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

Arkansas Republican Senate Candidate Tom Cotton Wants to Require Employers to Provide Employees With Multiple Healthcare Insurance Choices. Seriously.

[T]here is probably no one more gung ho for Obamacare repeal than [Senate Republican nominee] Tom Cotton. He talks about it all the time. So he obviously would roll back the Arkansas version of the state’s Medicaid expansion, right? Well, he has consistently refused to say. And in a new interview this week, Cotton was pressed on […]

Holy Ministry of Truth Batman!

Lifted from comments on Financing Social Security, Bruce Webb comments on Social Security prpaganda: Jim, the problem is that those people with “government, financial, business experience” who are promoting the message “No check for you!” to millennials know full well the numbers behind the following equation: No Check for You = After Trust Fund Depletion a […]

Farmers and who gets the money

Vis the NYT comes this look at the economics of small scale farming:   Don’t let your children grow up to be farmers AT a farm-to-table dinner recently, I sat huddled in a corner with some other farmers, out of earshot of the foodies happily eating kale and freshly shucked oysters. We were comparing business models […]

Libertarian? Or Fascist-Light?

The shooting death by police of Ferguson, MO teenager Michael Brown, and what has happened in the aftermath, has been blanketing the news for the past few days. It’s a story about race, but it’s also become a story about the power of the state and how it’s wielded, and against whom. So my question […]

FINANCING SOCIAL SECURITY A BOB BALL APPROACH

by Dale Coberly FINANCING SOCIAL SECURITY A BOB BALL APPROACH Bob Ball proposed in 2007 (www.robertmball.org quoted in NASI “Fixing Social Security” Reno and Lavery, 2009, p 14) a “balancing rate increase.” This is the way his idea was described in the NASI publication: Acknowledging the uncertainty of 75 year projections, former Social Security Commissioner […]

Tesla wants $500 million for its Gigafactory

Leigh McIlvaine (@Leigh M.) of Good Jobs First alerted me to this article on what Tesla Motors wants in incentives to land its $5 billion Gigafactory: $500 million. This massive 6500 worker facility will produce the next generation of batteries in order to introduce a less expensive line of cars in 2017, the Tesla Model […]

Remember the tobacco settlement?

Kenneth Thomas has covered how many state level deals to entice private companies are bad deals, including sports stadiums, as ‘job creators’ extol their own virtues. Run has covered the defunding of state unviversities and also the rise in tuition and student debt. Robert Waldmann writes about the constant ballance of reporting. Yves Smith has […]