Economic Mobility
- Getting Ahead or Losing Ground: Economic Mobility in America – Brookings Institution
- Why U.S. economic mobility is so low, in one chart – The Washington Post
- Poor Students With Poorly Educated Parents More Disadvantaged In U.S. Than Other Countries
Politics
- Bill Clinton on Obama: ‘I Think He’ll Be Re-elected’ | PBS NewsHour | Dec. 2, 2011 | PBS
I think — my sense was that he was — as you see from the book, I agree with the general thrust of his polices. And I think, particularly in the energy area, he’s done a very good job. My sense was that the partisan political climate in Washington was such that the only people listening to either side were people that already agreed with them.
And so what I wanted to do was say, look at the last 30 years. Look what our competitors are doing. There is no example on the planet of a successful economy with broadly shared prosperity and a shrinking, weak government. You can have a small, lean government. But they’re all strong. They’re all working in partnership. What works are these partnerships, these networks.
Watch Bill Clinton on Obama: ‘I Think He’ll Be Re-elected’ on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.
- Party of no ready to say yes – Jake Sherman – POLITICO.com
- Romney and Huntsman vs. the Rest | FrumForum
- David Frum: It’s Romney, Huntsman, or Bust
- Denielle Sachs: There Is a Rhino in My Bed!
- Flaws in Rasmussen Methodology: Is Gingrich Really in the Lead? | Decoded Science
- Rasmussen Poll Overestimated Republican Vote
Nate Silver‘s analysis confirmed what was already widely thought:
Rasmussen polls quite consistently turned out to overstate the standing of Republicans tonight. Of the roughly 100 polls released by Rasmussen or its subsidiary Pulse Opinion Research in the final 21 days of the campaign, roughly 70 to 75 percent overestimated the performance of Republican candidates, and on average they were biased against Democrats by 3 to 4 points.
Economics & The Economy
- GOP wants to repeal Dodd-Frank: instead they should listen to Nassim Taleb
- And after reading that article there I followed it back to it original source here: ataxingmatter: GOP wants to repeal Dodd-Frank: instead they should listen to Nassim Taleb and found another interesting blog to add to my Google Reader collection: ataxingmatter
- Repealing Dodd-Frank Would Put the Economy in Danger | Debate Club | US News Opinion
- And of course NewsMax reports that Gingrich, Bachmann Press to Repeal Dodd-Frank, why am I not surprised at all by that?
Frank Luntz Coaches Republicans on How to Couch Their Speech
- How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street | The Ticket – Yahoo! News
- Frank Luntz Afraid Of Occupy Movement, But Ed Schultz Not Afraid Of Luntz | Mediaite
- GOP pollster Frank Luntz: Taxing the rich is winning issue for Dems – The Plum Line – The Washington Post
- GOP’s Frank Luntz: The first rule of capitalism is you do not talk about capitalism | 89.3 KPCC
About the Right-Wing Pundit Thomas Sowell
- Applied Rationality: Thomas Sowell, what a caricature
…It’s not surprising that reasonable people come to different conclusions. By writing about and discussing different issues, there is the hope that one’s logic or information base might be improved. Similarly, there’s often a lot to be gained from reading and carefully considering analyses that are different from your own.
As I wrote, differences in outcomes and opinions can come from differences in underlying values, but they can also come from lots of other things. It seems worthwhile to explore all of these possibilities when evaluating someone’s opinion. Put another way, we don’t gain much by starting with the assumption that anyone who disagrees with us is a moral or intellectual defective.
Sadly, this does seem to be the starting point of Thomas Sowell (a one-time economist no less) and many conservative columnists. Rather than engage in any logical debate or any hard reasoning, Sowell takes the easy route of ascribing fundamental character flaws to people with different opinions…
- The Morally Superior Thomas Sowell on Progressives and Economics | Angry Bear – Financial and Economic Commentary
- Intellectuals, Beware Thomas Sowell