The main reason Democrats in Congress are willing to shut down the government is health care. Both parties are missing an opportunity here. Obamacare insurance desperately needs reforming. Smart reforms would make the insurance better for those who have it and save taxpayers money at the same time. More
The Congressional Budget Office is now estimating that 10.9 million people will lose health insurance coverage because of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. In all the press coverage and editorializing about these changes two facts are being ignored: (1) people who lose their coverage are almost certain to be healthy, and not in need of medical care, and (2) if people who drop their coverage get sick, they can easily re-enroll and get Medicaid to pay their medical bills retrospectively. More.
My academic adventure evolved into a struggle to understand why “change over time” (that’s how historians define history) occurs as it does. That is one of the reasons I created this blog: I was looking for a theory of history.
To some extent I have come up with one.
The Democratic Party is having an identity crisis. John Goodman’s theory: The crisis arises because the way most Democrats talk about and think about their party is completely different from how the party actually functions. In a democracy politicians have an incentive to take from Peter and give to Paul whenever the Pauls can deliver more political support than the Peters. Of course, this is true for Republicans as well. But for Democrats that is their raison d’être. More
The Declaration of Independence was made possible because of two changes: A change in the way people thought and a change in the way they earned a living. With the Enlightenment came the idea that individuals are independent moral entities who should deal with each other on the basis of reason, persuasion and voluntary exchange. With the emergence of a market economy, the way individuals could do the most good for the most other people is by pursuing their own self-interest in the marketplace. More
What most people think they know about the past is often wrong. Capitalism and greed did not cause the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nor did they cause the Great Recession of 2007–2009. These events were caused by bad government. Those are some of the well documented conclusions of a new book. More
Given the disastrous 20th century experiences with Zohran Mamdani’s ideas in Russia, China, North Korea and Cuba, how could anyone in the 21st century seriously consider them? Answer: Anyone who has taken a course in Econ 101 (even using Paul Krugman’s textbook) won’t take them seriously. More
If the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can stop our Social Security system from sending checks to dead people, that would be a plus. Yet a far more important task is to stop the system from overpaying people who are very much alive. Last year the Social Security Administration admitted it had identified 2 million beneficiaries who have been overpaid and sent them “clawback” letters, demanding the government’s money back. Some of these claims go back several decades, and they can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars. More
My late husband and I had a running debate over which force mattered the most: downtown landowners who wanted to keep up rents (Rick’s view) or urban planners (my view). Rick, the economist, may well have been right—especially about the devastation of Boston that goes back to the 1950s—but planners are at fault, too. That’s the subject of this post.