Tag Archives: politics

Impeachment: What’s the Message? The mantra of the moment is that impeachment is not a trial and shouldn’t be governed by the same rules that apply to a court of law.  True, but that means it’s really a political event, where the verdict matters less than the message. What’s coming through the media reporting is “Trump incited a riot.”  Well, he did, more or less, but that just means he’s a bad person.  It’s not news that Trump is a pretty...

We made many mistakes in our response to the coronavirus over the past year.  One of the most critical was our failure to massively expand our capacity to produce coronavirus tests and masks and other PPE.  As many economists including Paul Romer noted last spring, mass testing and wide distribution of high quality masks would probably have allowed us to crush the virus and return to something close to normal life even in the absence of a vaccine. ...

Before Science, treating the symptoms of an illness was all we had. Along our way, using trial and error, we found a few things that worked. The big breakthroughs came when we started to look for the causes of an illness. The association of an illness with toxins was deducible. Then, as we knew more and could see farther, we found that most of our physical illnesses were caused by such other things as bacteria, and viruses. Still and yet, we see...

Several comments on my last post on the economic difficulties of the people who attacked the Capitol took aim at their characters in one way or another. I certainly do not want to defend the Capitol invaders in any way.  I think they should be vigorously prosecuted.  However, it is critically important to step back from the violent horror of the assault and think strategically about how we can use public policy to reduce the risk of political...

The Slightly Less Than August Back in the days of Adm. Rickover’s Navy, we were taught the technical term CRUD for the radioactive metallic deposits found in the reactor’s coolant system, that the word stood for Chalk River Undetermined Deposits, Chalk River being a river in Canada with a Nuclear Lab named after it, which was mostly true excepting maybe the part about heavy water. This was long, long before the Republican Party started sending the...

House Bill Markup Details Updated Democrats are updating the ACA and detailing the $1.9 Tn bill to meet the Covid Pandemic and the resulting unemployment. The aid goes well beyond the direct payment of an additional $1400/person. The assumption is the released House COVID Relief Bill ends up passing as part of the final American Rescue Plan as currently written.  It would include major expansion and enhancements to ACA subsidies....

House Bill Markup Details Updated Democrats are updating the ACA and detailing the $1.9 Tn bill to meet the Covid Pandemic and the resulting unemployment. The aid goes well beyond the direct payment of an additional $1400/person. The assumption is the released House COVID Relief Bill ends up passing as part of the final American Rescue Plan as currently written.  It would include major expansion and enhancements to ACA subsidies....

From the WAPO: Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010. Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies,...

From the WAPO: Despite her outward signs of success, Ryan had struggled financially for years. She was still paying off a $37,000 lien for unpaid federal taxes when she was arrested. She’d nearly lost her home to foreclosure before that. She filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and faced another IRS tax lien in 2010. Nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies,...

Let’s discuss something worth getting really excited about, the Biden/Romney child tax credit/child allowance proposals.  These proposals would make life much better for poor children and their parents.  A lot better.  Neither proposal goes as far as I would like, but they would be a real improvement and could be made more generous over time. I will briefly describe the proposals and then discuss the political changes that may have paved the way...