Well despite the problems with what DeMint is saying or at least how he says them, his point about immigration is right, namely that there are too many of them now and the answer is not to have way more of them. In that sense I think he’s on the right side of that issue.

Without STEM immigration “reform,” for example, the United States is on track to have over 1.5 STEM graduates in the next decade for every new STEM job. Who will benefit from immigration reform in the STEM industries? Basically, Indian expatriates and the owners of I.T. businesses, and definitely those who outsource jobs in India. The losers will be American STEM workers, more of whom will become underemeployed and unemployed under immigration “reform.”

Well that is the kind of situation I worry about, though more with people, say a single person making $25-30k but with no insurance, who suddenly is required to buy it. Do they end up having to pay $1,200 a year with only catastrophic coverage that doesn’t really keep them from having large medical bills that could put them into bankruptcy, or at least serious debt?

For someone making only say $15k a year, it sounded to me like such a person should get a lot of their premium paid for, but maybe it’s worse than I think. Right now my income is so low I will probably be eligible for Medicaid, so I guess I will be a “winner” in all this, but I was always against the individual mandate.

Moreover, none of the plan lowers costs, except for whatever benefit will accrue to the system from having fewer emergency room patients, but as Steven Brill pointed out in his article, that isn’t the main problem with healthcare costs.

It’s indicative of his whole administration: do some minor progressive thing, but mostly just relabel it, then expect to be praised as some sort of great reformer.

I’m not so sure she wanted to preserve apartheid exactly. I think it’s more like she had a healthy degree of skepticism of the ANC and for what might come after apartheid; and, sorry to say, such skepticism was well justified.

Well, most likely those coal mines were tapped out, so one way or another things were going to change in the coal mining communities, and probably not for the better; which isn’t to say she went about things in the right way, of course.

Considering what a disaster post-Apartheid South Africa turned out to be, I’d say Maggie had things just about right.

Amen on that.

“Stockton, in its bankruptcy filing, admits that the city has had little-to-no success in getting the pay of its public safety workers under control, and these expenses consume about 76 percent of the general fund.”

The above is from one of Long’s articles. In it she states that the median income for residents of Stockton is around $50,000, but the median income for city workers is over $90,000. There’s your problem, folks. It’s a system that isn’t working because city leaders make promises to workers in good times that can’t be kept in bad times, and which are not prudent in any event as well as unfair to taxpayers.

If anything, it means that the Scott Walker brand of reform didn’t go far enough, because it exempted the very workers who are the biggest abusers of the system. Sad and pathetic for sure. As Long put it, the big losers are the city residents who aren’t getting decent public safety because of these bloated compensation packages. Thanks for being honest enought to link to the articles.

I listened to the clip of her. Interesting. On the one hand she says things aren’t going to change until the South/Washington changes them by doing something drastic, on the other hand she says the North is going to have to do something fairly soon — and then the South will have to do something, too. She seemed to say that the South’s reaction will be mainly symbolic, but I guess I wonder about that. Others seem to be saying that the South will do something more. She agreed that the North’s leader has painted himself into a corner, and that it’s a problem now. The interviewer suggested that maybe in our fantasies the whole thing is a kind of kabuki theater that’s already been worked out between the North and South. She laughed at that one; I don’t think she believes it.

I don’t see why things can’t cool down in the immediate near term, but the stage is set for conflict if and when the North does another military action to provoke the South. I worry about a war, but I also worry about the status quo continuing, since that will only give the North more time to upgrade its military capability. The line from the doves up until now has been that the North is fragile and unsustainable a government, that it’s bound to collapse sooner rather than later. But, it hasn’t happened yet. What if 10 more years of the status quo go by? Then maybe the North will be able to make even more credible threats against its perceived enemies; which is why there’s an argument to be made that military action now, rather than later, would be the lesser of two evils.

Some people on a news program last night said that the South’s thinking now is that another military action from the North would result in military action from the South/U.S., against something important to the North. Then, I guess, the ball would be in the North’s court as to whether it would choose to have a full-out conflict.

I don’t know much about this particular case, but I’ve always been surprised that this doesn’t happen more often, given how routinely police, prosecutors, and judges abuse their authority, engage in conspiracies against citizens and basically shake people down for money and railroad people into jail and prison sentences.