It’s an awful word, but I couldn’t resist using it. In any case, if you have any interest at all in the upcoming presidential election, you should read this article on what Obama’s economic priorities are. Obama has been characterized as both a conservative and a socialist, and the article attempts to explain [...]

Gay marriage is supposed to be a threat to the modern family, but I’ve never known a heterosexual couple get married or divorced because of the actions of a homosexual neighbor.
Praying in schools is supposed to be a family issue, but I’ve never known a couple who got divorced because their child’s teacher couldn’t lead [...]

John McCain gave us the details of his healthcare plan yesterday. (You can find details here or here.) There’s more to like here than I would have thought–although it’s far from a good plan. Here are the details:

I’ve had some intermittent foot pain over the last few months, and so I went and saw a podiatrist this morning. The doctor poked and prodded my feet for a bit; he watched me stand, walk, and sit; he had me describe what kinds of exercise I do; he talked to me about my [...]

I had thought a McCain presidency would be bad. Until today, I had hoped that it would be a significant improvement over the Bush Administration. And then, in in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University, McCain released his economic plan. Here are his proposals, minus the stump speech, along with my commentary:

Check out this really fascinating piece on nytimes.com. We’ve all heard the candidates reference people that they’ve met on the campaign trail and relate their stories of triumph and tragedy. Sometimes, however, those stories come back to bite the candidates, as happened to Hillary Clinton recently. The story she told was a [...]

Free Market Economics Assumption #2: A plethora of well-informed consumers.
There are two basic ways that this assumption can be violated in the real world. Most obviously, there can be too few buyers. (At the extreme, if there is only one buyer, this is called a monopsony.) On the one hand, this gives [...]

Unemployment is up. Inflation is rising faster than wages. The dollar is historically week. Interest rates are already low, and can’t be lowered too much further. Personal savings rates are extremely low, while consumer debt is very high–which mean that a short-term boost to consumer spending is unlikely (and unwise). [...]

So far as I can tell, there is absolutely no evidence that vaccines have any link to autism in children. The CDC has issued a report reviewing the evidence and has found no connection between MMR vaccines and autism. A similar report was issued by the Institute of Medicine, rejecting any [...]

President Bush vetoed the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and he cited two reasons for doing so.  First, he objected to the overall cost of the expansion and the tax increase that is needed to pay for it (in this case, a tax on cigarettes).  That’s fine, I guess, although complaining [...]