Tag Archives: politics

I just finished Reaching Beyond Race by Paul Sniderman and Edward Carmines.  They argued – in 1997 –  that people concerned with racial equality should focus on enacting policies that increase opportunities for the disadvantaged generally, using arguments that, as the title suggests, reach beyond race.  This is a common enough viewpoint, but they make a number of interesting points about public opinion on racial justice, including the following:...

Coronavirus Dashboard for February 8: Omicron declines sharply; did Delta provide protection against the worst outcomes? As I mentioned yesterday, I haven’t posted a Coronavirus dashboard in awhile, and with Omicron in rapid retreat, it’s time for an update. To begin with, deaths are presently peaking at roughly 2450 a day, while nationwide cases are down almost 2/3’s: There are over a dozen States where numbers are now down close to, at, or...

Noah Smith (and many others) is irritated by a puff piece about Stephanie Kelton and modern monetery theory MMT by Jeanna Smialak in the New York Times. I am not interested in Smialak’s article. I think that Noah sums up his critique here very well “The article then demonstrates that it has little notion of what separates MMT from mainstream thinking: ‘M.M.T. theorists argue that society should feel capable of spending to achieve its goals to...

Student Loan Cancellation will not Benefit the Wealthy, Alan Collinge, Student Loan Justice Org. Alan Collinge History In 1972, allegations about students abusing bankruptcy3 courts were beginning to make headlines. Major newspapers were publishing anecdotes about students who took out large college loans. Supposedly then, young graduates or students quickly declared bankruptcy to avoid paying them off. The Congressional Commission on Bankruptcy...

Public opinion in many countries is shifting against COVID-19 precautions and restrictions – even against vaccine requirements.  This has some libertarians declaring victory.  Not only are they declaring victory, they are claiming that the rollback of restrictions shows that they were right all along, and that the restrictions were foisted on us by a corrupt government that should be stripped of its powers.  Some at least flirt with the idea of...

Can Ukraine Become A New Austria?  In this Sunday’s Washington Post, columnist David von Drehle suggests that a way out of the difficult Russia/Ukraine situation would be for Ukraine to become like what happened with Austria in 1955 and since; it formally became officially neutral, not joining either NATO or the Warsaw Pact, and has remained so since.   For Ukraine, this would in effect grant Putin his demand that Ukraine not join NATO, although...

J.P. McJefferson writes: “On a Friday afternoon in February, I finally sense a glimmer of hope. Mike Pence finding truth in his heart and openly confronting Trump & his lot of criminals by reinforcing the fact that he had no authority to overturn the election and saying Trump is “wrong”. A direct slap in the face to Trump. Maybe it will be the beginning of the formal split in the party between right & wrong/evil. Along with Liz Cheney...

Here is Michael Bang Petersen in the New York Times: As a researcher and an adviser to the Danish government on the pandemic, I have repeatedly stressed that we need to make complex trade-offs between deaths, the economy, public well-being and constitutional rights. There is not a single right answer for how to proceed. Within the set of legitimate strategies, the choice of strategy is often less important than whether or not people follow and...

The stability and growth pact regulated the fiscal policy of Euro bloc countries. It is currently suspended, because of Covid. There is an ongoing discussion of whether to reactivate it when the epidemic ends or whether to replace it with something else. I strongly advocate eliminating it and replacing it with nothing. Very very rounghly, the pact limited cyclically adjusted public budget deficits to 0.5% of GDP. The possibility of suspending...

History is the study of the past. We can not undo the past; but we can make use of knowledge of the past to help us understand what is going on now so as to make the right choices, to take the right actions for issues of the present now; and to better our odds for survival into the future. ——-past—————————————————–|now|———future——- Now is the present time interval (one of definable duration) between the past and the future that moves forward...