Tag Archives: politics

How Recent Supreme Court Decisions Have Damaged Both the Court and the Constitution There’s a pattern: In November of 2000, immediately following the very close, highly contested, presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, John Roberts, a lawyer in private practice who had clerked for Chief Justice Rehnquist, rushed to Florida to be legal adviser to then Governor Jeb Bush during the to be decisive Florida recount; a recount...

Why Has AMLO Delayed Congratulating Biden On His Inauguration?  Maybe he has now done it, although I have been unable to find any reports of him doing so.  But almost alone among world leaders, I think joined only by Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Mexicos’s President known as “AMLO” did not basically immediately congratulate Joe Biden on his inauguration. Even very pro-Trump Brazilian President Bolsonaro did, expressing a hope to have good and...

From now on, these posts will be reviews of the established literature. I will assume, as is standard, that people are completely selfish. The point is to show that, even if people are selfish, there are desirable incentive effects of income taxation. As is often the case, the results of 50 year old theory turn out to depend on the assumption of symmetric information. If some agents know things that other agents don’t know, then free market...

“Unity,” they cried. “First, we must have unity.” “Whose unity shall we have, yours or mine,” I asked? Knowing there was a Unitarian Church nearby, I stopped by and asked the minister. This ordinate tells me that theirs is all about a god of one; a unity god. Always wondered. Is there such a thing as unity of minds? A singularity? Called up an old physicist friend; says it’s something to do with essence, he thinks. This unity you are...

Letters from an American, Newsletter History Professor Heather Cox Richardson at Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, Boston College chronicles today’s political landscape. Because it is difficult to understand today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs; the professor’s newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be an American. Professor Richardson follows...

Dale Coberly is a writer and frequent commenter at Angry Bear Blog who is well known for his understanding of Social Security and his proposed Northwest Plan. The Northwest plan was recognized by the Social Security administration as a solution to fixing the shortfall in funding now thought to be in 2034. An article about Social Security appeared in the Washington Post today. As written by another journalist on the Social Security beat who knows...

Extending START  It is not a big headline story among all the other things newly inaugurated Joe Biden is doing, but it is being reported that despite a generally more hostile approach to Russia, he has agreed with what Russian President Putin has said he wants, which is to simply extend the current nuclear weapons START agreement for five more years. It is possible that out of annoyance with Biden Putin might somehow at this point create a...

I don’t know if I should try to make my contributions to AngryBear a noahpinion sub substack or if I should put this over at my personal blog, but I am always stimulated by Noah’s posts . His most recent “No one knows how much the government can borrow” is on a topic I’ve mentioned here (and here also Brad all following Blanchard): How much should we worry about the huge and rapidly growing US national debt ? Noah wrote that he doesn’t know and...

David Hopkins has an interesting take on the failure of Trump’s presidency: Regardless of these challenges, the general verdict on Trump among historians and political scientists, reporters and commentators, and most of the Washington political community (including, at least privately, many Republicans) is guaranteed to range from disappointment and mockery to outright declarations that he was the worst president in American history. And there...

There is evidence from Israel that one dose of the Pfizer vaccine is less effective than was suggested by the few person-days of evidence in the phase III trials. In Israel  “over 12,400 have people tested positive for coronavirus after receiving vaccine shots” Israeli health officials estimate that one shot is about 50% effective after 14 days . The control group is not matched, it’s not a randomized trial, but it is evidence that the second dose...