Fish in Space

It seems that the popular conservative apologetic today is to claim that conservatives never introduced or supported mandatory health insurance. Even a casual browse through the public record reveals that claim to be false, but the claim continues to get repeated apparently in hopes of replicating the Big Lie . So for the record (mostly for my own benefit) here's what's on the public record with regard to the GOP's health insurance mandate. First there's the 1993 GOP counter-proposal to "Hillarycare" taken from the proposal written by the Heritage Foundation . The idea was to force people to join the insurance pool to lower the overall risk just like they do with mandatory auto insurance. Then there's Romneycare , the Massachusetts health care reform law that the Heritage Foundation claimed credit for helping build based off their original health insurance mandate. Romney and other conservatives continued to hail the Massachusetts law as a model for ...

A comment on reddit prompted me to write the following. I think it stands well enough without context, but I can provide it if you're really interested. I think there are a lot of better alternatives to "start your own business and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." One of them is to recognize that no one operates in a vacuum, and providing support for our least fortunate ought to be our top priority rather than indulging in some fantasy about "tough love." Another would be abandoning our fetish for Puritan work ethics in a society where scarcity is a matter of public policy rather than necessity. If we started supporting people for following their passions even when those passions aren't lucrative, we might see some surprising results. One of the reasons it's easier to start your own business in most European countries than it is in the US is because the consequences for failure aren't as dire. They don't have to worry about losing their...

It's not the mushroom cloud that deficit hawks are claiming it to be. We were promised an economic collapse if we passed the stimulus. It didn't happen. We were told that the bond market would punish us for our profligate spending. It never happened. We were told that all sorts of horrible things would happen if we didn't reign in our spending now! Now! Now! But none of them happened. On the flip side, we were told that our recovery would be stalled if we started cutting our spending during a market contraction. That happened. We were warned of a "lost decade" similar to what Japan experienced if we followed Japan's economic policy during their market contraction. That's happening now. We were warned that high unemployment was going to become the new normal, and that wages would be driven down with the effect of further decreasing demand and cooling the economy. That's also happening now. Unemployment is fal...