Democrats pay price for health-care circus
Democrats would be so much better off today had they given up their fruitless quest for bipartisanship last year and nailed down the health-care reforms two months earlier.
DEMOCRATS MADE THEIR OWN LUMPY BED
Tags: Democrats, health care, politics, Republicans, Washington
Weighty Canada — economic and otherwise
Marketwatch’s Canada expert, Bill Mann, makes note of my recent column praising Canada’s bank regulation as a boon to its economy.
Tags: banks, Canada, economy, health care, Washington
Bring on The New Progressive Era
The new financial reform law calls upon government experts to make “heroic judgments,” complains David Brooks.
That is to say, investors may believe a bank is stable. The executives of the bank may believe it is stable. But the regulators are called upon to exercise their superior vision and determine which banks are stable and which are not.
Although Brooks ridicules the notion that government experts could better spot a bank about to go under than the bank’s owners/managers, that happened about 20 months ago — not exactly the mists of time. And he does skirt the fact that the owners/managers had a great deal of money riding on hiding the truth that they were going under.
If we had government experts to force an orderly liquidation of big institutions on the brink and threatening the health of the financial system, we would not be paying right now for their bailout. By “we” I mean the taxpayers.
Brooks says with accuracy that a new progressive era is upon us. It’s not a liberal era where money is being redistributed. It’s a period in which “a large class of educated professionals” is being hired to analyze and make rules. In Republican shorthand, he’s talking about an “educated elite” tellling the rest of us what’s what. And the rest of us are supposed to resent that.
Bull.
In the early 1900s, patent-medicine companies were selling “cures” to the poor that were little better than (and sometimes were) poison. They filled their bottles with such ingredients as sulphuric acid, cocaine and booze, and sold the results as miracle medicines. The con artists getting rich off this waved the socialism word at journalists or scientists trying to expose the dangerous fraud.
In 1905, a pure food and drug bill was introduced into the Senate. Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich, a model of corporate-bought corruption, fought against the bill as “bureaucratic.”
May the New Progressive Era commence.
Tags: politics, progressives, Rhode Island
The phoniness of the Tea Party
After spending months trying to engage the Tea Party people on the policy level, I’ve plum given up. The movement hides its self-serving positions in a haze of self-contradiction. My new column:
TIME TO CALL TEA PARTY’S BLUFF
Tags: Medicare, politics, right wing, taxpayers, Tea Party
Wrong, wrong, wrong on sun screens
Heavens to Helios!
Most everything I believed about sun screens is wrong, according to the Environmental Working Group’s report on same. The EWG report found many of the makers’ claims specious, and even more troubling, some of the products’ ingredients dangerous.
So here’s something new to worry about over the Memorial Day weekend.
Tags: cosmetics, environment
