Professor Warren, in her capacity as a specialist in bankruptcy law, uses actual facts & statistics to back up her Cassandra predictions. Despite the Burkean vapors of Brooks & Doubthat, she pins the decline of the American middle class not to our moral decay and piggish consumerist lusts, but to the “rational” decisions of powerful industries (and the governments that served those industries) to shove an ever-increasing percentage of public-utility social costs like health care and education onto individuals and families.

If you haven’t got the time or strength to watch the whole lecture, I recommend listening, starting at about 47:30, to what she has to say about bankruptcies in America, even before the Great ‘maybe if we insist it’s only a recession it won’t hurt so much’ Collapse of 2008. Why do I suspect that 85% of middle-class bankrupts are no longer able/willing to hide the “stigma” from even their closest friends and family members?

Airports are good for something.

Peace

“After months of collaboration on President Obama’s attempt to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, the insurance industry plans to strike out against the effort on Monday with a report warning that the typical family premium in 2019 could cost $4,000 more than projected.”

Well what a big surprise that is ..not.

This report has been dubbed at least partially questionable by Johnathan Gruber. Read ( New Paper Predicts Lower Premiums, At Least for Some). He finds some of the claims implausible.

There is enough truth in it to see that those in the middle are screwed. Damned if we do and double damned if we don’t. Enough in this report to make me, should be all of us, want to bite the very industry who commissioned the report.

We need to Nationalize this system of health care, remove the insurance industry from it altogether, and have them redirect their greed toward those who actually have the extra thousands of dollars a year to spend on exorbitant life insurance policies, private room, and spa coverage. like they did in Switzerland. Whatever the various public options out there now, they stink. “The Public Option”, or the alternatives out there currently, are messy jokes being played on us.

The economists, bless their little eggheads, all having insurance, tend to look at things from aloft, as if they are studying it under a microscope. The economy, and by that health care, merely a specimen they have no real vested interest in. Most of the economist we read rarely apply their theories in real life, and remember how badly they failed us over the last ten years.

Go with your Gut.

I hate not being able to do my banking on a day off.

Columbus Day pfffft. He did unleash a future of brutal Spanish conquistadors on the Caribbean though.

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

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peace

Peace

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