A heated argument is going on about the right health insurance model between those those who believe in a public option and those who believe in single payer.

Or perhaps I should say between those who are willing to take what they can get -- a public option -- and...

Lying about health care -- indeed, fear-mongering about health care -- has ramped up as insurance companies attempt to keep their profits. Those profits are created by a system where the U.S. spends 5 percent more of its economy on health care in exchange for the worst results of any...

Chris at Americablog wonders why some Senate Democrats are caving on healthcare when 72% want a public option and 85% think the system needs to be fundamentally changed. He thinks it's because such Dems are spineless. That fundamentally misunderstands the situation. To vote against something that 72% of the...

The Washington Post hits on how much it costs to be poor -- the way that the poor are forced to pay more, not less, for virtually everything; if not in money, then in time.

A friend of mine put it most simply. Poor people spend time to save...

The Senate just stopped limits on credit card rates. Sometimes it takes a socialist to say the obvious:

"When banks are charging 30 percent interest rates, they are not making credit available," said Mr. Sanders, who noted credit unions are limited to 15 percent. "They are engaged in loan-sharking."

It being mother's day, and the entire world conspiring to tell me about it, over and over again, I've been thinking a bit about my mum. She died 3 years ago of cancer. I spent her last two weeks by her bed, and she died the night I told her...

Martin Wolf, one of the best economics commenters, notes that the widespread idea that central banks, over the past 30 years, had found the holy grail of policy in inflation targeting, was clearly wrong. That's good as far as it goes, and he's right. But it's worth taking...

Walk with me a while and imagine you are mad. Crazy. Insane. It's an interesting sort of insanity-you see the world as something other than it is. You are dead convinced that people are out to get you, but these people have almost no means to harm you and fear...

Chrysler went into bankruptcy because creditors wouldn't agree to be wiped out. They may believe that they will do better in front of a bankruptcy court, or some of them may have credit default swaps (CDSs) and have wanted Chrysler to go under so they would be paid off...

Benazir Bhutto's niece, Fatima Bhutto, lays out the reasons for decline as succinctly as anyone I've read:

The Taliban and their ilk, on the other hand, are able to seat themselves in towns and villages across Pakistan without much difficulty largely because they do not come empty-handed. In a...

Overview

More panopticon news raises the specter of not having any privacy left. First, America follows in the Brits' footsteps by keeping DNA on file from people who were arrested but not convicted.

Next for Britain is:

1) The mobile calls, emails and website visits of every person in...

Peter Morici points out something which should be obvious:

Monday afternoon, Goldman Sachs reported much larger than expected first quarter profits, and this comes on the heels of Wells Fargo's strong earnings reported last week.

No one should be surprised.

The Federal Reserve has provided the banks with lots...

Dave Johnson's got an excellent piece up in which he points out that laughing at the right is stupid. They're doing now exactly what they did to Clinton in the 90's, and it worked then.

In fact they're back to being as crazy and paranoid as they were...

I've been saying for years that the two pieces on the game board that matter to those who want a Caliphate are Pakistan, because of its nukes, and Saudi Arabia because of its oil. The realpolitik problem with the Afghani war is that it's destabilizing Pakistan so much -- Afghanistan...

The poor will always be with us, or at least as long as Republicans are also with us:

Virginia's Republican-run House of Delegates rejected a proposed expansion of unemployment benefits Wednesday, along with $125 million in federal stimulus cash to pay for it.

On a...

Looks like the Iraqi government is moving against the Awakening Councils in Iraq. The councils, as you may recall, were the Sunnis (many of them ex-insurgents) whom the Americans paid and armed to fight al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and to impose some sort of rough peace on their areas. They...

A friend recently gave me what is apparently a classic book on improvisational theater, called Impro, by Keith Johnston. The entire book is remarkable, and worth reading for anyone, not just those in the theater, but my favorite passage is the one below:

I once had a close rapport with...

Elizabeth Warren's the chief watchdog for the 700 billion TARP fund. Unfortunately, she has no real power, but it's still nice to see a government official say not just some of the right things, but almost all of the right things. Talk of how the US is following Japan's path...

I'm just not sure what, in terms of significance:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.