The Hermitage 3.0 (Beta)

Kaiser Health on health care reform(Cohn)

Pictures are worth 1000 words (more – Cohn)

Another 1000 words (Yglesias)

5 Cost Controls in the health care bill (Klein)

And finally…a big summary chart

What he identifies here is nothing less than a Green Lantern theory of the presidency in which all domestic policy compromises are attributed to a lack of presidential will. … Rather than learning from, say, the stimulus vote that Obama faces severe constraints in the Senate, liberal GL proponents have created a narrative in which all failure and compromise is the result of a lack of presidential willpower.

Category	Increase	Decrease	No Change	Unsure
Education	67	6	23	4
Veterans Benefits	63	2	29	6
Health care	61	10	24	6
Medicare	53	6	37	4
Combating Crime	45	10	39	6
Help Unemployed	44	15	36	6
Environmental Protection	43	16	34	6
Energy	41	15	35	9
Military Defense	40	18	37	5
Scientific Research	39	14	40	7
Agriculture	35	12	41	13
Anti-Terrorism Defense	35	17	41	7
Foreign Aid	26	34	33	7
State Department	9	28	50	12

…a poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland which stated that 75% of Americans believes that the US spends “too much” on foreign aid, and 64% want foreign aid spending cut. Apparently a cavalier 11% of Americans think it’s fine to spend “too much” on foreign aid. Respondents were also asked, though, how big a share of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. The median answer was 15%; the average answer was 18%; the correct answer is less than 1%. A question about how much would be “too little” produced a median answer of 3%–more than three times the current level of foreign aid spending.

Yglesias (cynically) adds

What if Barack Obama and John Kerry stood shoulder-to-shoulder and announced that “in light of massive deficits and a poor job market here at home, we’re proposing to slash foreign aid to slightly less than three percent of the federal budget.” Available evidence suggests that the majority of the public thinks this would be a large cut and even thinks it might go too far in terms of cutting back on what we spend helping others. In reality, it would be a giant increase.

I think we should simply give up trying to redistribute income on the tax side and accept that it can only be done meaningfully on the spending side. This would require both the right and left to give up some of their pet ideas. The left would accept that the only purpose of the tax system is to raise revenue and the right would accept that a fairly extensive social welfare state is here to stay. In essence, conservatives would raise the revenue and liberals would spend it.

When you are around her you are constantly struck by her charisma, her vitality, her confidence. Everywhere she goes people tell her that she is prettier in person. It never ceases to amaze her staff. “People think it’s a compliment,” says one aide. “And then when they walk away, she’s like, ‘Well, what did they think before they met me?’ “

The “All Else Equal” Fallacy: Assuming that everything else is held constant, even when it’s not gonna be.

More to the point, the very existence of drunk driving as an option can put you in the situation where you and you car are 10 miles from home, you’re drunk, and the most convenient option is to get in the car and try to make it back.

…the conglomerate structure forced managers to think of their firms as a collection of financial assets, where the goal was to allocate capital efficiently, rather than as makers of specific products, where the goal was to maximize quality and long-term* market share.

Yglesias adds

What’s declined is not manufacturing, but manufacturing jobs: … our manufacturing has gotten much, much, much more efficient.
That doesn’t make communities devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs any less devastated, or change the fact that recent decades have seen wages for working class men stagnate or even decline.

What would be the citizenship of a baby born to astronauts on the way to or from Mars (or on the Moon)? Let’s make it extra-complicated and presume the parents are of different nationalities.

Suppose you’re sitting at your desk and viewing a real-time beach scene on a Webcam set up 2,000 miles away. And you’re watching somebody get assaulted. Do you call your own 911 number to report it, or what’s the next best thing to do?

Are there really special agents like ’s Jack Bauer working for the U.S. government? Just total badass muthas who can basically do anything? Or are Navy Seals and Army Rangers the toughest we’ve got?

What could humanity possibly be like, or possibly have evolved into, if we as an entire species never discovered and/or harnessed the power of fire?