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

It’s a start

In many capitalist European countries, college students do not have to pay tuition fees out of their own pockets. Here in America, most students have to fund their own college costs, which for many students means student loans. Whether or not they complete the degree, student loan borrowers can’t discharge these loans through bankruptcy. Of […]

The range-bound new home sales market continues

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog As per my usual caveat, while new home sales are the most leading of the housing construction metrics, they are noisy and heavily revised.  That was true again this month, as sales (blue in the graph below) increased almost 9% m/m to 693,000 annualized, after February was revised downward […]

Trump vs. Biden: Who Got More Done for Veterans?

by Suzanne Gordon and Steve Early Washington Monthly Trump has mocked veterans and privatized their health care. Biden honors them but hasn’t challenged Trump’s privatization policies. Currently, they are moving more and more veterans to commercial healthcare. This rather than restoring VA healthcare to a better place for veterans to be and at a lower […]

Science and the Tinkerbell Effect

by Tom Dinger The Bell A commentary by an acquaintance of mine and from years ago. I believe there is only one person who might recognize the author. He was well liked amongst his fellow writers. Americans Doubting the Big Bang Is a Healthy Thing A new Associated Press-GfK poll asked approximately one thousand U.S. adults to […]

Real median wage and income growth through March continued the recent increasing trend

 – by New Deal democrat The Bonddad Blog This is an update of some information I last posted several months ago. Real median household income is one of the best measures of average Americans’ well-being. However, the official measure is only reported once a year, in September of the following year. So right now the most […]

Former Shell employees resurrect dead well in ‘monumental’ move for geothermal energy

by Laurelle Stelle msn.com, The Cool Down Nice read on geothermal energy produced from pumping water into fracked rock formations in deep dry oil wells. In Texas, several innovative new companies are combining clean energy technology and the expertise of former oil and gas industry employees to create a whole new generation of geothermal power plants, Grist reported. […]

Why is a widely used app named for a tenth century Scandinavian king?

by an old friend from “The Fray” Claude Scales Self-Absorbed Boomer Your smartphone, like mine, likely has the logo at left on it somewhere. I knew that “Bluetooth” was the name given to an ancient Scandinavian king, but had no clue why the app was named for him. Now, thanks to Rick Spilman in The Old […]

Why Unlimited Wealth Is an Unassailable Advantage

by Steve Roth Wealth Economics Imagine a five-player poker game. Assume all the players have equal skill, so the flows across the table over the course of the game are just a random walk. “It’s just how the cards fall.” All the players start with the same number of chips. But there’s one difference: four […]