In answer to a long-ago-posed question of MikeK's, no, you don't have to be a libertarian to oppose the Supreme Court's bizarre decision that would-be-mall developers have more of a right to your home than you do. You can be me. Or, Molly Ivins.
Paul Krugman on the The Center for Consumer Freedom, the junk food lobby that likes to pretend to be libertarian junk food fans.
Sarah Vowell! on the fact that, apparently, the demonic force that used to inhabit Pat Robertson has now departed (for the time being). I think it's in James Dobson now.
When it comes to global warming, we are stupid children who would rather pay more later than grow up now.
The unemployment rate fell to 5 percent from 5.1 percent in May, the Labor Department reported, the lowest since a matching reading in September 2001. But the department's survey of employers showed they added just 146,000 jobs to payrolls in June, up from a revised 104,000 in May. That was well short of the average forecast for a net gain of 195,000 jobs last month, according to economists surveyed by Briefing.com. "The improvement in the unemployment rate has been very steady, which looks very believable," said Mark Vitner, senior economist with Wachovia Securities. "It points to a probable undercount in (payroll) employment."
Well, that's what that guy thinks. I think the numbers indicate that people are dropping off the unemployment count simply because they aren't "looking for work" anymore, not because they found magical unreported jobs somewhere.
Addendum:
According to the US Department of Labor, unemployment figures come from a monthly sample survey, conducted through personal interview by Census Bureau employees, called the Current Population Survey (CPS). This survey covers about 60,000 households, selected so as to (in theory) be representative of the entire population of the United States.
They get information on all household members 16 or older. Each person is classified according to the job-related activities engaged in during the reference week. Respondents are never asked specifically if they are unemployed, nor are they given an opportunity to decide their own labor force status. That status is:
- People with jobs are employed.
- People who are jobless, looking for jobs, and available for work are unemployed.
- Everyone else is defined as "not in the labor force."
That would include, for example, somebody who had looked for work in the past 12 months, but not in the survey week. It might include people working under the table who don't report that work to the surveyor. It wouldn't count people on disability or retired people or fortunate dot-commers who cashed out their stock at a the right time and live off investment income.
The explanation of the methodology doesn't make it clear whether self-employed freelancers are "employed" or not, or whether people who run their own businesses, but are losing money, are "employed" or not. When I'm looking for a new client, am I "looking for a job" and therefore unemployed? Or am I "employed" even if no money is coming in?
The thing that this survey absolutely does not measure (for benefit of your fiscal conservatives) is underemployment. For example, ex dot-commers who cashed out at the wrong time and now live with their parents and work part time at McDonald's.
Also, I've never, personally, been surveyed. So (just like with the Nielson ratings) I can't shake the suspicion that the numbers are rigged.
a US-Canada sponsored study on the state of healthcare that showed Canadians and uninsured Americans had quite similar levels of satisfaction when it came to healthcare. In the same report, more Americans overall (53 percent) than Canadians (44 percent) were said to be "very satisfied" with the state of their health care.
I am, shall I say, skeptical, especially since it doesn't mention who conducted the survey. Her main point may be correct: a mixture of public and private health insurance is a good thing. On the other hand, it seems that she's trying to oversell the dubious attractions of the dysfunctional American health care system -- even while acknowledging that she couldn't have paid for a recent health care procedure under the American system.
I liked this interview with a guy who has a novel capitalist approach to eliminating poverty. It's part of a concept that I think you could call "humanized capitalism" or something like that. Basically, our current model creates corporations that are an artificial life form with limited intelligence, capable of only one goal: maximizing profit for stockholders. Companies that aren't traded are similarly limited to maximizing profit for the owner of the company. Yunus suggests that if you reconceptualize a company's goal as to not lose money it gives capitalism flexibility to consider human values in economic equations.
