Tag: GDP

Hillary Clinton’s Problems Go Far Beyond Being “Out of Touch”

Hillary Clinton has been getting reamed for being “out of touch” for comments she made regarding the Clinton family’s wealth.  The Clintons earned $109 million during their first 7 years out of office (for an average annual income of $15.5 million), but she nonetheless claimed that the Clinton family was “dead broke”and in debt when it left the White House in 2001, and that the Clintons are not truly “well off“. While Clinton badly misses the mark here, what’s far more disturbing is the role her husband’s administration played in enriching people like them at the eventual expense of the wider population.

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Mitt Romney is No Captain Hindsight on Ukraine

Since I last wrote about Ukraine, the Russians have occupied and annexed Crimea, a region that has a 70% majority ethnic Russian population and a major Russian naval base. The United States and the European Union have done even less than I anticipated in response–sanctions have been confined to a few figures in Putin’s administration. At this point, the armchair generals are beginning to come out of the woodwork, with Mitt Romney going so far as to tell us what he believes he would have done had he been elected in 2012. Unfortunately, Romney is no Captain Hindsight, and his proposals only serve to illustrate what a poor choice the American people had in 2012.

 

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Why Developed Countries Deny God

I ran across a fascinating Pew survey today about the extent to which people in different parts of the world believe that belief in god is necessary to justify moral views. It is a rare thing to get such a comprehensive look at the philosophical and theological views of people all around the world. Even more interestingly, the Pew survey reveals important relationships between the kind of society we have and the way we think about moral philosophy.

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The US Health and Education Systems Have the Same Problem

There are two parts of the US economy that have spiraling out of control costs–the health and higher education systems. I propose that these systems experience runaway costs for the same fundamental reason, that they are “high demand markets”. High demand markets differ from other kinds of markets in an important way, and once we understand that health and education are markets of this variety, it becomes much easier to devise and understand the potential efficacy of policy solutions in both areas.

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