TIME: Fareed Zakaria The Case for Making It in the USA

In theory, I am deeply skeptical of government industrial policy. Government doesn’t know how to pick winners and losers, it will make mistakes, and the process will get politicized. All this is true. And yet when I look at China and South Korea and also Germany and Japan, I see governments playing a crucial role. They do make mistakes— their versions of Solyndra— but they seem to view them the way venture capitalists would. Their role is to seed many companies, only a few of which will succeed. Once these companies are identified, government helps them compete against big U.S. multi nationals. There used to be a joke about Marxist economists who would say of a deviation from pure communist economics: “It might work in practice, comrade, but it doesn’t work in theory.” That’s what industrial policy looks like these days. The theory doesn’t make sense, but it’s hard to argue with the result.










TIME: Fareed Zakaria

The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care - NYTimes.com

Why does an appendectomy in Germany cost roughly a quarter what it costs in the United States? Or an M.R.I. scan cost less than a third as much, on average, in Canada?



The Money Traps in U.S. Health Care - NYTimes.com

The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker

In the past four decades, the two political parties have become more internally homogeneous and ideologically distant. In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote longingly about American politics in the mid-twentieth century, when both parties had liberal and conservative wings that allowed centrist coalitions to form. Today, almost all liberals are Democrats and almost all conservatives are Republicans. In Washington, the center has virtually vanished. According to the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have devised a widely used system to measure the ideology of members of Congress, when Obama took office there was no ideological overlap between the two parties. In the House, the most conservative Democrat, Bobby Bright, of Alabama, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Joseph Cao, of Louisiana. The same was true in the Senate, where the most conservative Democrat, Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Olympia Snowe, of Maine. According to Poole and Rosenthal’s data, both the House and the Senate are more polarized today than at any time since the eighteen-nineties.



The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President : The New Yorker

Fact check: Factual flubs in GOP's Florida debate – USATODAY.com

Fact check: Factual flubs in GOP's Florida debate – USATODAY.com

5 Founding Fathers Whose Skepticism About Christianity Would Make Them Unelectable Today

5 Founding Fathers Whose Skepticism About Christianity Would Make Them Unelectable Today

Opinion: Crazy never wins GOP sweepstakes - Joe Scarborough - POLITICO.com

Crazy never wins GOP sweepstakes

You heard right, my Upper West Side friend. Crazy. Never. Wins.

Despite the crop of nutty right-wing candidates that sprout up in GOP presidential fields every four years, despite the gasps and growls that regularly rise from Manhattan cocktail parties aimed at extremists who are hijacking the Republican Party (in ways that past GOP extremists would never have dreamed of hijacking the party), despite the cries from right-wing radio hosts predicting the rise of Ronald Reagan’s ghost and the nomination of an unelectable candidate, in the end this political chatter always proves to be sound and fury signifying nothing.



Opinion: Crazy never wins GOP sweepstakes - Joe Scarborough - POLITICO.com

FactChecking Health Insurance Premiums

FactChecking Health Insurance Premiums