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

GAO: EV Infrastructure: USPS Plan for Potential Workplace Charging

GAO: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: USPS Should Plan for Potential Workplace Charging – Save the Post Office Introduction Part of the plan as referred to in Steve Hutkins’ “EVs and S&DCs: USPS says you can’t have one without the other” was to have EV charging capabilities at the local post offices which would be available to […]

Weakening federal child labor laws

April 28, 2023, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson According to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI), legislatures in at least ten states have set out to weaken federal child labor laws. In the first three months of 2023, legislators in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota introduced bills to weaken […]

Healthcare Utilization, Costs, and Pricing Drivers – 2017 and 2021

Health Care Cost and Utilization Report, healthcostinstitute.org, April 2023 Year-over-year and 5-year cumulative trends in health care spending for individuals with employer-sponsored insurance. A detailed report by the Health Care Cost Institute covering the period 2017 – 2021 which includes the Covid pandemic. Decreases i total costs were seen during the pandemic. Still in the […]

House Debt Ceiling Bill

voting 217 Yes 215 no the House has passed a bill which would increase the debt ceiling, slash spending, and repeal (most of) the IRA. This ends the fun period when we could laugh at Republicans for demanding that Biden negotiate without themselves making a bargaining proposal. The bill is horrible. I am a Democrat […]

Debt

To be clear, our national debt problem is due to revenues insufficient to cover expenditures. More than anything else, for the past 40 plus years, this accumulated deficit is due to Republican opposition to tax increases coupled with their eagerness to cut taxes on the wealthy given the opportunity to do so. Most, if indeed […]

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry, Angry Bear Two Years ago As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) and the VA with commercial healthcare insurance […]

What Happens When a Safety Net Hospital Closes?

Much of this article I rewrote to make it clearer for the reader. It is written by upper management. I do disagree with the conclusions. Throwing more money at healthcare is not going to solve the issues he discusses. The article praises Commercial Healthcare Insurance who pay more for patient care and whose costs are […]

The last dissent of Thurgood Marshall: the Rule of Law vs. the transitory Edicts of 5-4 Court majorities

The last dissent of Thurgood Marshall: the Rule of Law vs. the transitory Edicts of 5-4 Court majorities  – by New Deal democrat Daniel Kiel at the TPM Cafe, on the supreme differences between Clarence Thomas and his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, writes: “Thurgood Marshall, … in his final opinion before retiring after a quarter century on the […]