This quote is right up there with the great Will Rogers line: “I don’t belong to an organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Matthew Yglesias opens his recent post with it. I don’t know if he coined it, but if so, A Huge Kudos. It’s utterly and painfully true. A deservedly iconic statement. Here’s what […]
A federal judge in the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of several cases brought by states including Indiana and Oklahoma, along with business owners and individual consumers, who say that the law does not grant the Internal Revenue Service authority to provide tax credits or subsidies to people who […]
Somewhere in the future months, one of us is going to have to eat crow here on the success of the PPACA. The Republicans, Teabaggers, Healthcare Insurance Companies, Gerrymandered Republican Districts, ALEC, Koch Bros, etc. are working their hardest to make this much needed change in how people gain coverage fail. Meanwhile healthcare insurance companies […]
Update: Brad DeLong has replied, and I have replied to him. Dean Baker quite rightly takes Robert Samuelson to task for his op-ed on the causes of secular stagnation. Samuelson: The problem might not be a dearth of investments so much as a surplus of risk aversion. For that, candidates abound: the traumatic impact of the Great Recession […]
Based on this report from the Economic Policy Institute Federal minimum wage increase comes this EPI info graphic pointing to some useful comparisons for general readers: The inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage is lower today than it was in 1968. If the value of the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages since […]
Via Reuter’s Scot J. Paltrow Part 1 Defense Finance and Accounting Service, or DFAS (pronounced “DEE-fass”). This agency, with headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana, has roughly 12,000 employees and, after cuts under the federal sequester, a $1.36 billion budget. It is responsible for accurately paying America’s 2.7 million active-duty and Reserve soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. […]
Obstructionism has been the modus operandi by Republicans in Congress to oppose President Obama with special emphasis in the Senate. Through the use of the filibuster, the Senate Republican minority has been able to block presidential appointments or sway them to less likely candidates, block the appointment of Federal Judges to the bench, and obstruct […]
Mike Sankowski has been banging his spoon on the high chair about this forever. And rightly so. Repeat after Mike. And keep repeating it to anyone who will listen. The “higher-corporate-profits = jobs” meme is perhaps the most pernicious falsehood in political economics. How Business Owners Think For almost ten years I was co-founder and […]
HENRY GIROUX: Oh, I mean, I think that’s the biggest lie of all actually. The biggest lie of all is that capitalism is democracy. We have no way of understanding democracy outside of the market, just as we have no understanding of how to understand freedom outside of market values. I learned about two maps […]
Religious liberty, [Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals] Judge Tymkovich wrote, cannot turn on whether money changes hands. “Would an incorporated kosher butcher really have no claim to challenge a regulation mandating non-kosher butchering practices?” he asked. — Court Confronts Religious Rights of Corporations, Adam Liptak, New York Times, today Why, yes, Judge Tymkovich, of course […]