Month: March 2025

With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.

No public memorial services are planned.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.

A Facebook page, 'In Memory of Kevin Drum', has been created as a place for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post your thoughts and memories there.

Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and challenged him through the years.

He will be greatly missed.

Marian

Everything is getting worse:

Other counts are getting worse and I feel terrible. Nonetheless they're slow walking the immunoglobulin treatment, which I think is my only chance. These guys are going to kill me before they figure out what's wrong.

The LA Times has finally activated its long-awaited, AI-powered "bias meter," announced last December by its owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong. It appears at the bottom of all opinion pieces and looks like this:

Color me a little unimpressed. Practically everything was labeled center left, and that's all it does. Meh.

Just below is a "Perspectives" dropdown, which provides a dull summary of the piece, along with an even duller set of bullet points offering alternative viewpoints. I don't really see the point of that. I'd prefer a fact check. That might get the fur flying.

All this stuff is generated directly by AI. No human staff sees it before it goes up.

It's official:

The U.S. will pause all military aid to Kyiv until President Trump determines that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is making a good-faith effort toward peace negotiations with Russia, according to a White House official.

Trump's revenge is now complete.

Construction data was released today, and once again I don't get this:

Following the pandemic, everyone was supposedly working from home. Downtowns were hollowed out. Vacancy rates were 50%.

And yet, construction of office buildings has never fallen below its pre-pandemic peak. We're putting up new office buildings like gangbusters. What's going on?

The other shoe drops:

The Trump administration has stopped financing new weapons sales to Ukraine and is considering freezing weapons shipments from U.S. stockpiles, moves that threaten Kyiv’s ability to fight at a critical time in its battle against Russian forces, current and former U.S. officials said.

The shutdown of financing new weapons sales began before Friday’s acrimonious meeting.... But the meeting to consider suspending ongoing weapons shipments to Ukraine drawn from U.S. military inventories emerged after the Friday blowup at the White House.

And the third shoe:

The United States is drawing up a plan to potentially give Russia sanctions relief as Donald Trump seeks to restore ties with Moscow and stop the war in Ukraine, a US official and another person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The White House has asked the state and treasury departments to draft a list of sanctions that could be eased for US officials to discuss with Russian representatives in the coming days.... The White House asked state and treasury officials to come up with a possible sanctions relief plan before Trump last week extended a state of emergency over the situation in Ukraine, the US sources said.

So: No more arms shipments to Ukraine, and sanctions relief for Russia, something Trump had in mind well before his staged blowup with Zelensky. Go ahead and solve for what this means. The algebra isn't hard.

The soda wars, begun they have:

At both state and federal levels, the Kennedy-led Make America Healthy Again movement is backing efforts to prevent people from spending food-aid benefits on sugary, carbonated beverages.... But the U.S. Agriculture Department, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, has rejected the requests for more than 20 years, saying it would be too complicated to implement. This year, deep-red Arkansas may be the first to get a different answer.

The state is preparing to ask the USDA if it can restrict some less-healthy items, including potentially soda, candy and desserts, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in an interview Friday.

I dunno. There's always a strain of moral censoriousness around the kinds of food welfare recipients should be allowed to eat. No Twinkies! No Coke! No T-bone steaks! But aside from the fact that slicing and dicing into ever smaller categories really is impractical for retailers, there's the fact that SNAP spending really isn't that bad:

Something like 70% of all SNAP spending is already on nutritious food, and sweetened beverages are only the #6 spending category. I'm not sure we can do all that much better, or that it's worth trying. Even poor people deserve to eat what they please.

Holy cow:

My inflammation is still going up despite massive doses of steroids. What the hell is going on?

Republicans love smoke-and-mirrors budgeting. They're laying off thousands of workers chaotically even though salary costs are a tiny fraction of the federal budget. Elon Musk is pretending to save far more money than he really is. Now Senate Republicans are trying to hide the cost of extending the 2017 tax cuts using a new wheeze called the "current policy baseline."

This one is a pistol, but it's a little trickier than the others. Take a look at the chart below:

The cost of the 2017 tax bill has so far averaged a little over $200 billion per year (blue bars). So let's just take that as the new zero! If we do, the apparent cost of extending the tax cut goes down from $3.6 trillion to $1.8 trillion. That certainly makes things easier on everyone.

It's not real, of course. Suppose you're paying off $500 per month on your car. After five years it's done and you decide to buy a new car with the same payments. If you assume that $500 is your "baseline" then the new car costs nothing. It's an exciting thought.

But it ain't true. Call it anything you like, but that car is costing you $500 per month in actual money. If you don't account for that in your household budget you're going to be screwed pretty quickly.

It's the same for extending the 2017 tax bill. Whether you like it or not, it's going to cost about $3.6 trillion and it's going to swell the national debt by $3.6 trillion.

But Republicans don't want it to increase the national debt by $3.6 trillion. They're against debt, you see. But they're also deeply in favor of tax cuts for the rich. What to do?

Pretend and extend, my friends. Can they get away with it under Senate rules? Probably not, but it's worth a try. Stay tuned.

Donald Trump plans to levy 25% tariffs across the board on Canada tomorrow:¹

The result, an overwhelming majority of economists agree, would be inflation and supply disruption in the United States, while Canadian industries could face large-scale layoffs.

Inflation in the US and unemployment in Canada! Sounds great. And whole factories will shut down:

Because 25 percent is far higher than the profit margins on cars and trucks, as well as the parts used to make them, industry executives predict that parts makers would soon stop shipping and factories would quickly close in all three countries, laying off thousands of workers.

“A 25 percent tariff across the Mexico and Canadian border will blow a hole in the U.S. industry that we have never seen,” Jim Farley, the chief executive of the Ford Motor Company, said last month.

Need more details?

Anderson Economic Group, a consulting firm in East Lansing, Mich., estimates that tariffs of 25 percent would add $1,000 to $4,000 to the price of a new vehicle, and as much as $10,000 if manufacturers are unable to take steps to reduce the impact.

....[John] Elkann acknowledged that the tariffs could make a turnaround harder for Stellantis. About a third of its highly profitable Ram pickups are assembled in a plant in Saltillo, Mexico. It also makes two Jeep models at a second Mexican plant, in Toluca. It makes Chrysler Pacifica minivans at a plant in Windsor, Ontario, and is scheduled to begin making the Dodge Charger in the same factory this year. A second plant, in Brampton, Ontario, is being retooled, with plans to make Jeeps there when it reopens.

Needless to say, this was all encouraged by the USMCA treaty Trump himself signed in 2018 and called "the single greatest agreement ever signed." But Trump doesn't care anymore. He wants more, and "Who's gonna stop me?" is his motto these days.

¹Also Mexico, but this story happens to be about Canada.