Tag Archives: politics

Focus on Fracking: natural gas price at a 33 month high; US crude supplies at a 23 month low; Ida shuts down Gulf Blogger RJS, MarketWatch 666 Oil Prices Oil prices ended slightly higher this week as oil traders apparently judged that Hurricane Ida’s damage to oil production was greater than the storm’s damage to refining and to fuel demand .  .  . after rising more than 10% last week as Chinese virus cases fell to zero, a quarter of Mexico’s...

Spending and Producing When a framing becomes ubiquitous you forget it’s a framing.  This is what popped into my head when I read a headline this morning about the infrastructure bills pending in Congress: Democrats Hit the Road to Sell Big Spending Bills as Republicans Attack. Yes, they are proposals to spend money; that’s one way to look at it.  But they are also proposals to produce infrastructure and social services—the spending...

Trade Deficit Fell 4.3% in July After 2nd Quarter Deficits Were Revised Lower, MarketWatch 666 blogger RJS Our trade deficit fell 4.3% in July as the value of our exports increased while the value of our imports decreased slightly….the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for July indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit decreased by $3.2 billion to a rounded $70.1 billion in July,...

Analytical Bias The world is made up of systems.  Our body is a system, or in fact a system of systems.  What we call “society” is another system of systems, as is the natural environment.  And all these meta-systems are themselves elements in even more encompassing systems that interconnect them.   But these systems are very complex, difficult to explain or predict.  One successful strategy, which has had a revolutionary impact on how we live,...

Why Hospitals and Health Insurers Didn’t Want You to See Their Prices – The New York Times (nytimes.com) Sarah Kliff and Josh Katz Some Background Tipping the balance to single payer? I believe Kliff and Tucker article in the NYT Times on hospitals and insurance helps to tip the balance. It is revealing to see what different hospitals will charge for the same procedure and what various insurance companies will payout to cover the same...

by Dale Coberly Condorcet and Malthusian essay relevant to Social Security and the problem of too much kindness [note, important sentences in the following are quoted from another author because it’s easier for me to write that way.  Credit will be given at the end of the article.] Goetzman: “In 1794 as the Reign of Terror raged the Marquis de Condorcet penned one of the most optimistic tracts of the eighteenth century.  He wrote...

This is thorough coverage of the background leading up to Roe v. Wade and today’s events with a SCOTUS majority of five shrugging its shoulders ignoring the impact of the Texas law on one state and its meaning to a nation. September 2, 2021, Letters From An American, History Prof. Heather Cox Richardson examines “the contrast between image and reality in American politics.” In the light of day today, the political fallout from Texas’s...

“Kavanaugh Helps Gut Roe, Critics Recount All the Times Susan Collins Said He Wouldn’t,” Common Dreams, Jake Johnson I am stealing this from Common Dreams. Senator (sigh) Susan Collins has done this on numerous times in the past and pulls the football away, again when Dems get ready to kick it. She knows she is wrong each time and does not want to take party guff for making a decision worth something besides just going along. “The Republican...

In a recent post I argued for political pragmatism, which I described as follows: I believe that politicians have some discretion to set policy, and that they should use that discretion to enact the substantively best policies they can, taking account of political and policy constraints.  Political constraints include the need to satisfy voters and win elections, the status-quo bias in public opinion, low levels of political trust, and the limited...

Roe v. Wade hasn’t been overturned. The rule of law might have been; The Washington Post, Erwin Chemerinsky Dean at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky; “The majority was mute on the right to privacy, abandoned its constitutional role and held, indirectly but unmistakably, that the Constitution is a mere inconvenience that states are at liberty to violate if they can come up with cunning statutory...