Via Naked Capitalism comes Brett Robertson’s Why Is PBS Airing Right-Wing-Sponsored School Privatization Propaganda? (Media Matters). I like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and sometimes Car Talk while driving to places, if they happen to be on. Otherwise I tend to avoid listening to Marketplace and the news segments. This has been true for me for a […]
The Hidden Cost of Privatization by Nina Shapiro at Institute for New Economic Thinking is an excellent read. This conception of government, of course, is not new. “Small government” has been a hallmark of the Republican Party for decades, and the privatization of government properties and services has been increasing worldwide since the 1980s. In the […]
It’s Sunday, so I take a break from nerdy econ analysis and speak my mind. Last November 9 we woke up to a living nightmare. The next four years were bound to be awful. The only question was, how awful? The very tiny silver lining as of now is that, so far, it has been […]
AEI-Brookings recently issued a report on paid medical leave. I found one of the figures in the paper to be especially interesting: Click to embiggen or to show the entire graph. (You should see four columns in the graph.)
Is Trump’s Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program? It looks like it might be in a crucial way. Both involve lots of rhetoric about expanding programs that many support, apprenticeships and infrastructure. However, on looking at them closer to the extent we can see anything specific aside from the rhetoric, it looks like they involve […]
I’ve noted a few times that the political center needs to come to grips with research on genes and intelligence or we risk ceding the field to people with scary impulses and frightening goals. I think something like what the center-left position should be is reasonably well articulated by Richard J. Haier. Haier is a […]
When Somebody Called “Mad Dog” Is The Only Adult In The Room In the last few days it has come to pass that twice US Secretary of Defense, James “Mad Dog” Mattis has shown himself to be the only adult in the room in the Trump administration. His first such exhibition of adulthood came during […]
Retail sales disappoint — but don’t hyperventilate about it There certainly is a lot of information to unpack from this morning’s retail sales and inflation reports, and what they mean for wages and jobs. I’ll address them in separate posts. First, retail sales. They certainly were a disappointment, coming in at -0.3% nominally and -0.2% […]
Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts Trump says AHCA is “Mean” One source said Trump called the House bill “mean, mean, mean” and said, “We need to be more generous, more kind.” The other source said Trump used a vulgar phrase to describe the House bill and told the senators, “We need to be more generous.” AP […]