Tag Archives: politics

Commenter Fred Dobbs reports (NYT) on the seizure of First Republic Bank by banking regulators in the comments section of Angry Bear. I am beginning to wonder how many more seizures will occur. How many failures are resulting from the loosening of Dodd-Frank? It appears the Fed has a greater impact on banks than Labor. JP Morgan Chase to the rescue . . . Earlier Angry Bear commentary on Dodd – Frank here and here. Fred Dobbs comment; First...

Dan had this one in drafts. Read it, liked it, relevant today, relevant to the SCOTUS BS, relevant to how Congress lets them get away with stuff, and where the hell is Joe Biden on this stuff? Sirota sums up the issues with the let-alone-Democrats rather well. Did some editing. The Democrats Are Enabling the Right’s Supreme Court Takeover, rsn.org, David Sirota/Jacobin 02 july 22 Chief Justice John Roberts is spearheading the right’s judicial...

GAO: Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: USPS Should Plan for Potential Workplace Charging – Save the Post Office Introduction Part of the plan as referred to in Steve Hutkins’ “EVs and S&DCs: USPS says you can’t have one without the other” was to have EV charging capabilities at the local post offices which would be available to the Post Office, USPS workers and also the public. As provided by Congress, funding was targeted for all three...

April 28, 2023, Letters from an American, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson According to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute (EPI), legislatures in at least ten states have set out to weaken federal child labor laws. In the first three months of 2023, legislators in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and South Dakota introduced bills to weaken the regulations that protect children in the workplace, and in March, Arkansas governor Sarah...

Health Care Cost and Utilization Report, healthcostinstitute.org, April 2023 Year-over-year and 5-year cumulative trends in health care spending for individuals with employer-sponsored insurance. A detailed report by the Health Care Cost Institute covering the period 2017 – 2021 which includes the Covid pandemic. Decreases i total costs were seen during the pandemic. Still in the end, you will see pricing being the biggest factor in healthcare...

I was doing some Angry Bear housecleaning and ran across this post by Barkley questioning whether trump would leave the presidency upon after his loss. This post was written by Barkley November 10th. In keeping with his requirements to wait on posting Econospeak’s commentaries, AB was to wait a day or two. Barkley had a series of posts along similar lines about trump. Of course, we all know trump did not attempt a Coup. Indeed, he incited an...

voting 217 Yes 215 no the House has passed a bill which would increase the debt ceiling, slash spending, and repeal (most of) the IRA. This ends the fun period when we could laugh at Republicans for demanding that Biden negotiate without themselves making a bargaining proposal. The bill is horrible. I am a Democrat in disarray trying to figure out how to respond (and who should respond). One possibility is to stick to the position that there...

To be clear, our national debt problem is due to revenues insufficient to cover expenditures. More than anything else, for the past 40 plus years, this accumulated deficit is due to Republican opposition to tax increases coupled with their eagerness to cut taxes on the wealthy given the opportunity to do so. Most, if indeed not all, currently serving Republican US Senators and Representatives, and State legislators have signed a pledge to never vote...

Little Good can Come from Private Equity in the Healthcare Industry, Angry Bear Two Years ago As if we did not have enough issues with the commercial healthcare insurance industry attempting to supplant single payer Medicare (minus setting hospital budgets, doctor fees, and pharmaceutical costs to the consumer) and the VA with commercial healthcare insurance and/or Medicare Advantage and ACOs? Commercial Healthcare Insurance and Medicare...

Much of this article I rewrote to make it clearer for the reader. It is written by upper management. I do disagree with the conclusions. Throwing more money at healthcare is not going to solve the issues he discusses. The article praises Commercial Healthcare Insurance who pay more for patient care and whose costs are twice Medicare of which much is administrative cost. The issue is not Medicare or Medicare. The issue is the cost of the...