Kevin Drum 🕸

As you all know by now, a couple of days ago the Justice Department indicted a pair of Russian nationals who work for the propaganda outlet RT. They are charged with secretly bankrolling Tenet Media, a startup content farm that churned out right-wing videos. But why? Unlike Russian efforts to seed social media with low-quality ...continue reading "Russia has been targeting the American right all along"

The American economy gained 142,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 52,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2%. Employment numbers for the previous two months were revised downward, so we've now had three consecutive ...continue reading "Job growth remains low in August but earnings soar"

Vox points me today to a new paper suggesting the following sequence of events: In 2006, a fungal disease called white nose syndrome starts killing off bats. Bats fail to eat insects. Farmers have to use more pesticide. Pesticides kill babies. Infant mortality goes up. Here's the inevitable chart: The researcher, Eyal Frank, found that ...continue reading "Unintended consequence of the day: Bats and infant mortality"

Just for fun, I want to show you what would happen if, against all odds, Donald Trump enacted a 20% tariff on all imports and it had no effect on the volume of imports. Here it is: For example, in 2023 the federal government had a budget deficit of $1.8 trillion. Total imports—every car, every ...continue reading "Trump and his tariffs"

OK, I admit that this is pretty amusing: Q: What specific legislation will you commit to to make child care affordable? Trump: Well, I would do that and we're sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka… But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers ...continue reading "Donald Trump and the child care non-crisis"

This is a masked lapwing at the LA Zoo.

The BLS reported revised Q2 productivity today, and while I was fiddling around with it I came across a question I couldn't answer: how are we doing in the post-pandemic era? Here are your two choices: If we assume linear growth before the pandemic, we're doing well. If we assume exponential growth, we're behind the ...continue reading "How is productivity doing?"

I see that AH Datalytics has published the inaugural version of their Real-Time Crime Index, which provides rough estimates of crime within a couple of months of it happening. This contrasts with the FBI, which takes about six months to provide quarterly estimates and nearly a year to provide final annual figures. What's more, the ...continue reading "Why did murder spike in the summer of 2020?"

This is the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. It was originally built as a palace, of course, but it never got used much. There were just too many other palaces in Vienna. Eventually, after 50 years of sporadic use, Maria Therese transferred the Imperial Picture Gallery to the Belvedere and it's been an art museum ever ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Maybe I just read the wrong people, but I've sure seen a lot of chatter about Kamala Harris's proposal to tax unrealized capital gains. A couple of notes: The proposal is only for people with a net worth above $100 million. In practice it's really not a big deal. It's hardly unknown to tax unrealized ...continue reading "Taxing unrealized gains isn’t unusual, but it’s probably not a good idea anyway"

The Wall Street Journal has this headline in today's paper: How Immigration Remade the U.S. Labor Force That's true enough, but it's also worth noting that it hasn't remade the workforce all that much—not recently, at least. Here's the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force: This is all foreign born workers, both legal ...continue reading "There’s been no surge in foreign born workers in the US"

There's nothing new in this week's YouGov poll of the presidential race: YouGov still has Harris two points ahead of Trump in national polling. Oddly, Harris continues to lead by four points when people are asked who they'd prefer to have as president. Perhaps the "Not Sure" vote breaks heavily for Harris? Also, Black support ...continue reading "Harris maintains lead over Trump"

Paul Krugman's column today is about "left behind" places in the US. Exhibit A is West Virginia, which indeed has the lowest level of prime-age men's employment in the country: But here's the thing: West Virginia has always been poor. Personal income in 1950 was a dismal 32% lower than the US average and central ...continue reading "What’s the matter with West Virginia?"

This has become a weirdly popular right-wing meme lately on Twitter—amplified, of course, by Elon Musk: Kamala will shut down X if she wins pic.twitter.com/sML999zQlB — Clown World ™ 🤡 (@ClownWorld_) August 30, 2024 This interview clip is from 2019 and has nothing to do with shutting down Twitter. It took place during Trump's first ...continue reading "Kamala Harris does not want to shut down Twitter"

I see that Rep. Jamie Raskin is trying to follow up on a weird Washington Post story from a month ago: Democratic leaders on the House Oversight Committee released a letter Tuesday asking former president Donald Trump if he ever illegally received money from the government of Egypt, and whether money from Cairo played a ...continue reading "Did Donald Trump take $10 million from Egypt?"

Rolling Stone has published a list of the 100 best television episodes ever, and there's not much point arguing over it.¹ It's a matter of taste, right? But there's one thing that bugs me. If your reviewers are all people whose TV experience goes back only to the '80s, that's fine. I get that it's ...continue reading "I guess TV really sucked in the ’50s and ’60s"

Today is a do-over. Allow me to explain. Nebulas in the night sky are basically just clouds of gas made luminous by starlight. They consist of hydrogen alpha gas (red), sulphur (a slightly different shade of red), and oxygen (blue). Serious astrophotographers capture this by using monochrome cameras and a set of narrowband filters that ...continue reading "Lunchtime Photo"

Are you curious about how Truth Social stock is doing? Sure you are. DJT got a little bounce when the Republican convention started, but that wore off quickly and the stock has tanked completely ever since Kamala Harris entered the race. It's down 40% from its pre-convention price. Mind you, it's still selling for about ...continue reading "DJT stock is down 40% thanks to Kamala Harris"

Residential construction spending dipped slightly last month, but take a look at the longer term: The pre-pandemic growth trend is strong because it was a rebound from the 2006-09 housing bust. But post-pandemic growth is even stronger. Adjusted for both inflation and population growth, residential construction is 20% higher than in 2002 and 28% higher ...continue reading "Raw data: Residential construction spending in the US"

I was diddling around this evening and accidentally typed books into FRED. I discovered two interesting things. First, there's been zero book inflation over the past quarter century: In fact, books today cost a little less than they did in 1998. At the same time, consumption of books has gone up considerably: We buy twice ...continue reading "Raw data: Book and newspaper consumption"