by Run 75441“Second Verse, the Same as The First”The story never seems to change . . . When you say that the high income earners, the top 20 percent, pay 90 percent of the taxes, what should they pay, 99 percent? These are the people who have enough money to invest in businesses and to […]
I noticed that the notion of income inequality and consequences was described outside the box in this article in the NYT. Several ideas struck me about the article. How people can work side by side with such little connection in their lives is instructive. The sense of ‘commons’ is missing from the article could be […]
by Jon Hammond Guest post: The Romney job record in Massachusetts For the period January 2003 – January 2007, the Romney record on state government job growth is compared against the national state employment aggregate. Likewise, private sector job growth in Massachusetts is compared against the national private sector aggregate, thus, benchmarking the Romney record […]
Via NYT Toward a Supreme Court Showdown Six federal courts have ruled on the Defense of Marriage Act and reached the same conclusion: the 1996 law violates the Constitution by denying same-sex couples, who are legally married under state law, federal benefits afforded to heterosexual couples for no good reason. The issue has now officially […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health care thoughts: Bundling Medical Payments The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is chocked full of pilot programs, mandates, guarantees, prohibitions, penalties, taxes and experiments. One of those experiments may define the future of Medicare funding for surgeons, and then may define the future of most of the […]
Via alternet comes this bit of news: …John Allison, a former bank CEO and a leader of the Rand movement, has just become president of the Cato Institute, the oldest and most influential libertarian think tank. This received only a modest amount of attention when it surfaced late last month, and you had to be […]
Lifted from Robert’s personal blog comes this thought: Ballance in the Washington Post Again – Robert’s thoughts This is part of a series. As usual, I think the latest is the all time winner. The concept of Ballance is that reporting and commentary must reach balanced conclusions no matter what the facts are. It is […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Crazy like Foxes? Several governors are announcing they will not begin building the state health exchanges required by PPACA (Obamacare). Some of this is pure partisan, and some a stall until November. Failure to comply will result in the feds installing exchanges in those states. The states […]
by Mike Kimel A Partial Review of Bulls Bears and the Ballot Boxby Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb A couple of years ago, Michael Kanell of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and I wrote Presimetrics. In it, we looked at how Presidents did on a wide range of issues – everything from abortions to the national debt. We measured […]