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Polls and Priorities FoxNews headline: “Fox News Poll: Voters Say Taxes are Too High, Want...
Does Rudolf Steiner Belie... Here is a great example of why we have to be careful with Steiner quotes. This...
Republicans and the Defic... The mind still boggles that the party that screamed “deficit” for...
Intellectually honest hea... Intellectually honest headline of the day: “CERN Scientists Conclude...
On the Comey firing So this Comey thing is interesting. By all objective standards he crossed a...
Health insurance at iPhon... Earlier today Representative Jason Chavetz (R-UT) said on CNN:...
Stenography and Steiner As source material the stenographic records of Rudolf Steiner’s early...
What did people in the 19... “Bolshevism” as understood in Steiner’s time would have been...

Student Loan Interest as Bad Social Policy

So outstanding student loans in the US are about $1.5 trillion. Most are at 6-8% interest, and are federally guaranteed. Meaning whoever holds the loan cannot lose money (if the loan isn’t paid by the borrower, the Federal government makes the lender whole). Since offsetting losses is the whole purpose of interest, this is pretty much a $90 billion per year federal give-away to big banks. They get to collect the...

On the Demise of Amazon’s HQ2 in NYC

So Amazon just canceled their planned NYC 2nd Headquarters, because of local resistance. A lot of people are rushing to frame this as “local socialists hate capitalism”. I would argue that it is much better understood as a question of fairness and the integrity of capitalism. Why should Amazon get a deal thousands of times better than any that existing local business get? Why should the government pick winners...

Examples of the Effects of Distorted Social Policy...

Rich People Pay for Private Firefighters While the Rest of Us Burn Welcome to the 1% society, where the 1% take care of themselves. Back in the 1950s the 1% paid taxes  at 90% rate at the top income brackets, and the money took care of everyone. That may have been a bit high (the US was still paying off WWII). In the 1960s the top rate was lowered to 70%. Today it is 37%, the with loopholes out of control. The effective rate...

When algorithms fail

Algorithmic fail… So I search for “Sinners Like Me CD” on eBay (Eric Church). Ebay suggests related items: “Just Like Me perfume”, “Dolls Like Me” (apparently a line of multi-ethnic children’s/girls dolls), and “‘Sinner’ T-shirts”. Presumably the algorithm took word pairs out of the original search string and matched them against the most popular...

Thinking about Change

Improving the world: I’ve noticed an interesting challenge. Someone sees an issue… something wrong in the world. Say, rapacious capitalism. They propose a solution, or a framework to a solution. Now it may be well-thought-out. Or it may be foolish. But the response always seems to be, “You proposal seems similar to X, and X didn’t work in the past.” Now if you get that in response to every...

The Economic Data that Explains Voter Attitudes

“Prices rose at their highest clip since 2012 over the past year, the Labor Department reported Thursday. The 2.9 percent inflation for the 12-month period ending in June is a sign of a growing economy, but it’s also a painful development for workers, whose tepid wage gains have failed to keep pace with the rising prices.” Chicago Tribune, last month. So the economy grew by 4.1%, but everything got 2.9%...

Why the Economy Isn’t working for Anyone but...

Short answer: structural incentives that redistribute income upwards, taking money from the less affluent and siphoning it to the ultra rich. And among those mechanisms, few have more of a negative impact than stock buybacks. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy? From the article: “The new Roosevelt Institute and NELP research examines public firms in three major but notoriously low-wage industries— food production,...

On Interpreting Economic Statistics

The economy grew at an annualized rate of 4.1% last quarter. Why, we haven’t had that level of economic growth since Obama was President (4Q 2011, for those wondering, and also Q4 2009). But the more important question for the average person is not how well “the economy” has been doing, but how this growth has affected him or her. This level of economic growth only tells us that more economic activity is...