Think Tank West

Getting named New York’s junior senator apparently requires pandering to those who support Israel’s right wing. From Nick Confessore’s written interview with Caroline Kennedy (and her staff) in the New York Times: Q. Do you believe that an undivided Jerusalem must be the national capital of the State of Israel? A. Yes, Caroline believes that [...]

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The Church of Universal Coverage is telling us that national health insurance will stimulate economic growth. Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) says universal health insurance coverage is the key to a healthy economy. MIT economist Jonathan Gruber says “health care reform is good for our economy.” Business Week columnist Chris Farrell writes, “Universal [...]

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Today’s The USA Today tells the story of “Phyllis Smith, a 60-year-old uninsured seamstress in Yantis, Texas, [who] goes without medications for high blood pressure and diabetes because she can’t afford a visit to her doctor to get her prescriptions refilled.”  The article quotes Smith: With the condition this world is in right now, [Barack [...]

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After so many PG-13 stories about health care reform and a new administration that everybody’s really hoping makes it happen, the press is starting to write rated-R stories about the actual chances for comprehensive reform. Today, I was quoted in a couple of the R-rated stories. Investor’s Business Daily reports on two Congressional Budget Office [...]

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The latest issue of The Economist praises president elect Obama’s pick of Arne Duncan to lead the department of education. In particular, it predicts that “Mr Duncan may restore the spirit of co-operation that helped pass NCLB in 2001.” But bi-partisanship is not intrinsically desirable. It is only good when it results in good policies. NCLB [...]

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More on that Rosen piece in the New Republic on the Department of Homeland Security (a name we should change, by the way) that Dave Rittgers just wrote about.  As Rosen notes, a society that is rational about danger, in the sense of equal attention to risks of equal magnitude, would not have created a Department of Homeland [...]

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Jeffrey Rosen has an article up at The New Republic criticizing the Department of Homeland Security as a bipartisan effort to be seen doing something about terrorism.  Unfortunately, that something fails any rational cost-benefit analysis:  “Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: that the Department of Homeland Security was a [...]

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The Congressional Budget Office released two much-anticipated reports on health care today.  I’m just on the first page of the first report and already I found this gem: By themselves, premium subsidies or mandates to obtain health insurance would not achieve universal coverage. Universal coverage: crescit eundo.

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A lot more than we used to think … or so we are told.  Turns out that the economists who study this matter are not so convinced.  Those interested in what the most recent literature review has to say on this topic should go here: http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9850.  Short answer: If you believe the scientific narrative offered [...]

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Just when you’re ready to feel sorry about the terrible treament colleges and their students receive at the hands of cheapskate legislators and economic downturns, you see the pampering they’re receiving from other hands. It almost makes you not want to send them your hard-earned cash.

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