Liberal Talk Radio

Following up on this post from last week, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle highlights some efforts underway in CA to combat climate change via smart growth: In Oakland, Fruitvale Village demonstrates how infill development, where new land uses are created on sites previously used for another purpose such as manufacturing, can encourage economic [...]

Matt Yglesias questions the effectiveness of charitable donations to wealthy universities and arts and cultural institutions, and wonders if we need to restrict the tax exemption: To me, to figure this out we’d need to have some serious estimates about the impact of restricting charitable deductions. How much new tax revenue are we talking about? [...]

If my previous post didn’t convince you that the current stimulus packages being bandied about are ill-conceived, how about hearing it from a Nobel prize-winning economist? We should begin by strengthening the unemployment insurance system, because money received by the unemployed would be spent immediately. The federal government should also provide some assistance to states [...]

The ridiculous thing about the “stimulus” package that President Bush and the Congress is proposing is that it we have to borrow to pay for it. The idea of an $800 tax rebate is being bandied about. But since we’re already in debt, that cash is going on Uncle Sam’s credit card, which is all [...]

As someone who’s worked in the nonprofit trenches for sometime, I think this report is welcome news. For years now, funding organizations have been obsessed with project-based grants. They don’t want to fund general operating expenses, because they’re harder to measure. The result is that nonprofits have become obsessed with taking on, short, specific projects [...]

Apropos of our discussions of health care, Ezra Klein boils down the debate nicely: Liberals really do craft health care policy with the intent of broadly sharing costs. The idea is that everyone should be able to afford care and coverage. Conservatives are trying to move towards a system where we pay basically what we [...]

Apropos of our current podcast series on health care, The Washington Monthly currently has health care author Shannon Brownlee guest-blogging. Today she talks about how doctors are paid, and suggests we replace the current reimbursement model: All of which is just one more reason why fee-for-service has got to go. It’s a broken payment system, [...]

Federalism sucks when it comes to natural disasters (think Katrina, for example) and waging fourth-generation war against the nihilistic forces of international terrorism. Which is to say, I actually don’t see what’s so great about New York City’s aggressive counter-terrorism program: The cutting edge of the NYPD’s antiterrorism efforts, though, is David Cohen’s Intelligence Division. [...]

Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell is struggling to get support for his Schwarzenegger-like plan. Perhaps only Nixon can go to China, after all. A health care plan like this one (or California’s, or Massachusetts’) is going to be disruptive. So it seems like, instead of trying to sort of piss of everyone, you need to win [...]

Forgive me for saying so — after all, I don’t want to sound like some kind of yahoo — but when it comes to crafting immigration policy, shouldn’t “economic need” basically be the only factor a government should ever consider? Because the proposed point system seems like it should be uncontroversial: Ekaterina D. Atanasova, a [...]