Archive for May, 2012

Open Mic May 25

19
12 months ago
by Logarchism.com in

Another week of loss. Robin Gibb passed away, leav­ing us with one Bee Gee. An earth­quake in Italy destroyed thousand-​​year-​​old build­ings. Oh…and a lot of peo­ple lost money on Face­book stock, lead­ing to numer­ous lawsuits.

And it’s Fri­day. Your day. What’s on your mind?

Don’t see an arti­cle on a par­tic­u­lar topic, but want to talk about it some­where? This is Open Mic. Talk about what­ever you want, but stay respectful.

We cre­ate a new Open Mic every week to give a clean slate, but feel free to add to this topic at any time.

Senate Watch: May 24

20
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

This install­ment of Sen­ate Watch, I’ve put more into the DW-​​NOMINATE analy­sis of the can­di­dates. More on that after the jump. First, here is the cur­rent map:

Now for the details. (more…)

Supreme Court Watch: Astrue v. Capato, My DNA, and Your DNA

12
1 year ago
by Monotreme in

Jus­tice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In March, we pre­viewed Astrue v. Cap­ato, in which Karen Cap­ato attempted to col­lect Social Secu­rity survivor’s ben­e­fits for twins con­ceived after the death of the father, based on the father’s income.

The court ruled unan­i­mously that no good def­i­n­i­tion of a sur­viv­ing child exists, given tech­no­log­i­cal changes which came into effect since Con­gress passed the orig­i­nal Act. How­ever, writ­ing for the Court, Jus­tice Ruth Bader Gins­burg says the Social Secu­rity Administration’s inter­pre­ta­tion of what is a “child”, while not per­fect, makes more sense and is more con­sis­tent with the Act than Karen Capato’s.

Kris­tine Knaplund, over at SCO­TUS­blog, gives this plain Eng­lish analy­sis of the Court’s decision:

The United States Supreme Court decided unan­i­mously that a child con­ceived and born after a parent’s death can­not rely solely on a genetic con­nec­tion to the deceased par­ent in order to qual­ify for Social Secu­rity sur­vivors ben­e­fits.  Sid­ing with the Social Secu­rity Administration’s inter­pre­ta­tion of the law, the Court held that all chil­dren, includ­ing those born via assisted repro­duc­tion tech­nol­ogy,  must either demon­strate that they would be eli­gi­ble to inherit from their late par­ent under state law or sat­isfy one of the statu­tory alter­na­tives to that require­ment.  The SSA’s inter­pre­ta­tion was more con­sis­tent with the core pur­pose of the Act, which is to pro­tect fam­ily mem­bers who depend on another fam­ily member’s income from hard­ship if that fam­ily mem­ber dies.

(more…)

Rights in Conflict

8
1 year ago
by dcpetterson in

When do the reli­gious rights of an orga­ni­za­tion over­ride the reli­gious rights of an indi­vid­ual? Does the health of an employee take sec­ond place to the reli­gious or polit­i­cal pref­er­ences of an employer? If cor­po­ra­tions are peo­ple for the pur­poses of polit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions, are they also peo­ple for pur­poses of reli­gious observance?

A num­ber of Catholic orga­ni­za­tions are suing the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion over con­tra­cep­tion, claim­ing that new rules under the Afford­able Care Act vio­late the reli­gious rights of those orga­ni­za­tions. This is an exten­sion of the flap start­ing last Feb­ru­ary, when the Health and Human Ser­vices depart­ment pro­posed that employer-​​provided health care must cover con­tra­cep­tive ser­vices. The Catholic Church objected, insist­ing that pro­vid­ing such ser­vices is con­trary to Church doc­trine, and that, there­fore, Catholic orga­ni­za­tions which employ peo­ple must be exempted. This led to over­in­flated rhetoric from the right about the Administration’s “war on reli­gion.”

