Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Via Journel of American Medical Association (JAMA) is an invitation us to keep looking at the plight of rural hospitals in light of decreasing rural population. Dr. Diana Mason writes: But other rural communities, home to nearly 20% of the US population, are not so fortunate. Since 2010, 78 of the more than 2150 rural nonspecialty US hospitals have closed. While the closure rate has recently declined, the proportion of financially struggling rural hospitals...

Video series for “Rethinking Investment Incentives” As regular readers will recall, I contributed to the Columbia Center for Sustainable Investment’s book, Rethinking Investment Incentives: Trends and Policy Options (Columbia University Press, 2016). Now, the editors have put together a series of video teasers for most of the individual chapters, all of which can be seen here. As I wrote before, the book offers the perspectives of numerous experts in the...

From Kaiser Health News points to other general sources of lead than paint and water: The Environmental Defense Fund, in an analysis of 11 years of federal data, found detectable levels of lead in 20 percent of 2,164 baby food samples. The toxic metal was most commonly found in fruit juices such as grape and apple, root vegetables such as sweet potatoes and carrots, and cookies such as teething biscuits. The organization’s primary focus was on the baby foods...

Via Naked Capitalism comes Brett Robertson’s Why Is PBS Airing Right-Wing-Sponsored School Privatization Propaganda? (Media Matters).  I like Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me and sometimes Car Talk while driving to places, if they happen to be on. Otherwise I tend to avoid listening to Marketplace and the news segments. This has been true for me for a decade anyway.  MA rejected increasing the cap on charter schools.   I found many unaware of the lack of oversight and...

The Hidden Cost of Privatization by Nina Shapiro at Institute for New Economic Thinking  is an excellent read. This conception of government, of course, is not new. “Small government” has been a hallmark of the Republican Party for decades, and the privatization of government properties and services has been increasing worldwide since the 1980s. In the earlier period it centered on the privatization of state-owned enterprises, but in more recent times it has...

Is Trump’s Apprenticeship Program Like His Infrastructure Program? It looks like it might be in a crucial way.  Both involve lots of rhetoric about expanding programs that many support, apprenticeships and infrastructure.  However, on looking at them closer to the extent we can see anything specific aside from the rhetoric, it looks like they involve actual cuts in funding support for existing programs related to both apprenticeships (and more broadly worker...

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts Trump says AHCA is “Mean” One source said Trump called the House bill “mean, mean, mean” and said, “We need to be more generous, more kind.” The other source said Trump used a vulgar phrase to describe the House bill and told the senators, “We need to be more generous.” AP News I think this “vulgar phrase” baryard metaphor is slang-term-for-reproductive-act-ing idiotic. But I do think the unsurprising news about Trumps...

by Joseph Joyce Exiting the Planet The full impact of President Trump’s announcement that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord will not be fully realized for years, and indeed, decades to come. But the withdrawal is part of a series of disavowals of international agreements and commitments that were created after World War II. It represents a fundamental change away from engagement with allies and partners in the global community to a mindset...

Kansas Republicans abandon Brownback; raise taxes over his veto Remember Kansas’s great tax-cutting experiment under Governor Sam Brownback? (Me, sarcastic?) As always in Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore La-La Land, cutting taxes leads to economic nirvana. Except when it doesn’t, and it didn’t in Kansas. I recently wrote about the idiocy of Investor Business Daily‘s criticisms of California, and Paul Krugman carried the ball further, citing me and bringing in...

A Personal Observation On Trump’s “Infrastructure Week” Yes, folks, you may have already forgotten it, but this has officially been Trump’s “Infrastructure Week,” highlighted by his proposal to privatize air traffic control in the US, and his trip to Cincinnati where he in general terms talked about the supposed virtues of privatizing highways, bridges, and airports, While he claims he wants to provide up to $200 billion in federal funding to draw forth a...