on stuff

The Bonddad Blog: Macroeconomics is a rancid, putrefying pseudoscience:

Put more simply: we avoided Great Depression 2.0 in 2009 because we remember the history of the Great Depression. But we peered into the abyss because we forgot the 1920's and repeated in more modern form almost all that decade's vices. We do have lots of data from the 1920's - but nobody in power believed it was relevant any more.

Newt, May 15, 2011 Meet the Press | TPMDC:

I've said consistently we ought to have some requirement that you either have health insurance or you post a bond or in some way you indicate you're going to be held accountable

Newt, May 16, 2011 Youtube | TPMDC:

I am for the repeal of Obamacare and I am against any effort to impose a federal mandate on anyone because it is fundamentally wrong and I believe unconstitutional

Hyperbole (and Progressive Bloggers) Fail Me: The End of Public Higher Education « zunguzungu:

At a certain point, public universities will have ceased to exist. We will only have a variety of private universities, some of which will be subsidized a little bit by tax-payers. Depending on where you draw the line, the University of California might already be at that point — student tuition now makes up a larger portion of the UC’s budget than state funding — but the long-term trend is undeniable: since 2004, the amount of money the UC has gotten from the state of California has been cut in half, and has continued to decline, every year, with utter and complete reliability. And where the UC and CSU systems are now, every other public university will soon follow. This is not a trend that’s going to end tomorrow. This is a trend that ends with the end of public universities. It just depends on where you decide to draw the line.

The Koch Brothers and the End of State Universities | Informed Comment:

This abandonment of their responsibilities to higher education on the part of the states hurts students in the first instance. Institutions that used to be affordable to students from working and lower middle class backgrounds are now increasingly out of reach for them. State universities are becoming the new Ivies, a good bargain still for the upper middle class and the wealthy, but a distant dream for the daughter or son of a worker in a fast food restaurant.

on colleges (pt 2)

Hyperbole (and Progressive Bloggers) Fail Me: The End of Public Higher Education « zunguzungu:

we all need to open our eyes to the fundamental transformation of American society that it represents. The generation before Drum’s made it possible to get an excellent education even if you couldn’t afford to pay the $9,000 that Stanford charged in 1981. Kevin Drum’s generation enjoyed the benefits of that system and then they dismantled it. My generation is muddling through by going deep into debt. The next generation will not.