Tag Archives: politics

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...

My mind goes back to 2008. I was recently tempted to ask why bad loans by banks are a public problem. I was tempted to say that the bank made the loan, so it is their problem. If enough debtors default that the bank fails, so what? Then I remember the very appealing logic of the argument that, while other banks are free to save Lehman if they choose, no public money should be involved. That didn’t work out very well. The tempting pure market let...

Prof. Heather Cox Richardson (substack.com) “Letters From An American,” January 31. 2022 There are more topics covered in yesterday’s Letter than I can list in the title. It is an interesting mixed bag of experiences we are enduring and what is being reported. I have also included the links below if you wish to do a deeper dive on each topic. It was yesterday, I had read and heard a C&L report featuring George Conway telling CNN trump...

Lambert at Naked Capitalism has an interesting article up as taken from KHN entitled “I Write About America’s Absurd Health Care System. Then I Got Caught Up in It” as detailed by Bram Sable-Smith. As taken from the KHN article, Bram describes the beginnings of his dilemma of getting Insulin: “I’d been waiting since September for an appointment with an endocrinologist in St. Louis; the doctor’s office couldn’t get me in until Dec. 23 and...