The Fact of My Ignorance

Well while I’m on the topic of the future of Healthcare here’s another one for you.  The CEO of the CMA, Joe Dunn, came and spoke at the UCD School of Medicine several weeks ago and he gave a great speech.  And now, through the miracle of technology, that speech is available to all of you!  His speech was directed towards medical students but it really has relevance to anyone who wants to get something done in politics.  Its long but he’s a very engaging and entertaining speaker and the speech really gets better as it goes along so if you have the time its definitely worth watching it through.  You would be hard-pressed to find a better primer on how things get done in government.

I doubt I will ever write many articles that fit better into the theme and mission of this blog than this one.  And despite the fact that the piece it’s based on is over 3 years old, it couldn’t be more topical.  There was an article in the New Yorker in December of 2005 entitled “Everybody’s An Expert” that discusses a book by UC Berkeley Psychology Professor Philip Tetlock called “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”.  The article is a fascinating read and I’d encourage you to go through it if you’ve got a few minutes.  But it is long so I’ve tried to draw out the more important and politically relevant points and I’ve added them below, along with a little of my own commentary. Continue reading

Hey look, a timely article for a change!  Finally I’m addressing a phenomenon before it happens and not days/weeks after it has passed.  Anyway, you may or may not have heard about the “tea-party” anti-tax movement that’s developing around the country.  This tea-party movement consists of people gathering in various cities on April 15th holding protests about the “terrible taxes burdening americans”, and what they see as America’s coming descent into socialism.  Here’s a quote from one of the two fawning FoxNews articles that were up about it today.  From one of the organizers of the tea party protests:

“People are getting killed — they’re getting hammered with taxes and it’s not the way this country is supposed to be run. … We want to fight back,”

Are people really getting hammered with taxes?  I don’t challenge their right to gather and protest taxes or whatever they want, but they may want to check a few facts first.  And to make it convenient for them, I’ve gathered the pertinent graphs and information after the jump.  I should also note before I begin that not all tea-party participants are claiming taxes are too high and that some are doing this for other reasons (to protest the stimulus, just to express their anger that McCain lost etc), I’m not addressing those concerns here.  But these tea-parties are being billed as “anti-tax protests” so this is a significant part of what they’re organizing for and this article will address that issue.  Anyway, as best as I can deduce, here’s some relevant historical perspective… Continue reading

Well its long been my position that the largest bias of the media is their bias towards the exciting, tantalizing, scandalous, lurid, and enraging.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the way that the media treats the actions of murderers who commit mass shootings.  I was reading an interesting article in MindHacks (an excellent psychology/neuroscience blog) the other day about this subject and with the immigration center shooting that happened in New York today, I thought this was an appropriate time to post something about it.

A very interesting video clip on this subject and a brief commentary can be found after the jump (which means after you click “continue reading” for my readers who are new to the blog culture) Continue reading

The internet was full of jokes today in celebration of April 1st.  I thought one of the best was Yahoo’s new “Ideological search”, both because of its astute social commentary and its near-believability.  Their info page on the subject has this to say:

Tired of being inundated with the contradictory and offensive beliefs of others? Today, the scientists at Yahoo! are releasing a groundbreaking new search filter that keeps controversy out of your search experience. I’m extremely pleased to announce Continue reading

Okay well I know the stimulus bill is passed and settled now so this will likely be my last post on the subject.  But I’ve had several questions recently about whether or not there’s any truth to accusations of pork in the stimulus and while I’ve mentioned some stimulus myths in a previous post (see “ACORN, Fieldmice, Banning Prayer, Socialized Medicine and other Stimulus Fear-Mongering“) and I’ve talked a little bit about pork in some of my previous posts, I haven’t yet focused on it specifically.  So with this post I intend to answer this question to the best of my ability: “Does the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka. The Stimulus Bill) contain pork-barrel spending?” Continue reading

Well I’ve had several questions lately about a statement I made in my post CA Obstructionism and Political Games in which I was pretty dismissive of tax cuts in the stimulus bill.  All the questions came via email of course (this is what the commenting system is for guys!  You can comment anonymously if you want!).  Anyway, while I’m planning on writing a much larger treatise on tax policy at some later date, I thought I’d address why I think tax cuts provide for relatively little stimulus.  I’m going to try to keep it as non-technical and conversational as possible.  And I should note before I begin that the principles I’ll present in this post are not universally agreed upon in the field of economics, but they are reflective of the economic philosophies that seem most reasonable to me given my educational experiences, and the views that are most widely held among economists today.  So with that, lets just jump right in, this is the trouble with tax cuts as far as I can tell… Continue reading