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Free Sample on Open Culture.

Open Culture is an awesome website that I’ve been frequenting ever since I found out about it. It’s devoted to bringing together all of the interesting, free things on the internet that you’d never find otherwise. So, younger readers, it’s like a cat video site, but it’s not all videos, and the videos are of […]

Ooh, this is delicious.

Salon has an article by the awesome Alex Pareene about the decline of the Heritage Foundation, which has gone from a semi-sane, practical conservative think tank (the one that invented Obamacare) to a right-wing nutjob one (the one that puts billboards on Times Square warning against the horrors of Obamacare).

Apparently, this shift has coincided […]

What the framers of the Constitution actually said about the filibuster, repeated

So, seeing the apoplectic outrage of the right wing about losing the filibuster in certain limited situations (an overdue rap on the knuckles considering how the filibuster has been abused in recent years), I thought I’d repeat something from a post I made two years ago during the first bullshit debt limit crisis. That post […]

My Obamacare nightmare

I freelance, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to afford private health insurance since I was in my 20s.

I thought my premiums–north of $7,100 per year now, and I’m single with no children [EDIT: And no health issues]–were pretty ridiculous, especially because I was on the absolute cheapest option my plan offered […]

Economix in color!

So, Economix will be getting a Greek translation.

And apparently the Greek market likes color comix, so the publisher will be putting Economix out in color!

I was skeptical at first—we used black-and-white by choice, for clarity—but I’ve seen some sample pages, and they look good! Check them out:

 

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The reason that conservatives aren’t proposing an alternative to Obamacare

If you go to the Heritage foundation website, they’re throwing everything they have against Obamacare. “Everything they have,” if my nonscientific I’ll-read-all-I-can-before-I-vomit sampling is any indication, comes down to three things:

Some people are quotably scared of Obamacare. Which is not exactly surprising after a multi-year smear campaign (remember “death panels”?). It’s the thin end […]

More thrilling text about the tax deduction for performance-based pay

So, I did some more digging after my post talking about performance-based pay.

(The relevant points from that post: The government does not allow companies to deduct pay over $1 million for execs, but “performance-based” pay is excluded, which is why so many execs get “bonuses” no matter how badly they do their jobs).

It […]

SAT scores are flat, and that’s worse than it sounds.

So, this year’s SAT scores are out, and they’re disappointing. Only 43% of students who took the test got scores indicating readiness for college.

Really, SAT scores have been flat, or even slowly falling, for a while. Some of that slow decline can be attributed to more people taking the SAT. Maybe all of it […]

The CEO of AIG tells the truth, accidentally

So Robert Benmosche, the CEO of AIG, is under fire.

AIG, remember, took a bunch of very stupid bets on the mortgage market, needed a massive bailout from the government (a bailout that was really a gift to the companies that took the other side of AIG’s bets, like Goldman Sachs), and then paid its […]

Politics and economic instruction

It’s worth mentioning that when I came across the chart in Monday’s post, I wasn’t just idly sifting through charts; I do have a life. Rather, I wanted to check to make sure my understanding of the history of the national debt was right.

My understanding was:

When Ronald Reagan took office, the burden of […]