5 -- this latest one from CA-13 Rep. ...continue reading "When is a campaign ad not a campaign ad?"

Today brings good news and bad news. The good news is that Morning Consult polling shows Kamala Harris behind in only one battleground state. The bad news is that she's lost ground from two weeks ago: This is one tight race, folks. Even Florida is within two points (49-47 in favor of Trump).

This goes into the file of sentences you never expected to see: The Springfield Police Division said Monday morning they have received no reports related to pets being stolen and eaten. If you have no idea what this is all about, count your blessings. It means you're a normal person who doesn't chase right-wing memes ...continue reading "What’s really happening in Springfield?"

This is a picture of Highway 177 looking north on a day with 120° temperatures. It may be only the edge of the Mojave Desert, but it's still pretty hot.

I see that Kamala Harris now has an extensive issues page on her website. People have been whining about its absence forever, and now that it's here I predict that about 17 people will bother reading it. My favorite is this one: Politically, I'm sure this is a winner. Logically, not so much. It is, ...continue reading "We need higher energy costs"

Bruce Springsteen's wife, Patti Scialfa, has joined the multiple myeloma brigade that includes me, Tom Brokaw, Steve Scalise, Karen Tumulty, and maybe even Queen Elizabeth II. I wish her the best of luck.

Semafor published a story this evening about a mysterious right wing financier who organized a secret¹ group of conservative influencers to smear Kamala Harris with sexual innuendo: This influencer network was organized over emails and Zoom calls....The money was good: One participant made more than $20,000 for several weeks of boosting assigned messages, according to ...continue reading "Now we know where the sex smears against Kamala Harris came from"

What's the single best metric for the health of an economy? Conventionally it's GDP growth, and there's nothing really wrong with that. But if I had to choose one thing it would be median income. In particular, market income before taxes or government benefits. Here it is: Compared to GDP, income is a better measure ...continue reading "Median income is the best measure of an economy"

Government bureaucrats say the unemployment rate last month was 4.2%. Donald Trump says the real unemployment rate was 7.9%. Please. In August the United States had 161 million workers out of a total population of 337 million. That's an unemployment rate of 52.1%. Why won't the lamestream media tell you that more than half of ...continue reading "Half of all Americans are out of work"

What do you make of this? If you start at 2009, suicidal thoughts reported among teens have gone up by more than half. But if you look at the entire data series, suicidal thoughts declined by half during the '90s and aughts and have now merely reverted to their historical average. It's all especially hard ...continue reading "Raw data: Suicide and thoughts of suicide among teens"

This data comes straight from the CDC: Nuff said. This is a crisis, people.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that the share of foreign born workers in the US had accelerated a bit over the past two years. This was largely because the number of native born workers had flattened out, and I wasn't sure if this was due to native workers being pushed out of the ...continue reading "Raw data: Labor participation for prime age, native born workers"

I was looking for some old photographs last night and ran across my pictures of Hilbert when we first brought him home ten years and two cameras ago. So today you get a stroll down memory lane. Hilbert isn't quite a kitten in these pictures—he was ten months old when we adopted him—but he still ...continue reading "Friday Cat Blogging – 6 September 2024"

Over at National Review, Dominic Pino has a sarcastic post about Democratic efforts to collect unpaid taxes from rich people by amping up IRS enforcement. I don't care much about the fact that some of the estimates for revenue collection were a little crazy, but even putting that aside Pino has a point. Using the ...continue reading "Treasury is way behind on auditing the wealthy"