Kevin Drum 🕸

Oh great. It's no longer possible to download the Barnes & Noble Nook app, which means there's no way to install it on my new tablet. This in turn means that the ~100 books I have on Nook are now gone. Pffft. I will never be able to read them again. Three cheers for the ...continue reading "No more Nook"

Quick question: how's the performance of the blog these days? Normal? A little sluggish? Lightning fast? Infuriatingly slow? Just curious. I'm just wondering how my hosting company is doing lately. UPDATE: OK, thanks. The reason I asked, obviously, is that performance lately has been abysmal and I was hoping against hope that it was just ...continue reading "How’s the blog doing?"

Donald Trump, economic genius: Trump: A tariff is a tax on a foreign country. A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No… It’s is a tax that doesn’t affect our country. pic.twitter.com/NNyNthZbKg — Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2024 This brings up the eternal question: Is he lying or is he ...continue reading "Donald Trump: Liar or moron?"

This week I learned how to do something new. I have in mind an astrophotography target for next month—or maybe later in winter—that's far too big to fit in my telescope. The only way to capture it is by creating a mosaic: several separate images that are then stitched together. My software does this via ...continue reading "North America in the sky"

I noted the other day that the Fed has had no effect on inflation. However, the Fed is really good at one thing: making interest rates go up. When the Fed cranks up the reserve rate, interest rates do indeed go up. And the housing market naturally craters: Housing starts went down another 100,000 in ...continue reading "The housing market continues to crumble"

I want to let you all in on a secret. You know the economic plans from Trump and Harris—tariffs, price gouging, no tax on tips, 3 million new houses, etc.? None of it is going to happen. It's just empty, meaningless campaign talk. Now you know.

Dylan Matthews says that a sign of aging is that he's become more concerned about the national debt. Maybe. But I was old back in 2010 and I'm old now, and I agree that this is all due to the fact that things have changed: The 2024 economy is not the 2011 economy. Interest rates ...continue reading "Our national debt problem really is simple"

Did Tim Walz force Minnesota schools to put tampons in boys' bathrooms? Daniel Dale says no: All 15 of the districts that responded Friday to a CNN survey of 25 districts, including the Minneapolis and St. Paul districts in the state’s two most populous cities, said they comply with the law without providing tampons in ...continue reading "Nope, no tampons in boys’ bathrooms"

Many people have come up to me recently and said, "Mr. Drum, sir, was Trump's news conference yesterday really a news conference?" Sorry. It just amuses me that when people describe a Trump speech they now say things like "he told a few sir stories and then...." But let's return to that news conference on ...continue reading "About that Trump “news conference”"

Kamala Harris announced her new Trump-killing populist economic plan today: Harris’s most surprising policy announcement was her plan to ban “price gouging” in grocery and food prices. While details were sparse, the measure would include authorizing the Federal Trade Commission to impose large fines on grocery stores that impose “excessive” price hikes on customers, her ...continue reading "Are grocery stores gouging us?"

This is Charlie peeking out from behind the drapes while Hilbert waves a tail in his face. Eventually Charlie couldn't control himself any longer and walked outside to give Hilbert a swat. Between these two, however, a "swat" is just the barest contact of paw to head. It's possible Hilbert never even felt it.

Border crossings plummeted below 100,000 in July, the first time this has happened since 2020: Out of this total, 56,000 were caught trying to cross the border illegally. The rest were asylum seekers who presented themselves at border stations. It's maybe worth noting that this decline is due to President Biden's new policy of immediately ...continue reading "Illegal border crossings plummet in July"

I'm beating a dead horse on this topic, but here is inflation in the US over the past three years: In 2022 the Fed began raising interest rates. By June, rates went above 1% for the first time. In July monthly inflation abruptly fell off the map and then stayed steady around 3% for the ...continue reading "The Fed played no role in our recent bout of inflation"

Donald Trump says he want to eliminate income taxes on Social Security benefits. These taxes are currently deposited in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, a policy that was put in place under Ronald Reagan in order to help Medicare and Social Security finances. So what happens to Social Security and Medicare if this ...continue reading "Raw data: How Social Security finances are affected by ending the tax on benefits"

I see that Donald Trump is still droning on about Kamala Harris's Time cover. It's fake, maybe, or it looks like Melania or Time is in the tank for Kamala or something. Just in case you're wondering what this is all about, here's the Time cover and the Getty photograph it's based on: It's an ...continue reading "Kamala Harris looks like Kamala Harris"

Here's the latest from Vox: The hidden reason why your power bill is so high The price of electricity is continuing to rise across the United States, and there’s no end in sight. Why are our electricity bills getting so expensive? Energy prices have been creeping up across the nation for over a decade. The ...continue reading "Today’s boring but true headline: The cost of electricity has not been going up"

So far the Trump team has proposed: No tax on tips. No tax on Social Security. Extend the 2017 corporate tax cut. Implement a $5,000 Child Tax Credit. This would collectively blow the deficit to hell, raising it by something like $1 trillion per year. Does anyone care? Maybe. It makes me wonder if Kamala ...continue reading "Does anyone care about the deficit?"

Several weeks ago a handful of big-name news outlets began receiving a trove of documents about J.D. Vance from "Robert," all of which had been hacked from the Trump campaign. So far, though, nobody has published any of it—even though when the same thing happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, they eagerly splashed the hacked ...continue reading "Why is everyone keeping mum about that hacked J.D. Vance material?"

Behold the following timeline: November 21, 2023: Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, sues Media Matters for saying mean things about him. Nine months pass . . . August 9, 2024: NPR reports that the judge in the case, Reed O'Connor, holds stock in Tesla, which is also owned by Musk. Today: O'Connor recuses himself from ...continue reading "Musk judge recuses himself . . . but only from one case"