Tag Archives: Hot Topics

The most recent year for reported year-round earnings data available for full-time workers revealed the gender earnings gap to be 20 percent between men and women or said a different way women earned 20 percent less than men (Hegewisch 2018). The earnings gap between women and men has been measured (in the past) by taking a snapshot of both genders who have worked fulltime year-round and in a given year. Reviewing a 15-year period from 2001 through 2015,...

CNN, Thursday: The Department of Education will implement a rule known as the Borrower Defense to Repayment created during President Obama’s Administration and blocked by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in 2016. The rule or regulation grants federal loan forgiveness automatically for students who could not complete their education due to the schools shutting down before their education was completed while they were enrolled. Unfortunately students are...

American Journal of Public Health: “The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End-of-Life Care” December 2015, Melissa D. Aldridge, PhD, MBA and Amy S. Kelley, MD, MSHS There has been a lot of talk and presentation on End of Life care and its high costs. “The Myth Regarding the High Cost of End of Life Care” reviews those costs and expands the topic beyond End of Life to all the population with chronic conditions and functional limitations. FIGURE 1Estimated...

Michigan Electablog “Lame Duck Republican Majority at work in Michigan.” • Accrued Sick Time: This was one of the proposals not allowed to go to the ballot. Why? Because if it passed and it would have, Repubs would have needed 2/3rds vote to overturn it. Instead they passed it before November 6th and now they are altering it by taking coverage responsibility from over 93% of Michigan’s firms. The threshold for exemption from the law was raised from 5 in...

Persuasive Case of Voter Fraud and Republicans Do Not Care North Carolina: The first public indication things were not right in Bladen County occurred weeks ago. The North Carolina State Board of Elections did not certify the results of the closely watched 9th Congressional District race. Republican Mark Harris appeared to defeat Democrat Dan McCready by just 905 votes. Documents released by the NCSBE on Tuesday revealed a political-consulting firm...

At the CEPR blog, Beat the Press, Dean Baker and Jason Hickel are debating degrowth. Dean makes the excellent point that “claims about growth” from oil companies and politicians who oppose policies to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, “are just window dressing.” I also agree, however, with the first comment in response to Dean’s post that his point about window dressing could be taken much further. I would add that economic growth is window dressing for...

Governor Rick Snyder: I would ask you to block any legislation from the Michigan Lame Duck Legislature which would overturn the will of the constituents as determined through the November 6th vote or endorsed by petition and thereby blocked from being placed on the ballot due to deliberate legislative action passing it in the Michigan House and Senate pre-November 6th. As you already know proposals passed through elections require a two-thirds legislative...

Mourning The Death Of The New World Order  I think this is behind the apparently bipartisan and intense outpouring of mourning over the death of 94 year old George H.W. Bush, indeed with some of this even being for the broader post-World War II era in which the US predominated over the world.  Bush was president when the long Cold War with the former Soviet Union came to its end with the victory of the US and the breaking up of the USSR, as well as being...

Krugman argues that the Bank of Englands worst case scenario for no deal Brexit is implausibly bad. I agree with his conclusion, but strongly disagree with one argument (on a point which he stresses is quantitatively minor) … the BoE includes some nonstandard effects of trade: they assume that reduced trade (and foreign direct investment) will reduce productivity more than the direct impacts on resource allocation would predict. They cite some...

I get the alerts from Georgetown University Center for Children and Families weekly. The news much of the time is a reflection of the number of attacks on families and children who have lesser means to provide for healthcare themselves and depend upon Medicaid, ACA, and CHIPS for care. Since the election of Trump, McConnell and Ryan have been strutting around like the cocks on the walk demonstrating their machismo as they hold women, children and...