Medicare for All doesn't just provide everyone with the care they need, free of charge. It's also a potent anti-poverty program, reducing poverty by over 20 percent and increasing poor people's incomes by 29 percent. The Census released its annual income, poverty, and health insurance statistics earlier this week. The summary report shows that 8 million of the nation's 42.5 million poor people would not be poor if they did not have to pay medical out-of-pocket (MOOP) expenses like deductibles, co-pays, coinsurance, and self-payments. Medicare for All (M4A) virtually eliminates these kinds of payments, meaning that these 8 million people (18.8 percent of all poor people) would find themselves lifted over the poverty threshold if M4A were enacted. read more
I am obviously a partisan for Sanders, but six months ago if you asked me who could beat Trump I would give you two names: Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Everyone else has extremely shaky numbers against Trump, and some candidates in particular (Warren and Buttigieg) seem personally ill-matched for his combative reactionary populism. Biden, meanwhile, has polled well against Trump, which is why my argument against him was entirely political: I saw no reason to expect him to lose. So when I say that I've changed my mind, please for the love of god do not read this as a cynical argument for Sanders. I was not saying this six months ago. Even now I don't have to say it for Sanders, because he doesn't need it. The case for Sanders is still that he is the best candidate who can beat Trump, and this is true even if worse candidates (like Biden) can also beat Trump. But I don't think Biden can. Not anymore.
"It doesn't make any difference whether a country makes computer chips or potato chips!" "Attributed to Michael Boskin, Chairman of President George H. W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisors When U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year low, why do so many people have trouble finding work with decent pay and adequate predictable hours? A new economic indicator"the US Private Sector Job Quality Index (JQI)"gives the answer: we have lots of jobs, but they are increasingly low-quality jobs. "The problem is that the quality of the stock of jobs on offer has been deteriorating for the last 30 years," says Dan Alpert, an investment banker and Cornell Law School professor. The JQI is built and maintained by Alpert and his fellow researchers at Cornell University Law School, the Coalition for a Prosperous America, the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity.
The Internal Revenue Service is in a bind. The agency's job is to collect the taxes that fund everything else in the government, from Social Security to the Post Office to Medicaid to the military's endless conflicts across the globe. But the IRS is struggling: According to Vox, Americans owe a cumulative $131 billion in unpaid taxes, enough to completely fund the Department of Education for two years. The bulk of that money is owed by the wealthiest people in the country, yet the IRS isn't attempting to collect it from them. Instead, as IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig confirmed in a letter to Congress recently, the agency literally can't afford to audit the rich, so it's pursuing the poor instead. read more
That these people vehemently oppose things like nuclear power and carbon capture
I actually think nuclear power will eventually have to be a significant part of the solution. I just hope they manage to find reasonable ways to recycle the waste. They're working on it.
Recycling Nuclear Fuel: The French Do It, Why Can't Oui?
And for the sake of context, I normally hate the Heritage Foundation.
Thank goodness nobody dropped a string of fire crackers in the crowd.