Kevin Drum

The Washington Post has a story today about payment apps like Venmo and PayPal. The gist of the piece is that they're inconsistently regulated and potentially not safe.

I know I'm an old dinosaur, but I don't really get the appeal of payment apps. Oh, if you use them solely to transfer small amounts to friends or for occasional eBay purchases, then sure. I suppose they're convenient. For everything else, though, I continue to recommend two things:

• Use credit cards. Tapping a credit card is about the easiest possible way of paying for things, and they're the only form of payment protected by federal law. You're never responsible for more than $50 in fraudulent charges, and dispute procedures are built in. No other payment method is safer or more convenient.
• For anything more than a few hundred dollars, keep your money in an ordinary bank. It's safe and insured. Anything else is a pointless risk.

I suppose I must be missing something here. I'm just not sure what.

Are we having fun yet? Over the past three years, consumption has grown 13.7%:

Now, these are annual figures, and the latest one represents an increase over the pandemic low. So it's maybe not totally fair. But it's still a great illustration of how strong the Biden recovery from the pandemic has been.

Over the past three years, the United States has produced 378 million barrels of oil per month:

This is yet another 50-year high. You may decide for yourself if it's unalloyed good news, but it's certainly strong economic news.

Are you still hungering for great economic news? Over the past three years the poverty rate among working-age adults has averaged 9.3%:

This is not quite a 50-year record, but only because Biden set that record last year.

Want more about how great the economy has been? Over the past three years GDP has grown 1.4% faster than potential GDP:

This is not quite a 50-year record. The economy was slightly hotter during the dotcom boom of the late '90s. But it's still pretty damn strong.

Do you want to know how good the economy is? Over the past three years unemployment has averaged 3.8%. This is the lowest sustained rate of unemployment of the entire past half century.

Better than Morning in America. Better than the dotcom boom. Better than Trump. The best in more than 50 years.

Here's something I ran into sort of by accident today. It shows how long it takes between filing a new business application and actually starting up:

This is for retail stores. The time it takes to get the doors open has increased from 18 weeks to 30 weeks in only fifteen years.

This same increase is seen in other business sectors too, but retail is the worst.

I don't really know how to interpret this. Is it purely red tape? Or is there more to it? Does it have something to do with the increased domination of chain and franchise retail compared to mom-and-pop stores? Have retail outlets gotten bigger and more complex over time? I wonder what's going on?

Here is the trajectory of growing income inequality over the past half century:

As measured by the GINI metric, inequality skyrocketed during the '70s and '80s. Then, very abruptly in 1993, it slowed down. Inequality has been growing steadily ever since, but at a moderate rate. Nevertheless, the US now has the highest income inequality of any advanced economy in the world—by far.

But what happened in 1993? That's a bit of a mystery.

Here's another look at the federal budget over the next decade. It comes from the Congressional Budget Office:

Nobody wants to cut Social Security or Medicare. Pensions are legally obligated. Veterans and defense have bipartisan support against cuts. And interest on the debt has to be paid.

That leaves a bit under $2 trillion. It includes Medicaid and all other social welfare spending, plus all ordinary domestic spending (national parks, the FBI, the EPA, crop subsidies, etc. etc.). You would have to cut it 100% to eliminate the federal deficit.

Any other ideas?

This now the modal Elon Musk tweet:

I know I've asked this before, but what the hell happened to the guy? His feed these days is nothing but an endless firehose of retweeted lies and conspiracy theories, and not even remotely believable ones. It's just made-up Alex Jones level lunacy about immigrants and FEMA that's meant solely to outrage the true believers who will blindly accept anything he says. Nobody else over the age of five believes a word of it.

But why? It's self destructive, makes him look like a moron, and persuades no one. At least Donald Trump does this stuff because he wants to win an election. What's Musk's motivation?