March 2012
33 posts
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In the fall of 2009, Obama’s chief congressional lobbyist, Phil Schiliro, touted a clever idea for dealing with the tax cuts: introduce a bill that would extend the middle-class cuts for two years while allowing the upper-income portions to expire. After two years, the middle-class cuts would also expire unless Congress paid for them with off-setting savings or tax increases.
Schiliro figured...
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“The United States stands out as performing very well in the area of cancer care,...”
– OECD Health at a Glance 2009: Key findings for the United States
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The cost of not controlling health-care costs
RAND Health researchers combined data from multiple sources to depict the effects of rising health care costs on a median-income married couple with two children covered by employer-sponsored insurance. The analysis compared the family’s health care cost burden in 1999 with that incurred in 2009. The take-away message: Although family income grew throughout the decade, the financial...
“There you are, Pat. You came in with a box of glory and there you stand with an...”
– Letters of Note: A book is like a man
February 2012
64 posts
Amazon.com: The Rent Is Too Damn High eBook:... →
yfiles:
YOU WANT TO BUY THIS BOOK!!
Study: Rich more likely to take candy from babies
The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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“This is the first rule of Republican politics: If you are in trouble, promise to...”
– Rational Irrationality: Romney’s New Tax Plan: Big, Bold, and Desperate : The New Yorker
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“Last year, the prestige movies were crowdpleasing enough to reach a...”
– “The Artist” and the Oscars - NYTimes.com
The problem with Tom and Ann
The problem with the Tom and Ann subplot in this season of Parks & Recreation is that it’s forcing viewers to confront the unpleasant fact that if they actually knew Tom Haverford in real life, they would hate him so, so, so much.
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Most patent cases are not about copying
The researchers studied 193 patent cases and found only 21 of them—that’s 10.9 percent—that contained even an allegation of any copying, whether that’s copying from a patent or from a patent-holder’s commercial product.
And here’s the kicker: more than half of the copying allegations they did find were from pharmaceutical and chemical cases. Remember that a big chunk of...
“Step one, the American people send me up there, the day after election,...”
– Ross Perot on how to fix America’s problems. Via: A plain blog about politics: Perot Myths
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Things Mitt Romney won't tell you: Romneycare is...
In 2010, John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel P. Kessler published in Forum for Health Economics & Policy a report (“The Effect of Massachusetts’ Health Reform on Employer-Sponsored Insurance Premiums”) on the effects of Governor Mitt Romney’s 2006 health-care reform in Massachusetts. This report suggested that, up until 2008, these reforms (hereafter referred to as...
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Mitt Romney's budget in less than 150 words
Money comes into the federal government through taxes and bonds. The vast majority of it is then spent on old-people programs, poor-people programs, and defense.
Mitt Romney is promising that taxes will go down, defense spending will go up, and old-people programs won’t change for this generation of retirees. So three of his four options for deficit reduction — taxes, old-people programs, and...
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“I think the European countries are different when you compare to the United...”
– Danish PM: ‘In the last two months, we have undertaken more far-reaching decisions than perhaps in the last 50 years’ - The Washington Post
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Romney is using the programs the poor depend on...
Cutting subsidies from Amtrak and Planned Parenthood is the equivalent of President Obama promising to close loopholes for corporate jet owners. It’s red meat for the base, but a rounding error in context of the budget.
Romney’s real savings come in the next section. He’ll “send Medicaid back to the states and cap that program’s rate of growth,” and then “do the same for other programs, like...
