“…Humility, so that each of society’s competing factions might comprehend that it will not always hold power. Tolerance, so that the habitual reaction to a difference of opinion is the shrug rather than the bayonet. And forbearance, so that the immediate rush of victory can be subordinated to longer-term ambition. Little by little, we are losing all three…”
I’m going to assume an annual budget of $2 trillion (inflation-adjusted) of additional federal spending to tackle five problem areas: healthcare, poverty, social mobility, housing, and threats to the biosphere. Let’s start with healthcare. The challenge is to come up with a high-quality, affordable universal healthcare system that doesn’t eat up my budget. Easy - the The Urban Institute has done most of the work already…Per the Urban Institute’s analysis, just $108 Billion in additional revenue is needed for their proposed reform: a drop in the $2 trillion bucket. But even this reform option leaves a lot of waste in the US healthcare system.
With more stimulus spending on the way, the federal debt is going to grow a bit more before the long drift downward to a manageable size - a process that will take many years. In the meantime, the Bold Centrist has a major challenge: how to fund Big Ideas without adding to the public debt.
Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all ideal tax system but here are a few tips. Tax systems should:
Provide a relatively stable revenue stream.
Generate enough revenue to meet policy goals without incurring excessive debt.
Be sufficiently predictable for taxpayers to make long-term spending and investment decisions.
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…”Once you’ve selected your policy approach, seek out examples that already exist of similar models – either from other jurisdictions or similar local laws applied to different contexts. You may also wish to work with officials from other jurisdictions or agencies to understand what has worked well for them and what can be improved.”
While the general mission hasn’t changed much since the Constitutional Convention of 1787, what that mission means in practice certainly has changed. For example, securing the right to life implies a duty to protect from harm - but only to the extent that is doable given current resources and capabilities, which change over time. It would have made little sense in the early 1800s for the federal government to mandate and subsidize universal access to healthcare services when such services were rather risky propositions and the government was near-broke. Today’s a different story. The medical field has evolved and the resources are there. We could have an affordable universal healthcare system in the US. All we need is the political will and a way to do it responsibly.
There’s that word again: responsibly. What does that mean? …
Political centrists favor a flexible, pragmatic and non-ideological approach to government policy. They tend to occupy the middle-ground of political opinion but are rarely attached to particular policies. This is not because centrists lack conviction or ideas but because they appreciate the utter difficulty of predicting policy effects over time. Like scientists, centrists appreciate their own limitations and the need to keep an open mind.
Ok, so government’s job is to secure the people’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The policy challenge is to secure each right without losing sight of the others, e.g., to protect life but not to the point of smothering liberty or undermining the pursuit of happiness. A tall order - one which calls for a mix of boldness and caution..
Hill himself was ambivalent about the utility of these criteria. On the one hand, he asked “in what circumstances can we pass from this observed association to a verdict of causation?” Yet he disagreed that any “hard-and-fast rules of evidence” existed by which to judge causation…
The BMJ is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association. A week ago, it published Covid-19: Russia admits to understating deaths by more than two thirds. An extended excerpt:…
Motivated by love of truth, glory, and tenure, scientists tend to be a critical bunch: they like to pick holes in each others’ arguments and evidence. To defend themselves against this critical onslaught, scientists adhere as much as possible to various procedural norms governing the gathering and analysis of evidence - also known as the scientific method.
Policies and laws are very complex: drafting them requires a degree of expertise. Lobbyists are invaluable to legislators because they provide a lot of useful technical information - and yes, sometimes they play a major role in writing the legislation (whether they're lobbyists for the Teamsters or the Mining and Extraction Industry Council). The issue is not to eliminate their input but to make sure other perspectives and data are also considered.
Per Terner Center’s “Cost of Building Housing" Series”., the outrageously high cost of housing in California’s urban areas include construction labor costs rising much faster than inflation, high development fees, incredibly long permit and development timelines, burdensome regulatory requirements, zoning restrictions (especially on apartment buildings), and chronic labor shortages.
But bounded rationality fails spectacularly when untethered to something real, - that is, unless it is grounded in the real world…
According to psychologist Gary Klein, confirmation bias leads us to:
Search only for evidence that confirms our beliefs
Prefer evidence that supports our beliefs
Best remember information in keeping with our beliefs
Interpret evidence in a way that supports our beliefs
Rely on favored beliefs to misunderstand what is happening in a situation
Ignore opportunities to test our beliefs
Explain away data that don’t fit with our beliefs
This headline seems to be saying that just a quarter of Republicans accept that Biden won the election. That’s pretty amazing, assuming it’s true. But it isn’t true, at least not according to the poll in question. The first hint that something was amiss in the NPR article was this sentence…
All the above countries have been hit hard by Covid, especially as colder weather set in, but Spain, Belgium, the UK, France, and Italy are managing to turn things around. Why not the US? What did the European countries do differently? Well, for one thing…
Most formerly incarcerated people in the US are arrested within three years of release from prison. What can be done to prevent them from returning to their old ways? Here’s an idea…
This post provides the median earnings by major for California State University graduates ten years after they’ve graduated. The figures apply only to graduates working in California, and so are likely a bit higher than the earnings of comparable graduates in other states. However, I’m assuming the overall pattern remains the same, i.e., some majors have a much greater payoff than others, no matter where you live. I chose ten years post-graduation, because that allows enough time for most graduates to pursue further studies, explore various starter jobs, and land in a career-type occupation.
Before anyone assumes that remote workers moving from Blue to Red areas will change the politics of their new home, consider the opposite possibility: their new home may change the Blue transplants even more. That’s because political views aren’t fixed for life and where one lives can have a big effect on how one thinks about politics. At least that’s according to Jeffrey Lyons, a political scientist who studies why people change their political views over time. The rest of this post summarizes Lyons’ findings on factors that make some people more likely to change their politics than others.