The Angry Bear

For a Fiscal Neutrality Amendment Against the dogmatic ignorance of a proposed amendment to the US constitution mandating a balanced budget, I propose an alternative, a fiscal neutrality amendment: “No unit of government within the United States may establish voting or other decision procedures that embody a bias in favor of either higher or lower tax rates and revenues.  The federal government may not adopt voting or procedural restrictions that bias...

Take Back ICE U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established 15 years ago: ICE was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9/11. Leveraging those authorities, ICE has become a powerful and sophisticated federal law enforcement agency. My link was for a 2013 discussion of its laudable achievements during its first ten years. As a...

In his editorial “Say Hello to Your Boy. A Special Guy,” Josh Marshall at TPM had this to say: “When I first read the Times story I wasn’t sure whether the younger Kennedy (Justin), whose title was Managing Director and Global Head of Real Estate Capital Markets, would have been someone to actually make loans to someone like Trump as opposed to overseeing more complex or synthetic efforts like mortgage backed securities and such. But it turns out he...

Immigration Politics In Europe Versus Immigration Politics In The US Immigration politics in both places has gotten very ugly, but it strikes me that in Europe it may be worse than in the US.  We may be about to see the fall from power this weekend of Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany over the issue of immigration, with her having been for some time the leading political figure in Europe supporting more moderate policies towards immigrants, even as...

Robert Waldmann caught this tweet: The North Korean national anthem was played at a Virginia Women for Trump gala. It was to pay tribute to the Trump-Kim Summit. https://t.co/ZytMX9gVbd — Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 28, 2018

The Mezzogiorno Problem Revisited I have recently returned from participating in a conference in Naples, Italy on “The Economy as a Complex Spatial System” where there many papers and much discussion about the longstanding poverty problem in southern Italy, long labeled “the Mezzogiorno problem.”  Mezzogiorno literally means midday or noon, but has long been applied to southern Italy because it is sunny, and middays are supposedly sunny.  Unfortunately...

Anthony Kennedy will retire July 31. This gives Trump and Republican Senators a chance to nominate and confirm a fifth hard right justice. Already the Court has become extremely ideological and activist. Today it declared that Unions couldn’t require employers to pay the union a a fixed amount per worker, because that allegedly violated the first amendmenr rights of workers in unionized workplaces which disagree with the union leadership. This is...

“I have rarely seen so much inconsistency and even hypocrisy from the Supreme Court as in its decision to uphold President Trump’s travel ban.” On the Colorado SCOTUS Decision A few weeks ago, the court found that members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had expressed impermissible hostility to religion because of relatively mild statements that every business in Colorado should serve all customers regardless of the owner’s religion, and that...

(Dan here….lifted from comments, lightly edited for readability) by Dale Coberly I’ll offer my own answer to the question. (of Morality in Capitalism post here) “Capitalism” offers itself as the answer to morality. always in some version of the Ayn Randian “life is time and time is money so taxes are not only theft, they are murder.” The truth is there is no conflict between capitalism and morality any more than there is a conflict between capitalism and...