Posts in: Politics
- On walking away: Rich folks edition
- The delinquency rate on investment homes where the original mortgage was more than $1 million is now 23 percent. For cheaper investment homes, it is about 10 percent. That’s from yesterday’s New York Times piece, Biggest Defaulters on Mortgages Are the Rich. Makes sense, actually. Rich people can avoid the fallout of foreclosure more easily [...] [10 Jul 2010]
- On open source, open data, and open government
- The open standards won because any kid could download the rules of the game, understand how they work, and make a contribution. — It taught us that we can make government heel. That’s a quote from Carl Malamud, of Public.Resource.org in Washington’s I.T. Guy in The American Prospect. Nancy Scola does a wonderful job of [...] [8 Jul 2010]
- On moderating American politics
- If the people who turn up voluntarily at the polls reinforce our worst political instincts toward conflict and obstruction, we could dilute their influence by roping absolutely everyone into the process. That’s how Miller-McCune sums up William Galston’s cure for extreme partisanship. Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Galston’s idea to mandate [...] [8 Jul 2010]
- On immigrants
- [T]he kind of people who choose to immigrate are really people who look a lot like the American ideals. They’re ambitious. They’re fairly self-confident. They’re risk-takers. They’re kind of strong, hearty people. They’re usually driven because they want to protect their families, which are on the borderline of really falling apart because there’s actually no [...] [23 May 2010]
- Race, Mexican-Americans, Hispanics, Texas and the first Latino president
- Historically, Mexican-Americans have generally been considered “white” in Texas; they served in white units of the segregated military, including the National Guard, and were allowed, during the Jim Crow years, to marry white (but not black) partners. In the early ’40s, the Texas Legislature even passed a “Caucasian Race Resolution,” which affirmed their status as [...] [7 May 2010]
- ‘Merica: Keepin’ It Klassy Since 1776
- All true, but mean-spirited small-mindedness is part of our tradition, which brings us to Benjamin Franklin. In 1753, he called the German immigrants flocking to Pennsylvania “generally the most stupid sort of their own nation” and warned: “They will soon outnumber us (and we) will not, in my opinion, be able to preserve our language, [...] [1 May 2010]
- Who are the real “babykillers”?
- It is conservatives who are notorious for their vicious and malicious opposition to social welfare programs, which they insist are “hand-outs.” But in my humble opinion, those who legislate into existence a permanent underclass are the real “babykillers.” If I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d almost think our well-meaning conservative brethren were invested in perpetuating [...] [23 Mar 2010]
- Canada has better healthcare
- Canada has shown it is possible to provide universal, publicly funded lifetime coverage, achieve better overall health outcomes and reduce health disparities while spending substantially less than the United States. From an economic standpoint, a system such as Canada’s makes sense. Canada’s universal health care and the Canadian social safety net combine efficiently to generate [...] [25 Feb 2010]
- Immigrant crime is B.S.
- The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong [...] [24 Feb 2010]
- On ‘Looting’
- [T]hose with guns and the force of law behind them, are too often more concerned for property than human life. In an emergency, people can, and do, die from those priorities. … Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone [...] [1 Feb 2010]