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When you allow the debate to shift so far to the right, you lose the politicial space to end up in a safer, more productive middle. You look at the health care debate [of 2009]. That could have and should have been a debate between a single-payer system and some market-driven reform things on the right end. Instead you got market-driven reforms on the left and death panels on the right. And so we ended up in the middle. Better than zero, but not nearly the positive impact we could have had if we had a healthier set of boundaries to begin with.
Baratunde Thurston on Melissa Harris-Perry (via alexch)Posted on February 18, 2012 via alexch's almanac with 4 notes
Source: alexch
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But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations. ¶ First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t. ¶ Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.¶ Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they ‘have not used a government program.’
Paul Krugman’s article “Moochers Against Welfare” from his op-ed column in the New York Times. Krugman has an openly liberal bias, but the questions he raises about why working-class Americans appear to be acting against their best interests deserve more consideration on both ends of the political spectrum.
What’s the Matter with Kansas? has an informative entry on Wikipedia.
Source:
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Europe’s richer nations, led by Germany, resist institutionalizing any substantial flow of money toward Greece apart from a modest amount of development aid long made available to Europe’s poorer regions for specific projects. In Germany, the notion of a so-called transfer union, which many economists see as essential to any enduring common currency, is still firmly resisted. […] As in the euro zone, there are questions even within Britain about the value of its union. But they are driven more by political and cultural divisions than monetary ones. The Scottish national leader Alex Salmond is pushing for a vote that might provide Scotland independence from Britain, while remaining vague on whether the Scots should then abandon the pound to adopt the euro.
“The Welsh Economy Slips, but London Cushions the Fall” by Landon Thomas, Jr. in the New York Times. The article discusses why monetary union appears to work well within Great Britain, but doesn’t work well in Europe.Source:
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‘Much of the politics we have today is strident and polarized and mean,’ says Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic House member who now runs the Center on Congress at Indiana University. ‘The fundamental problem, of course, is we do not show respect to those who are involved.’ Hamilton points out that while everyone pays lip service to the idea of civility, few will castigate a politician for being impolitic. Instead, the media always show some love for confrontation, while constituents may well reward a politician for taking an aggressive stance against another politician they don’t like.
Alan Greenblatt’s story “The Public Respects Civility, But Rewards Rudeness” on the NPR websiteSource:
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Glad tide is turning on SOPA: don’t need bad legislation when should be safeguarding benefits of open net. Speeding is illegal too: but you don’t put speed bumps on the motorway.
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Iowa Republicans, after two weeks of trying to decide who won the caucuses they held earlier this month, announced Thursday that they simply could not tell.
At a news conference in Des Moines, we were told that Rick Santorum appeared to be 34 votes ahead, reversing the outcome that favored Mitt Romney on the morning after caucus night by eight votes.
It seems that eight of the precincts (out of 1,774) were not fully able to report on the preferences of those who showed up to participate on Jan. 3. Something happened to the records of who was for whom.
‘Maybe a door was open and they just blew out,’ said one Republican in Des Moines, perhaps only half in jest.Ron Elving’s NPR blog on how Iowa Republicans don’t really know who came out first in their caucuses.Source:
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What the history books are going to show, I believe, is that the Reagan revolution never happened. It was a campaign slogan. Government wasn’t reduced; taxes were cut marginally, but the basic functions of the federal government didn’t change.
David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s former budget director quoted in the NPR story “Will The Real Ronald Reagan Please Stand Up?”Source:
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SOPA and media industries' failure to innovate
Just keeping in mind some of us in the media industries can’t afford to innovate as much as we’d like, this is an interesting collection of facts with some structure that helps underline what happens when the world of intellectual property changes completely in a handful of years.
You can’t blame everything on the film industry, though, and people who take without giving anything back can do so much more effectively when they leverage technology, but the film industry as a whole has made it hard to give them a fair price via the best and most convenient distribution channels in existence.
Monetization is the answer. Instead of shutting everything down, why don’t they propose some legislation to get some of the money that’s being made through all this downloading?
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How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece
In her piece “How A Computer Scientist Tried To Save Greece”, Chana Joffe-Walt describes the efforts of Diomidis Spinellis to retrieve taxes owed to the Greek government, the lack of which has forced Greece into its current debt crisis. This article shows an excellent example of how technocrats are hampered by factors outside of the domain of the problem they are addressing. You can create accountability, but without a sense of responsibility coming from local culture, this approach is doomed to fail.
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There is an easy, conservative argument to make about taxes — and even about the 47 percent. Our code is a block of swiss cheese, with $1 in holes (tax expenditures) for every $2 in cheese (revenue). We can lower rates and raise revenue — for my conservative friends, I will say: “moderately!” — by exchanging lower tax rates for lower tax giveaways. Instead of this, some Republicans, having spent three decades demanding lower taxes every single election, are still professing utter shock and disgust that these tax cuts have helped the poor avoid income taxes … while simultaneously proposing one of the largest tax cuts ever for the rich.
Writer Derek Thompson in his article for The Atlantic “The GOP’s Weird Obsession With Poor People Not Paying Enough Taxes“
To his credit, Romney hasn’t been going after the poor.
Posted on January 6, 2012 with 6 notes
Source: The Atlantic
Lest we forget that our ability to reason is what separates us from the other animals
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