You’ll notice that the roundup is waaaaay later than normal.That’s because blackink12, our usual roundup guy, is kinda swamped with uber-important life stuff (something about “getting married this weekend…”). So into the breach I step, as your substitute aggregator. But don’t be forgetting yourself and writing all sorts of funny names on the attendance sheet. Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. After I wrote a column supporting New York’s latest effort to tax sugary drinks, I read RaceWire’s column on how it’s just another tax to hurt poor people. While, yes, sales taxes are regressive, decrying this tax as a social justice issue misses the point. For starters, as I wrote in my Read More
Bruce Bartlett laments that in his pitch for comprehensive healthcare reform, President Obama didn’t go all out and call for a single-payer system — not because he would have gotten it, but because the eventual watered-down legislation would have still been more effective of the legislation currently on the table. The real problem, in my Read More
(x-posted from TAPPED) A former champion of No Child Left Behind has written a book criticizing the policy as a failure, especially because it relies on standardized testing. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch also says school choice is a bad idea: “There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch says. Read More
At the risk of belaboring the point on just how ridiculous our current teacher tenure policies are and the role the teacher’s unions play in keeping them that way, it should be pointed out that in New York City, which has a school system that employs 80,000 tenured teachers, almost never finds any of them Read More
With a few slight adjustments, of course! That is, the White House’s recently released health care proposal is virtually identical to the Senate’s health care bill, with a few notable changes (if you’d rather not go to the White House site, you can read the full proposal here): The White House’s proposal eliminates the Nebraska Medicaid exemption Read More
This analysis of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka: the stimulus), by New York Times reporter David Leonhardt, is the most important thing you’ll read today: Imagine if, one year ago, Congress had passed a stimulus bill that really worked. Let’s say this bill had started spending money within a matter of Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. Megan McArdle has been questioning the benefits of health insurance and has been attacked for some pretty lazy reasoning. The basis of her argument is that one study showed there wasn’t a big difference in mortality when 64-year-olds go on Medicare — and that somehow shows having health insurance doesn’t provide much Read More
If you missed it, President Obama gave remarks and took questions this morning at a retreat for Senate Democrats. You can watch the full video here. Unlike last week’s session with House Republicans, there wasn’t anything particularly exciting or noteworthy to come out of the event, but I did think Obama was right to argue Read More
If you want to understand the anger at Obama’s proposed freeze on discretionary spending, just take a look at how the 2009 federal budget shook out: Glenn Greenwald: The facts about America’s bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the Read More
