Paul Krugman wrote today about Life Without Cars. This subject strikes home for me. I have lived without a car since 2005. I lived 5 of the past 9 years in Chile and used the bus system there. I came back to the United States and have used a combination of walking, a bike and […]
Stay with me here. Because I am almost serious about this proposal. Or at least it highlights the contradictions (while not Heightening the Contradictions). The Border Crisis: tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border. Social Security ‘Crisis’: per ‘Reformers’ one that is driven by pure demography – too few future workers to […]
by Dale Coberly For some time now the Social Security Trustees have been reporting in the “media” using scare tactics like this: “Social Security Going Broke Sooner Than We Thought! Faces [fill in the blank] Trillion Dollar Deficit!” And I have tried to explain that what those numbers mean is that we need to raise […]
by Barkley Rosser at Econospeak The Wannabe Caliphate Openly Declares Itself So I earlier argued here that ISIS(ISIL) or DAEESH was not yet claiming itself to be a caliphate, and that its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was only calling himself “al Hakim,” or “Ruling Emir,” even as I recognized that he had turned over this […]
There are what I perceived as problems with the Brookings Study. Just one example: they base much of their analyses upon “lifetime earnings associated with earning a bachelor’s degree”. The average lifetimes earnings of degree holders is certainly skewed significantly upwards by the top 10% of earners (who account for over 40% of all earnings, […]
Update to the Hobby Lobby decision comes as a result of a SCOTUS injunction the day before the 4th of July 2014 The nonprofit Wheaton College filed a petition to keep it from having to a file self-certification document certifying it is a religious organization and should be exempt from having to provide contraceptives. Sotomayer […]
As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.” But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form […]
I haven’t read the opinions, concurrence, or dissents in either Hobby Lobby or Harris v. Quinn, so these comments are based on news summaries and quick commentaries by others. But the biggest surprise in Hobby Lobby, I think, is the express approval, in the opinion and in Kennedy’s concurrence, of HHS’s on-the-fly setup devised in […]
Part 1; Cantor’s Defeat and What It Does Not Mean When House Majority leader Eric Cantor lost his seat to ultra-conservative David Brat, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus summed up the majority view among political pundits: “The episode offers a disturbing commentary about the poisonous, polarized state of American politics.” I cannot agree. I don’t […]