Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Bananas

I find this vox.com post by Natahnael Johnson even more interesting than their very high average. It is a paean to genentically modified bananas originally published at Grist. The Grist (and Vox) headline people tease “These vitamin-fortified bananas might get you thinking differently about GMOs”. Johnson should be glad it didn’t get me thinking differently […]

“The Battle for VA Healthcare and Its Funding”

VA healthcare has its faults; but, it still is one of the more successful examples of publicly funded healthcare even while hampered by a lack of funding to provide more capacity in strategic places for new Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and aging Vietnam veterans like myself. Libertarian Pete Hegseth, a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq […]

Millennials like socialism — until they get jobs. Or until a pollster tells them that it would mean tax increases but doesn’t tell them, for example, that the tax increases would replace healthcare insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical expenses. And doesn’t tell them that “more government services” means something other than, say, trash collection twice a week instead of once a week.

Okay, so the title of a Washington Post op-ed piece today by research fellow and director of polling at the Cato Institute Emily Ekins is “Millennials like socialism — until they get jobs.”  She knows that this is do because a recent Reason-Rupe poll—that’s libertarian magazine Reason, and some polling organization they hired—found that: When […]

The Key to Defeating Trump in the General Election Is in a Single Sentence of His in Last Night’s Debate: Angry Americans want big tax cuts for the wealthy

People come [to Trump campaign events] with tremendous passion and love for their country. … When they see what’s going on in this country, they have anger that’s unbelievable. They have anger. They love this country. They don’t like seeing bad trade deals. They don’t like seeing higher taxes. They don’t like seeing a loss […]

John Cornyn Adopts Trump-Like Fascism Techniques. Good Job, Donald! [Updated.]

Dan Crawford sent me links to these two articles about Senate Judiciary Committee enforcer John Cornyn’s threat on Tuesday that he and his compadres will destroy the reputation of anyone nominated by Obama for Scalia’s seat.  I responded to him after reading the articles: You know, Dan, this is so palpably, stunningly offensive that Sanders and Clinton need […]

Harry and Louise Now Support Sanders’ Medicare-for-All Plan. With Good Reason.

In the Comments thread today to my post yesterday titled “Clinton Announces When She Will Disclose Her Healthcare Insurance Improvement Plan: She’ll announce it just as soon as the Republican presidential candidates tell us theirs,” reader Urban Legend wrote, as part of a several-paragraph comment: While a single payer plan is superior in theory — […]

Clinton Announces When She Will Disclose Her Healthcare Insurance Improvement Plan: She’ll announce it just as soon as the Republican presidential candidates tell us theirs. [Typo in sentence referencing Max Ehrenfreund’s Wonkblog post corrected 3/2 at 2:28 p.m.]

Paul Krugman has been incessantly complaining about some Sanders supporters who accuse him and other high-profile Sanders critics, especially academics, of conflict of interest. The Sanders supporters allege all manner of self-interested reasons for the Sanders animus, much of it (including Krugman’s) expressed with vitriol. I’m not among the Sanders supporters who subscribe to the […]

Welfare Reform Killed People

A 20th anniversary reminder that an authentic randomized control trial proved beyond all conventional statistical significance levels and all reasonable doubt that welfare reform killed people. I will just note a very crude calculation. The experimental point estimate is that Florida’s welfare reform caused death rates to increase by 16%. This is a huge gigantic […]

Apparently there’s a special place in hell for Democratic politicians who criticize Barack Obama as insufficiently progressive. And a special place in heaven for politicians who have accepted $133,246 from the private-prisons industry but tell Black and Hispanic voters at a debate shortly before the Nevada caucuses and South Carolina primary that they want to end the private-prison system.

Nicholas Kristof  ✔@NickKristof Clinton is accusing Sanders of being anti-Obama. Feels fake and contrived to me, and rather nasty. 10:47 PM – 11 Feb 2016 Twitter ___ What worries me more than anything else about a Clinton general election campaign is her propensity to say obviously silly things. Elsewhere in that speech, in Clinton, IA […]

‘Both of us share the goal of this and that. But only one of us will try to score the goal.’

This is not about math — this is about people’s lives, and we should level with the American people.  Every progressive economist who has analyzed that say the numbers don’t add up. And we should level with the American people about what we can do to get quality affordable health care. — Hillary Clinton, at […]