My dad would stop by the airport LaRouche booths and argue with the nutjobs. Not sure why he found it amusing. He knew they were nuts, but he did it anyway. “It’s easy enough to do now what the dominant news media of the time did: look back on LaRouche as a joke, a once-in-a-generation […]
– by New Deal democrat With the stock market flailing around trying to keep its head above water, jobless claims along with consumer spending are the only two metrics that solidly support a continued economic expansion (ok, maybe ISM manufacturing is trending in that way as well). But to the point of this post: last […]
Trump’s closure of the Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase (VASP) plan creates financial issues for veterans who have VA mortgages which did not exist previously. Even so, in the past Trump has displayed little respect for veterans, calling them suckers and losers. He has denied the name calling, but it would be typical of him to […]
“Ask an Analyst: What makes a donor state?” USAFacts States contribute to the federal budget primarily through residents’ federal taxes and through business taxes on local industries. In return, states expect federal support via programs such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (or CHIP), transportation and education funding, and contracts and grants to local businesses […]
“Shared Legislative Power: The One Rule Congress Must Change” J.P. McJefferson Thoughts Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash Congress is widely described as polarized, dysfunctional, and unable to solve the country’s most pressing problems. Those diagnoses are not wrong—but they are incomplete. The deeper issue is not political division. It is structural design—specifically, the internal rules Congress has […]
The equivalency of education for women and men in the same disciple is not a guarantee of equal pay. This is true even if both went to the same school for their education. Also. more likely than not, a woman from a highly rated school may still get paid less than a man who graduated […]
About a seven-minute read: Gasoline prices in AZ, (in the part where I live) as of late March 2026, are high. They average around $4.21 per gallon for regular, with some locations exceeding $4.39. Prices have surged significantly, following broader metro Phoenix trends, with options ranging from $4.159 at Circle K and QuikTrip to higher […]
Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich died on March 13th. His 1968 book “The Population Bomb” was both influential and controversial in its time and has proven to be better fiction than science since then. I was required to read The Population Bomb in college. I recall being beguiled by its arguments and probably too by the […]
I’m neither an economist nor an historian, but I know enough about Marx to know that none of the governments that have been established in his name followed Marx’s theories. Suffice to say that Marx taught that socialism—and eventually communism—would arise in mature capitalist economies, when the workers got tired of labor exploitation and overthrew […]
– by New Deal democrat Occasionally on Sundays I have posted on things other than the economy. Some dramatic poll results I saw this past week called out for such a post. A popular poster over at Bluesky named Micah posted what comes pretty close to my overall view of the 2024 Presidential campaign: But […]