Tag Archives: politics

Some History In 1980, a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine by the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program stated “the risk of addiction was low when opioids such as oxycodone were prescribed for chronic pain.” It was a brief statement by the doctors conducting the study which was cited many times afterwards as justification for the use of oxycodone. In a June 1, 2017 letter to the NEJM editor, the authors reported on the...

New article on tax increment financing in Missouri shows impact of KS/MO border war After several years of work, my colleague Susan G. Mason (Boise State University) and I have published a new article on TIF in Missouri, specifically in the St. Louis and Kansas City metropolitan areas. “Exploring Patterns of Tax Increment Financing Use and Structural Explanations in Missouri’s Major Metropolitan Regions” appeared in the July 2018 edition of the HUD...

(Dan here…better late than not) by New Deal democrat A thought for Labor Day, 2018 US voters will continue to vote for alternating partisan “waves” in Congress, and for “outsiders” however chancey for President, until the problem depicted in the below graph is solved:

Marrying NAFTA and The TPP: The US-Mexico “Free Trade Agreement” I really am not sure where to begin with this latest farce, Trump’s announcement yesterday of a supposed US-Mexico Free Trade Agreement.  Of course there was the farce of him trying to make the announcement with a live phone call between him and outgoing Mexican President Pena-Nieto (to be replaced on Dec. 1 by leftist populist Obrador), which took awhile to get going.  There is the...

Are We Alone In The Galaxy (Or Maybe Even The Universe?) In 1938 Orson Welles put on a radio show in New York City that dramatized the famous novel by H.G. Wells, _The War of the Worlds_. This novel is about an invasion of Planet Earth by intelligent beings from Planet Mars, with this invasion just  barely being defeated.  Several movies have been made of this famous novel, probably the first to present this now long-running sc-fi theme of our planet...

Hannity as Goebbels Joseph Goebbels famously said that if you want to convince a populace of A Big Lie (fake news), then you do it by repeating it, over and over and over again.  For a long  time I havebou been keeping an eye on Hannity, reportedly nightly conversing with Trump after his show.  What struck me some time ago how repetitive the core pats of his introductory monologue are.  I have increasingly noticed that pro-Trump people seem to believe...

[embedded content] Listen to the first 5 minutes and you get a clue as to what Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings may be like as told by Robin Williams. Maybe I Te Fisher King there is a hint of his being ill.

“Economists are active militants against the concept of the lump of labor, that is, the popular idea that the total number of jobs or of working hours is fixed (Walker, 2007).” The quote is the first line from a 2017 paper by Tito Boeri, et al. It gives me confidence that at least some of the time my message is getting through. The image below is from a 2018 report published by the Roosevelt Institute. It tells me there is still a huge amount of work to...

(Dan here…a little late posting,,,my fault) A graph for Sunday: 2012 Obama voters by 2016 vote  – by New Deal democrat This is a graph I’ve been meaning to comment on, that I saw on Vox.com a couple of weeks ago. It breaks down Obama voters from 2012 based on who they voted for in 2016, and adds in Romney voters who voted for Clinton in 2016: As an aside, note that the graphs measure opinions per group, and definitely *not* their number. Also,...

“The national landscape in 2018 tilts in favor of Republicans with Republicans sitting on 208 safe seats, 10 seats away from a majority, and 22 additional and not projected seats leaning Republican(too close to call).” It would take Democrats casting 55% of the votes in a national two-party election to tip the House majority the other way. It is possible as it did happen in 2008 when there was a 57% turnout. What makes the following projections disturbing...