Is Megan McArdle actually surprised that no one mentioned Obamacare at the debates? Or is this rhetorical surprise? The Affordable Care Act barely came up. What candidates wanted to talk about was Medicare-for-all. That is nothing short of extraordinary. In 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the biggest entitlement expansion, and the most significant… Read More The Democrats are Democrats
I spent a day angry about the Game of Thrones finale. I won’t go into the why, because I’m going to write something larger on that topic later on. Put me in the group of fans that found it highly unsatisfying and leave it at that. Many of those same people have been saying that the… Read More When You Need the Tropes – Game of Thrones Edition
Been a while since I came across a Megan McArdle piece I thought worth passing on, but this one is it. This past week the axe fell in the newsroom, most notably at BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, but also… newspaper chain Gannett swung the ax through several of its publications this week, including the Indianapolis Star,… Read More Journalism is Dying Because It’s Not Free
In the first place, the countries are hardly exemplars of the free market: With the notable exception of Iceland, these are not countries I would describe as “capitalist”: Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt. They’re countries where kleptocratic government officials amass money not through commerce, but through quasi-legal extortion, or siphoning off the till. This is an… Read More McArdle: Corruption is not an Indictment of Global Capitalism
Megan McArdle, illuminating a very real issue: Very old debts are very difficult to collect, because they disappear from credit reports after seven years, and after a state’s statute of limitation on debt collections expires, the collector can’t even sue. So these wily collectors either hope that the debtor feels bad about being a deadbeat… Read More Dealing with Zombie Debt
Megan McArdle gets the nature of the problem, in a very sensible article on the VA. You can’t fire government bureaucrats – especially not en masse, so matter what you do, old patterns re-emerge. Every “reform” just adds a new set of directives and rules without trimming or significantly changing the old ones. What that means… Read More Why Government Bureaucracies are Un-Fixable
Politicians were making decisions about it: So no, this is not a good project undone by Republican “sabotage,” as I saw suggested on Twitter this morning. It’s a potentially good IT project undone by system design and deadlines chosen for political reasons, rather than feasibility. What we’ve been through in the last week, I’d argue,… Read More Megan McArdle Discovers the Problem with A Government-Instituted Health Exchange:
Good article, as one expects from McArdle, even when you don’t always agree with her. Never having been to business school, nor any kind of school at Harvard, I can’t dispute anything she discusses here. But on average, the women I talk to just aren’t nearly as willing to sacrifice close friendships, and family relationships,… Read More Megan McArdle on the Choices Women Make
Abortion is not new. It did not spring fully-formed from the head of the Supreme Court in 1973. It is as old as civilization itself, and the controversy surrounding it is just as old: “Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit? Where there are many efforts at abortion? Where… Read More Kermit Gosnell and the Holy of Holies
Presidents win re-election as a referendum on their first term, on the people’s view of them. They don’t tend to accomplish much with that term. In fact, recent two-termers tend to spend years 5-8 getting swatted around like weathervanes by events and opposition. So there’s that. Then there’s the actual circumstances of this particular second… Read More Welcome to The Second Term
Content Blues 