jon thornton is the bee's knees!

So, to recap: Pearson could receive as much as $132 million in incentives for deciding to move half its Upper Saddle River jobs to Manhattan and the other half to Hoboken. But the net gain in jobs for the New York metropolitan area would be close to zero. And still, officials on both sides of the Hudson River seemed quite pleased with the deals they had struck.

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California has spent approximately $4 billion on capital punishment since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978. In that time, the state has executed 13 people.

"Republican Gov. Bill Haslam [who signed the bill] told reporters earlier this week that he wasn't familiar with the details of the legislation, but..." »

Sigh.

The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.

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—	Alexis de Tocqueville

Why might widening inequality lead to a banking crisis? The Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz’s theory is that “growing inequality in most countries of the world has meant that money has gone from those who would spend it to those who are so well off that, try as they might, they can’t spend it all.” This “flood of liquidity” then “contributed to the reckless leverage and risk-taking that underlay this crisis,” he asserts.

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Bingo!

The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us: “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.

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—	Clay Shirky No governments have come forth and said that WikiLeaks has broken a specific law, and yet their rights to free speech are being stripped as if they had committed a crime. Scary stuff.

Why Are 25 Hedge Fund Managers Worth 658,000 Teachers? »

Jay Parkinson MD: What should health insurance reform look like? »

“The business model you’ve created to sap our country dry for the past 50 years is unsustainable. So your business model has 5 years left. Over the next five years, the US government is offering the largest X-Prize in the history of the world. We’re going to give the companies who can form an innovative alliance and manage the health of a population of 5 million people a total of $500 billion cash.”

Yes please!

The video makes a good point, and then completely destroys its own argument with the closing line:

…turn your ire on a goverment that is vast and growing, and helps or hinders corperation based on politcal lobbying rather than marketplace forces.

So the best way to fight a government that is beholden to special interests is to allow those groups to spend more on behalf of candidates?

The limitations on political advertising are not unique. Other forms of advertising are currently censored in the name of the public good - when’s the last time you saw a cigarette ad on TV? Corporations and other organizations don’t have the right to vote, so it’s a stretch to frame this as a free speech/civil rights issue.

Conventional wisdom holds that money wins elections, with campaign donors essentially voting with their dollars. Until that changes, only those who actually have the right to vote should be able to vote with their dollars.

Listening to George Bush made me want to drink, so in college I developed a tradition of playing a State of the Union drinking game. Looking forward to see how the game is with a new president.

On my inablity to write concisely about health care reform

The brewhaha over the Massachusetts Senate election has got me thinking about health care reform again. I have a blog now so I figure I should exercise my right to say something inflammatory on the internet.

However, my little Tumblr post was turning into an Infinite Jest-style rant, so you’ll have to settle for this:

(In the context of entitlements from the goverment:) Aside from a social security number and a birth certificate, what’s the difference between between a poor American and an illegal immigrant? Neither is providing tax revenue.