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A comic about Obamacare

I’ve already talked about my (overwhelmingly positive) experience with Obamacare in two blog posts here and here. But one Jen Sorensen, a freelance cartoonist in Texas, did the same thing in comics! It’s available here.

A sample:

[…]

Quote of the day

“Each man has his own individual right to do as he pleases, but businessmen have no influence over voting. If they did it would be the downfall of the nation.” —R.K. Mellon, businessman, quoted in Burton Hersh, The Mellon Family, p368.

He was exaggerating, of course, but it wasn’t completely implausible when he said it […]

Joseph Stiglitz comes out against the TPP

So, a week or so ago one of my favorite living economists, Paul Krugman, posted a piece on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He wasn’t for it, exactly, but he thought it just wasn’t that important. I disagreed, to put it mildly.

But yesterday, one of my other favorite living economists, Joseph Stiglitz, came out swinging against […]

On the Gweek podcast

Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing runs a podcast called Gweek, where people talk about their favorite media, devices, and suchlike. He was kind enough to include me on one with the author Scott Stigler; we recorded it yesterday and it’s already up!

Listen to us talk about zombie jugheads here: http://boingboing.net/2014/03/04/gweek-podcast-136-zombie-jugh.html

Who’s negotiating our trade agreements?

The Washington Post has a nifty interactive infographic that shows who sits on the committees that advise the administration on trade negotiations. And although nobody can accuse me of being a pollyanna about the influence of business on trade agreements, even I was a bit stunned by just how corporate-heavy the committees are.

It’s worth […]

My Obamacare nightmare, concluded

I posted a while back about my experience with Obamacare. To recap:

I was informed that my existing insurance plan (for which I was paying $7100 per year) would no longer operate; I was offered other plans that looked to be better value for money.

I ended that post with:

So yes, Obamacare is a […]

Why Antitrust Still Matters

I was gratified, and surprised, by T-Mobile’s announcement a year or so ago that they were planning to offer the sort of plan a consumer would actually want: Cheap, you’re not forced to stay for two years, you don’t keep paying for the same phone forever, you don’t pay fees for going over your data […]

A comic on the Trans-Pacific Partnership!

So, Dan and I have been working on a piece explaining the Trans-Pacific Partnership for a while–it’s a tangled subject–and it’s finally done!

Check it out here.

Tom Coburn needs to read Dilbert

So, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has decided to stop bashing Healthcare.gov. “It will eventually work and work well,” he said.

But Coburn warned that the law would still have problems, thanks to the “centralized management” of the federal government, which is “inefficient, most of the time ineffective, oftentimes complicated by fraud or incompetence.”

All of […]

How to get even more depressed, vol CLXXVII

So there’s a new analysis of the Easter Island story.

The old one: Polynesians showed up on this small, isolated island, used up all the trees, and the economy collapsed while people futilely built giant heads to make the collapse stop. They were reduced to a wretched remnant by the time Europeans showed up.

The […]