On Sunday Henry Paulson, the former Treasury secretary and a lifelong Republican, had an op-ed article about climate policy in The New York Times. In the article, he declared that man-made climate change is “the challenge of our time,” and called for a national tax on carbon emissions to encourage conservation and the adoption of green technologies. Considering the prevalence of climate denial within today’s G.O.P., and the absolute opposition to any kind of tax increase, this was a brave stand to take. But not nearly brave enough. Emissions taxes are the Economics 101 solution to pollution problems; every economist I know would start cheering wildly if Congress voted in a clean, across-the-board carbon tax. But that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future. A carbon tax may be the best thing we could do, but we won’t actually do it. Continue reading Paul Krugman: The Big Green Test – NYTimes→
Life with food allergies is fraught with mysteries, a few of which, I suspect, are never elucidated. My daughter has many allergies and, as a result, her food is prepared at home, from single ingredients that are carefully-vetted to exclude soy, corn, palm, gluten, and dairy, just to name the main culprits. We’ve had too many accidents that resulted in a trip to the emergency room to stray too far from our regimen. While a great number of those accidents were traceable to a food she ingested, or the possibility of cross-contamination, there were still a great many instances where there was an illness and no obvious culprit.
Olive oil is a staple in our kitchen. Up until recently, while I would strive to buy our olive oil mostly from either Costco or Whole Foods, I would buy it at my local grocery chain when in a pinch. Recently, I ran out of olive oil as I was getting ready to make a limited run to the local grocery. I bought a liter bottle there. Within hours, my daughter was sick. While she was not sick enough to need the emergency room, she was noticeably ill and we didn’t know why. After all, nothing new was added to her diet. Right? Continue reading #OliveOil: buyer beware!→
by Lois Beckett ProPublica, June 10, 2014, 3:30 p.m.
After mass shootings, like the ones these past weeks in Las Vegas, Seattle and Santa Barbara, the national conversation often focuses on mental illness. So what do we actually know about the connections between mental illness, mass shootings and gun violence overall?
To separate the facts from the media hype, we talked to Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, and one of the leading researchers on mental health and violence. Swanson talked about the dangers of passing laws in the wake of tragedy and which new violence-prevention strategies might actually work. Continue reading ProPublica: Myth vs. Fact: Violence and Mental Health→
Mayor Bill de Blasio acted in the interest of justice when his administration agreed to pay about $40 million to the five black and Hispanic men wrongly convicted in the brutal beating and rape of a white, female jogger in Central Park in 1989. If the settlement is approved by the city comptroller and a federal court, it will bring to a close one of the more shameful and racially divisive episodes in New York City history.
The assault, which stunned New Yorkers, came at a time of deep anxiety about urban crime that pervaded not just the city but the nation as a whole. New York City itself was still recovering from the insolvency of the previous decade and reeling from the crack wars, which had desolated neighborhood after neighborhood. Continue reading Editorial: A Settlement in the Central Park Jogger Case – NYTimes→
Mark, 22 and unemployed, sleeps late in the morning.
His roommate has to get up for work, but Mark has nowhere to be. He rolls out of bed at 11 a.m. He checks his email — still no response to his last round of resumes — and heads out for a run. When he gets home, he spends 45 minutes filling out job applications, then plops down in front of the television for a couple hours before cleaning up the house — he’s taken on more chores since his roommate is cutting him a break on the rent. In the evening, his buddies are catching a game at the local bar, but Mark has class at the local community college, where he’s working toward a certificate in HVAC repair.
That deep divide between those with jobs and those without them reveals itself not just in well-known statistics on hiring and income but in the day-to-day details of how people live their lives. The unemployed have higher rates of depression, obesity and suicide. In interviews, they frequently report that the social and emotional impacts of joblessness — isolation from friends, the loss of a daily routine, feelings of uselessness — can be as hard as the financial toll. Many say it’s hard just to get out of bed in the morning. Continue reading @FiveThirtyEight: It’s Hard to Get Off the Couch When You’re #Unemployed→
CHICAGO — Prosecutors in Wisconsin assert that Gov. Scott Walker was part of an elaborate effort to illegally coordinate fund-raising and spending between his campaign and conservative groups during efforts to recall him and several state senators two years ago, according to court filings unsealed Thursday.
The allegations by five county district attorneys, released as part of a federal lawsuit over the investigation into Mr. Walker, suggest that some of the governor’s top campaign aides directed the political spending of the outside groups, most of them nonprofits, and in effect controlled some of them. Continue reading #Wisconsin Governor at Center of a Vast Fund-Raising Case | NYTimes |→
You’ve surely heard about the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs. A number of veterans found themselves waiting a long time for care, some of them died before they were seen, and some of the agency’s employees falsified records to cover up the extent of the problem. It’s a real scandal; some heads have already rolled, but there’s surely more to clean up.
But the goings-on at Veterans Affairs shouldn’t cause us to lose sight of a much bigger scandal: the almost surreal inefficiency and injustice of the American health care system as a whole. And it’s important to understand that the Veterans Affairs scandal, while real, is being hyped out of proportion by people whose real goal is to block reform of the larger system. Continue reading Paul Krugman: The Hype Behind the #HealthCare #Scandal – NYTimes→
For some time now, Republicans in Congress have given up the pretense of doing anything to improve the lot of most Americans. Raising the minimum wage? They won’t even allow a vote to happen. Cleaner air for all? They may partially shut down the government in a coming fight on behalf of major polluters. Add to that the continuing obstruction of student loan relief efforts, and numerous attempts to defund health care, and you have a party actively working to make life miserable for millions.
“Free” is a word with a powerful appeal. And right now it’s being tossed around a lot, followed by another word: “college.”
A new nonprofit, Redeeming America’s Promise, announced this week that it will seek federal support to make public colleges tuition-free. That effort is inspired by “Hope” and “Promise” programs like the one in Kalamazoo, Mich., which pays up to 100 percent of college tuition at state colleges and universities for graduates of the city’s public high schools.
In reality there’s no free college, just as there’s no free lunch. The real policy discussion is about how to best distribute the burden of paying for it — between individual families and the public at large — and, secondly, how to hold down the cost of providing it. All while leveraging the power of “free” responsibly. Continue reading NPR: Free College For All: Dream, Promise Or Fantasy?→
Home sales have fizzled in part because Americans in their 20s and 30s are choosing not to buy. Only 16 percent of new home sales are to first-time homebuyers.
A year ago, the housing market looked like it was finally recovering. Sales and prices were picking up. But then home sales fizzled. Currently, they are down about 7 percent from last spring.
