While OpEdge is on a two-week hiatus, we are running some of the more evergreen columns from past years. This blog entry originally appeared on March 19, 2010. Most of the first round of hand-ringing about the Texas Board of Education’s decision to infuse inaccuracies in social science textbooks is over. I’ve noticed a very […]
While OpEdge is on a two-week hiatus, we are running some of the more evergreen columns from past years. This blog entry originally appeared November 10, 2009. Whenever Congress talks of raising taxes on the wealthy, as in the current House bill on healthcare reform, people complain that it isn’t fair for the government to […]
Read More… from OpEdge Redux: Praise and Blame is Harder to Assess than You Think
Let’s face it, when we remove the complex financial structuring, the obfuscating economic theory and the strident political posturing and just look at the flow of money, the Greek debt crisis reduces to one kettle of rich folk owing money to another kettle of rich folk. Kettle, by the way, is the name for a […]
Read More… from A modest proposal to end the Greek debt crisis: Let the rich pay the rich
I have been scratching my head as to why the mainstream news media has seemed to lionize George Mason professor Tyler Cowen over the past few years. It seems that everywhere you turn—Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsweek, New Republic—you can see an article by Cowen. Stupid me, I just wasn’t digging deep enough […]
Read More… from Mainstream media help to establish Koch-financed professor as an economic guru
If there’s a false argument to be made in support of corporate interests, Professor Tyler Cowen of George Mason University is sure to make it. Cowen specializes in spinning dispassionate sounding short articles that sell economic nonsense in the better mainstream media, such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs. A […]
Read More… from George Mason professor tries to tell us that the Uber is good for workers
Conservative Republicans must privately be rejoicing that the U.S. Supreme Court 1) affirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry and 2) declared it constitutional for the federal government to subsidize poor individuals and families who buy health insurance on the federal exchange because the state in which they live doesn’t have an exchange. Let’s […]
Don’t get me wrong. I have been opposed to the flying of the Confederate flag for decades. I immediately become disgusted, make that physically revulsed, when I see the blue X with white stars across a field of red—the central motif of the flag of the American slave republic—branding belt buckles, tee-shirts, banners, jackets, bandstands, […]
Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul wants to create a flat tax of 14.5% that he says will reduce government revenues by trillions of dollars, but magically lead to greater tax revenues in the future fueled by economic growth. His plan, which he outlined in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that has been reprinted on […]
Read More… from Rand Paul’s flat tax proposal sounds as dubious as the flat earth theory
Politicians, primarily Democrats, and cable news commentators have tried to look beyond the individual pathology of Dylann Roof to explore root social causes for his monstrous gunning down of nine African-Americans at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Some say a lack of gun control laws is the culprit, others say racism, while […]
Read More… from Racism or guns in Charleston Church shooting: which played a bigger role?
As a Jew, I come to the current controversies over what is a woman and what is an African-American or black with a special perspective. The definition of what is a Jew has haunted the Jewish religion, culture, race and/or nation for millennia. Internally, Jewish courts have long enforced the concept that religious identification comes […]