Your Depressing News for the Day

April 15, 2014

There’s a pretty depressing article on the status of diplomacy in the Far East at FP: This means that both Japan and China have an interest in seeing the United States face a binary choice between supporting Japan and stepping back from confrontation with China. Tokyo wants Washington to prove unambiguously that it will not […]

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It’s the Policy, Stupid

April 15, 2014

Ignore whether global warming (manmade or not) is happening. Here’s an example of why I’m skeptical of the policy proposals intended to combat it: The world needs to triple the energy it gets from renewables, nuclear reactors and power plants that use emissions-capture technology to avoid dangerous levels of global warming, United Nations scientists said. […]

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A Reminder

April 15, 2014

Just a little reminder. The backend of Healthcare.gov is still presenting problems. The user-facing part of the site is, apparently, much improved, but, like an iceberg, that’s only a seventh of it. The user experience may be better but to say that’s it’s working now is at best an exaggeration and at worst a lie. […]

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Where to Begin?

April 15, 2014

I could hardly let the recent Wall Street Journal article, “What’s the Matter With Illinois?”, pass without comment. I’ve taken the liberty of sampling the graphic above from that article. As you can see, Illinois has fared far worse in the recovery than its neighboring states. The WSJ attributes Illinois’s problems, essentially, to Democrats: Democrats […]

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No Recovery for Millennials

April 14, 2014

The editors of the New York Times lament that the economic recovery has left Millennials, Americans aged 25 to 34, behind: The Federal Reserve, increasingly optimistic about the economy, is dialing back its stimulus efforts. The International Monetary Fund has raised its forecast for growth in the United States. Congress has long since reduced aid […]

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Foreign Policy Blogging at OTB

April 14, 2014

I’ve just published a foreign policy-related post at Outside the Beltway: Kaminski on Ukraine I respond to Wall Street Journal editor Matthew Kaminski’s lament about the West’s failure to oppose Russia in Ukraine.

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Long-Term Unemployment

April 14, 2014

Robert Samuelson muses about long-term unemployment: A study by Princeton economists Alan Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho is discouraging. Among the long-term unemployed from 2008 to 2012, only 36 percent had jobs 15 months later, the study found. As for the rest, 30 percent were unemployed, and 34 percent were not in the labor […]

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You Cahn’t Get The-ah from He-ah

April 12, 2014

Megan McArdle explains why the PPACA isn’t the first step in the process of getting to a single-payer system using Vermont as an example. Basically, it’s just too darned expensive. Our present basis for healthcare spending is just too high.

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Self-Flagellation

April 12, 2014

This weekend I’m engaging in my annual rite of penance and mortification. Somewhat like Prince Vronsky in Anna Karenina, I take the opportunity of the due date for my federal income taxes to re-examine and put the finishing touches on my books for the previous year. As I think I’ve mentioned before, last year my […]

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Five Little Words

April 12, 2014

In the past I’ve mentioned my opinion that just because most of the members of the Congress are lawyers doesn’t mean that they’re good lawyers. I’m beginning to think I should extend that observation to members of the Supreme Court. Consider, for example, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s prescription for “fixing” the Second […]

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