What’s a person to do? or ‘Motivated avoidance’ From the American Psychological Association comes two studies here and here. Individuals are often confronted with information that they do not know how to comprehend or evaluate, even though this information can be of critical importance to the self (or society as a whole). In the case […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Regulatory Bumbling The people who daily manage health care services (and their advisers) have been shocked at the inability of the Obama administration to manage the administrative regs roll out process. The 2009 stimulus act contained multi-year funding for adopting electronic medical records (EMR/EHR) systems. The funding […]
by reader ilsm The Campaign to Preserve Pentagon Waste is in High Gear: From Forbes, Defense Advocate Loren Thompson: How To Waste $100 Billion: Weapons That Didn’t Work Out One of the most unsettling facets of federal finance is the way the government devalues past investments. The political system is so focused on the next […]
by Linda Beale Ian Ayres on the Brandeis Tax I’ve often argued here that vast inequality is harmful to democracy, and that the kind of unequal society that we have today, reflected the Gilded Age of yore, is especially worrisome. Much of what is happening in this country that threatens freedom and economic suffering […]
Update: Mike Konczal also takes a look at this question in Who are the one percent and what do they do for a living.Update 2: Another source for historical trends on inequality is at The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities by Taryn Hart Taryn Hart publishes at her blog Plutocracy files and has interviewed […]
by Linda Beale More on Romney’s Privileged Roots The New York Times ran a story on Rmoney on Sunday but with quite a different take than the Journal’s interview by Paul Gigot that I reported on yesterday. See, At Harvard, A Master’s in Problem Solving, New York Times, Dec. 25, 2011, at A1. The story […]
Based on the notions of economic efficiency that I laid out here, if I could do whatever I wanted I would make the following changes over a ten-year period. (Some faster, some slower, some phased in, some implemented instantly on a given date.) The appropriate amounts in each case require a better calculator than I […]
Romney’s Wall St. J. Interview with Gigot–Protecting the Rich [edited to rephrase and correct typos 12/26/11 5 pm] Joseph Rago and Paul Gigot interviewed Mitt Romney on his ‘vision’ for America–“On Taxes, ‘Modeling’, and the Vision Thing”, Wall St. J. Dec. 23-24, 2011, at A13. In it, Romney reveals the way patrician wealth has affected his […]
Joseph Stiglitz in an op-ed in Vanity Fair tells us about a more basic set of problems we face than actually discussed in public media. It is very long. The fact is the economy in the years before the current crisis was fundamentally weak, with the bubble, and the unsustainable consumption to which it gave […]