HHS responded with a com­pro­mise, requir­ing instead only that the insur­ance com­pa­nies, not the employ­ers, would be sub­ject to this rule. This would pro­vide proper and ade­quate health choices for women, while respect­ing the doc­tri­nal dic­tates of the Church. That wasn’t good enough for Catholic Bish­ops, though many other Catholic orga­ni­za­tions praised the move. The issue refuses to go away. (more…)

Education Bubble?

41
1 year ago
by Michael Weiss in

Lately, a con­ver­gence of events — grad­u­a­tion sea­son, impend­ing expi­ra­tion of a sub­sidy on stu­dent loans, and an elec­tion year — have led to a broader dis­cus­sion about the over­all econ­omy of higher edu­ca­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, some have sug­gested that we have an “edu­ca­tion bub­ble”. How accu­rate is this sug­ges­tion? And, if it is, what are the poten­tial impacts of it bursting?

To answer this, we should start by exam­in­ing the mean­ing of an eco­nomic bub­ble. His­tor­i­cally, eco­nomic bub­bles were referred to as “booms”, and their pop­ping as “busts”. Only the ter­mi­nol­ogy has changed.

Booms are caused when credit grows rapidly in a par­tic­u­lar mar­ket, lead­ing to ris­ing prices, and over­ex­pan­sion. Even­tu­ally this leads to a point where the return on invest­ment is no longer assured, which causes the credit to quickly dry up, and the mar­ket to then col­lapse (the “bust”). The credit for the boom can come from many dif­fer­ent sources, but typ­i­cally the late stages of the boom are funded by pri­vate creditors.

We saw this hap­pen with Inter­net com­pa­nies in the late 1990s, as their stocks sky­rock­eted from a tremen­dous influx of pri­vate invest­ments. We saw it hap­pen more recently with real estate, as home prices sky­rock­eted from a tremen­dous influx of pri­vate invest­ments in credit default swap–backed col­lat­er­al­ized debt oblig­a­tions, which funded the mort­gages that funded the real estate pur­chases. In both of these cases, the credit dried up when spec­u­la­tors were no longer able to turn prof­its by reselling the invest­ment property.

What about higher edu­ca­tion? (more…)

It’s Complicated

8
1 year ago
by Monotreme in

Nebraska State Sen. Deb Fischer

Nebraska held their pri­maries Tues­day, and there was a major upset: a little-​​known rancher and State Sen­a­tor in Nebraska’s uni­cam­eral leg­is­la­ture won out over two estab­lish­ment Repub­li­can candidates.

State Sen­a­tor Deb Fis­cher (R-​​Valentine, NE) eas­ily won a three-​​way con­test, with 41 per­cent of the vote. For­mer front-​​runner Attor­ney Gen­eral Jon Brun­ing was sec­ond with 36 per­cent, and State Trea­surer Don Sten­berg was third with 19 percent.

Brun­ing staked out a posi­tion far to the right of the polit­i­cal spec­trum. For exam­ple, he pub­licly attacked the sup­posed “Uncon­sti­tu­tional Assault on Reli­gious Lib­erty” rep­re­sented by a 12-​​year-​​old rule based on a 33-​​year-​​old law sup­pos­edly “requir­ing” reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions to cover con­tra­cep­tion. I’ve writ­ten before (here and here) about the cor­rupt and cyn­i­cal posi­tion taken by major Repub­li­can law­mak­ers on this issue.

Appar­ently, Brun­ing was still too much of a social­ist run­ning dog for Sen­a­tor Jim DeMint (R-​​SC) and the Club for Growth, both of whom poured a huge amount of money into Stenberg’s cam­paign. Accord­ing to them, Sten­berg, who served as State Attor­ney Gen­eral for 12 years, is a “gen­uine, life­long con­ser­v­a­tive” who is con­cerned that we need to “Take Back Amer­ica” [sic] from social­ist run­ning dog Sen­a­tor Ben Nel­son (D-​​NE). Nel­son is appar­ently even more social­ist, a faster run­ner, and more canine than social­ist run­ning dogs like Brun­ing. (more…)

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