The sophisticated safety net that ensures few Danes ever experience poverty, fear hunger or lack in health care does not come cheap. The Danish economy may be the most heavily taxed in the world, with rich Danes paying over 55 percent of their total income in taxes to support generous social services. Even if high […]

No one would ever accuse Bernie Sanders of thinking small. The senator from Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate wants to transform one of the world’s most boisterous free-market economies into an exemplar ofScandinavian-style “democratic socialism.” He wants to jail Wall Street executives and double the minimum wage. And he wants to spend taxpayer money, lots of it. According to an estimate by The Wall […]

I received this email this morning from “FedEx”: Subject: Copy From: [email protected] Today at 10:06 AM To: [Me] This is to Remind you that this Parcel has arrived at our Local FedEx Office since 12th october 2015. However, our courier dispatch was unable to deliver the parcel to you due to incorrect delivery instructions / details. […]

Denmark isn’t a middle-class, capitalist, entrepreneurial country?  Because it has universal healthcare, free college, free day care, and guaranteed family and medical leave?  Really, Secretary Clinton?  Really? — Me, here, Oct. 14 No doubt surprising many of the people watching the Democratic presidential debate, Bernie Sanders cited Denmark as a role model for how to […]

In a comment to this post of mine from yesterday in which I used the phrase “affordable daycare,” reader Eric377 posted this comment: Eric377/October 18, 2015 7:50 am Leaves I understand as policy. Affordable daycare a whole lot less. Affordable daycare is not what is meant here. States could change regulations to allow lower cost daycare. Is […]

Hillary Clinton never, ever says the word “families” without prefacing it with the adjective “hardworking.”  It’s downright Pavlovian.  And every time I hear her say “families”—which is often—and therefore “hardworking” in reference to families, I wonder whether she’s dividing workers into hardworking ones and ones who slough off their work onto their colleagues, or something. […]

Senator Sanders did vote five times against the Brady Bill. Since it was passed, more than 2 million prohibited purchases have been prevented. He also did vote, as he said, for this immunity provision. I voted against it. I was in the Senate at the same time. It wasn’t complicated to me. It was pretty […]

  E.J. Dionne just posted a column online that will be published in tomorrow’s Washington Post.  Here are its last three paragraphs: But the debate’s most substantive contribution was to the larger philosophical argument the country needs to have in 2016. Republicans plainly still believe their central mission is cutting taxes, shredding regulations and shrinking […]

I read Paul Waldman’s posts on the Washington Post Plum Line blog regularly and agree with most of what he says, but his claim today that rural young people who can’t afford college aren’t interested in attending college anyway, and those who do attend are fine with borrowing large amounts of money to do so if […]

[Sanders’s] most newsworthy moment, of course, came when he declined Cooper’s invitation to attack Clinton for using a private email server. “[L]et me say something that may not be great politics,” he said. “But I think the secretary is right, and that is that the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” […]