Tax churn. Or so I will suggest. There are two basic ways to improve the economic position of disadvantaged Americans using the income tax system. The first approach, targeting, uses refundable tax credits to put more money in the hands of lower-income households. Subsidies decrease for households with higher earnings. The second approach is to […]
Here is what Biden said about omicron in December: “We’re looking ahead to a brighter and happier December,” Mr. Biden said on Wednesday. He ticked through a list of actions by his administration that he said would help ensure fully stocked shelves in groceries and retailers through the holidays. Asked by reporters if he was […]
A few days ago, libertarian economist Donald Boudreaux published a photo of a woman sitting in an airport with some kind of bubble over her head. He claimed that it illustrated how insanely risk averse some people are about COVID. When some of his readers objected to this absurd propaganda, he responded as follows (my […]
This drives me crazy. From Alice Miranda Ollstein and Megan Messerly in Politico: Republicans are accusing the Biden administration of racism — against white people. The administration’s recommendation that race and ethnicity be considered when deciding who gets the limited supply of new Covid drugs is the latest political talking points with which Republicans are […]
Predicting the future is hard, but right now things look bad for President Biden and congressional Democrats. Their agenda is stalled in Congress, the pandemic continues to kill people and disrupt normal life, prices are rising, and perceptions of the economy are bad. No one is surprised that the President’s approval rating keeps hitting new […]
I have a piece up at Science Based Medicine digging into some misleading claims by two authors of the Great Barrington Declaration about Anthony Fauci. Frankly I was surprised at how brazen some of the misrepresentations were. For example, they criticize Fauci for being in favor of school closures, but: . . . if you […]
This doesn’t justify the NYDH guidance. In a recent post, I criticized the New York Department of Health for using race/ethnicity as risk factors when determining eligibility for Paxlovid without providing evidence that Black/Hispanic people are more likely to die if they get Covid-19 than similar White people. My criticism is not based on a […]
Donald Trump had a rally this weekend in Arizona: Former President Donald Trump on Saturday claimed that white people are being discriminated against and sent to the “back of the line” when it comes to receiving COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. Speaking during a rally in Florence, Arizona, Trump alleged that coronavirus vaccines and treatments are being unfairly […]
What are leading Democrats trying to accomplish with their current push on voting rights? It’s far from clear. One approach to voting rights reform would have been to reach out quietly to Republicans and to try to negotiate a limited bill that could win bipartisan support. Biden could express optimism that reasonable Republicans would come […]
Some libertarians oppose vaccine mandates by claiming that unvaccinated people only impose costs on themselves. However, as I noted in an earlier post, we’re all paying for the vaccine hesitancy stirred up on the right. From JAMA (footnotes omitted): Findings suggest that insurers heavily subsidized the costs of ivermectin prescriptions for COVID-19, even though economic […]