Consider also that the 10 largest cities in the U.S. produce the same amount of economic output ($4,300 billion) annually as Japan, and the top 20 largest U.S. cities produce the same output ($6,000 billion) as the economies of U.K., France and Canada combined.
Mark Perry has a chart of those 20 cities and the countries with similar GDPs in the first part of a series on America’s ridiculously large economy. Check out parts two and three as well.
Hugh Hewitt is having a contest involving the best use of the Christmas theme in a Presidential ad.
Here is my submission:
A couple of comments. First, I know the guy who is “playing” Barack Obama looks nothing like Barack Obama. This is an amateur ad for a reason. (Mostly that I’m not getting a huge consulting fee, of course.) Second, the views expressed in the song are my own only and not that of my friends who agreed to sing the song.
Sometimes a flat tax just argues for itself:
The Internal Revenue Service is looking hard at delaying the start of its filing season, set to kick off on Jan. 14, if Congress fails to pass legislation in the next two weeks. At issue is how to handle what could be a dramatic increase in the number of people facing a higher alternative minimum tax.
If there is a delay and it extends into mid-February, it would slow nearly 32 million refunds worth a total of about $87 billion, the IRS Oversight Board predicts.
Luckily, the IRS is very clear about its feelings when it comes to people paying debts late. So all those people who have delayed refunds can expect to be payed penalties and interest… right?
Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.The cost of providing healthcare and other government services to illegal immigrants looms large in the national debate over immigration.In Los Angeles County, much of the focus of that debate has been on hospital emergency rooms. Ten have closed in the last five years, citing losses from treating the uninsured, and those that remain open are notorious for backlogs.
By federal law, hospitals must treat every emergency, regardless of a person’s insurance — or immigration — status. Illegal immigrants, who often work at jobs that don’t offer health insurance, are commonly seen as driving both the closures and the crowding.
But the study found that while illegal immigrants are indeed less likely to be insured, they are also less likely to visit a doctor, clinic or emergency room.
Story here. Overestimating the costs of illegal immigration is pretty easy to do. Even pro-immigration types can succumb to inaccurate biases.
I know this news that’s about a week old, which in this day and age is just about ancient history, but I have yet to really see much that was resolved by the recent break-through in stem cell research. This NRO article sees this as a vindication of pursuing “ethical science,” and the title of this NY Times article seems to indicate that they think the “stem cell war” is reaching its conclusion. But I’m not convinced.
Oh, of course, the particular issue seems to be resolved–I doubt there will be many people out there campaigning or picketing in order to continue embryonic stem cell research. Nevertheless, the real issues that made the question of embryonic stem cell research a heated debate are not resolved.
Let’s face it folks–it’s been nine years since this debate got kicked off. That’s nine years in which stem cell research was hampered in some way, shape, or form. Sure, the editors at NRO can say that this break through shows why we can stick to our moral guns while still practicing science, but what about all the research that could have already been accomplished? What about those people who were unable to reap the potential benefits because the pro-lifers got a burr up our butts about a couple-day-old embryos? Don’t get me wrong–I think the ban on embryonic stem cell research was the right call to make, but simply because we can do stem cell research without having to destroy embryos right now does not automatically mean that the ban was therefore the right ethical or moral decision back then. There are legit ethical questions that cut both ways, and in order to have any real resolution to these issues, we’ve gotta address more fundamental questions, such as Which set ethics are right? and Why are the others wrong?
Just for the record, I don’t think you can ultimately do this without talking about who God is, and what he has revealed to us about himself. I’m not saying that to try and make this merely a religious issue–it’s just to say that if we want to find any answers that are worth their salt, I don’t think we can ignore the religious, theological, or philosophical issues involved.
…but this is just ridiculous. He dropped his drivers-licences-for-illegal-immigrants plan today, saying:
“I’ve concluded that New York state cannot conduct this program on its own…It does not take a stethoscope to hear the pulse of New Yorkers on this topic.”
Most governors, realizing their constituents were against them, would back down. But not Eliot Spitzer. No, he went to Capitol Hill, hoping to get Congress to impose something like this on the whole country–not much hope for federalism in the US when a governor, in order to defy his own constituents, asks Congress to overstep its authority. This is a clever way for Spitzer to avoid paying the political price for his position, while still posturing for the Hispanic vote and the unions. But I’d expect nothing less from Eliot “180 on the LSAT” Spitzer, who, as Attorney General, brilliantly usurped legislative power to cast himself as a defender of consumers. Now he’s abusing his position as governor, asking the feds to usurp state power in order to cast himself as a defender of immigrants. I’m sure he hopes he can ride this issue into the Senate, just like he rode his sketchy lawsuits into the State Executive Mansion.
Earlier today a Stanford student wrote this of Republican Candidate Ron Paul in The Stanford Daily. The obligatory wave of Paul supporters rushed in to leave their detraction’s in the comments listed below the article.
Some of the comments:
“Perhaps if you spent as much time contemplating Paul’s stands on the issues as you do cooking up flavorful ad hominem attacks (Or not so flavorful– “Paul is insane”) you might have found some common ground with him. ”
“I thought Stanford is also a “Research Institution,” no?”
There is something dissapointing about a student at Stanford (ranked 4th in the nation) that would publish this:
“Paul’s views are a contradictory hodgepodge of conservative and libertarian positions. He opposed the Iraq War but supported Afghanistan. He’s strongly pro-life but vaguely pro-gay-marriage.”
It may be particularly disappointing to the Federalist or Constitutionalists to hear an educated person decry Paul’s efforts to protect the life of the unborn while refusing to use federal power to force a definition of marriage on the states. What’s worse is the implication that, if Paul opposes gay-marriage in his private judgment, he must seek to abuse the power of the president to force that judgement on others. It is a threat to the ”institutions and values that have brought the United States to where it is today” when even the educated see nothing wrong with such a fallacious assumption.
Perhaps Stu will come around. Consider this comment: “Then again, he is graduating in 2009, he still has a lot of growing up to do.”
It only took six years, nine months, 24 days, and a change in Congressional power, but Bush finally vetoed his first appropriations measure yesterday. And he did it to be fiscally responsible:
“Their majority was elected on a pledge of fiscal responsibility, but so far it’s acting like a teenager with a new credit card,” the president said…
[…]
Bush criticized Democrats for approving a bill that exceeded his budget request for the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education departments by $10 billion.
Good criticisms, but a little weak coming from Bush:
Since 2001, Bush signed at least 50 spending bills passed by Republicans that exceeded his budget requests, according to House Appropriations Committee records. He did not veto a single one.
Nor did he veto any bills to protest the explosion of earmarks under Republican Congresses. (Bush has vetoed only six bills, the fewest by any president since James A. Garfield, who was shot in 1881 after four months in office and died weeks later.)
Overheard at the Pittsburgh airport, just past the security checkpoint:
“Dude, if the terrorists hate me for my freedoms, I think they officially won when that cranky b**** took my toothpaste.”