The New Statesman has an analysis of how Britain under Thatcher reduced social mobility and increased income inequality:

In 1945, when Thatcher turned 20, the richest 0.01 per cent people in Britain received 123 times the mean national average income. By the time she turned 40 in 1965 that had halved to 62 times, and the year before she came to power, in 1978, it was at its minimum: just 28 times the average income…

TV programme called Breadline Britain [...]released the results in 1983. Its startling finding was that the spike in unemployment figures that Thatcher had tolerated and the shift in income from poor to rich had resulted in a rapid increase in poverty, so that one in seven people was living in poverty by the early 1980s. This was a sharp rise above levels experienced after the end of the 1960s.

Frank Turner has a (NSFW) take on this.

Massachusetts Democrats go to the voting booth tomorrow for the primary in the special election to replace John Kerry.

Want a quick comparison of Ed Markey vs Stephen Lynch? WBUR has this quick summary.

The Attorney General of Texas — and I think it goes without saying which party he belongs to — has identified a greater threat to Texas than even North Korea:

One thing that requires ongoing vigilance is the reality that the state of Texas is coming under a new 
assault, an assault far more dangerous than what the leader of North Korea threatened when he said he was going to add Austin, Texas, as one of the recipients of his nuclear weapons…

And what is this threat?

The threat that we’re getting is the threat from the Obama administration…

Remember: this is the Attorney General of Texas saying this.

Oops.

A paper by Harvard University economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff that has been cited by Republican lawmakers to justify eliminating the budget deficit contains “serious errors,” according to a study by a group of University of Massachusetts academics.

The Reinhart-Rogoff paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” argued that countries with public debt in excess of 90 percent of gross domestic product suffered measurably slower economic growth.

The new study — by economists Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin — says that the Harvard economists excluded some data and unconventionally weighted the statistics they included to reach their conclusions.

This led to “serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth,” Herndon, Ash and Pollin said in the paper published yesterday.

Remember when the “Tea Party” was supposedly a non-partisan group concerned with lower taxes and smaller government?

Tea Party Nation head Judson Phillips has announced that

It is a pretty safe bet right now that this attack was carried out by an Islamist… The reason we will be hit again is because our government is not committed to destroying our enemy. Radical Islam is our enemy.

The LA Times reports:

A smug, uncaring, ideologically rigid national Republican Party is turning off the majority of American voters, with stale policies that have changed little in 30 years and an image that alienates minorities and the young, according to an internal GOP study.

Of course, don’t expect the GOP to actually listen:

A just-concluded gathering of conservatives in Washington cheered speaker after speaker who urged the GOP to stick to its guns and, instead, largely blamed the 2012 defeat on Romney or the way he ran his campaign.

Not that the report actually has much to say:

The report notes the party’s problems with women voters, especially unmarried women. But its 10-point plan for appealing to women makes no mention of the GOP stance on any social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, that have turned off many of the voters in question.

We’re back! Our long, post-election detox has ended, and we’re back to keeping you informed. And by that, I mean “passing along Daily Show clips”.

Let’s start with this one, where the headline really says it all:
House Republicans Meet at a Former Slave Plantation to Practice Talking to Black People

Paying a visit to his Chicago campaign office the day after the election, President Obama choked up at what his staff’s commitment means to him.

“Somebody needs to stand up and say, ‘When you win the election, you pick the nominees. Until then, shut up! Just shut up! Just go away! Bury yourselves in your rat holes and don’t come out until you win an election. When you win an election, you can put all these…wackos… all over the court, but until then, SHUT UP! You are really irritating me.’”
– Rush Limbaugh, July 5, 2005

Dear Rush,
See above,

Love,
Me

I just watched this… and was inspired to make another donation. Hopefully you will be too.

Aaron Sorkin imagines Jeb Bartlet coaching President Obama on the debates in this great piece over at the NYTimes.

BARTLET: …Let’s replay some of Wednesday night’s more jaw-dropping visits to the Land Where Facts Go to Die. “I don’t have a $5 trillion tax cut. I don’t have a tax cut of a scale you’re talking about.”

OBAMA: The Tax Policy Center analysis of your proposal for a 20 percent across-the-board tax cut in all federal income tax rates, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax, the estate tax and other reductions, says it would be a $5 trillion tax cut.

BARTLET: In other words …

OBAMA: You’re lying, Governor.

BARTLET: “I saw a study that came out today that said you’re going to raise taxes by $3,000 to $4,000 on middle-income families.”

OBAMA The American Enterprise Institute found my budget actually would reduce the share of taxes that each taxpayer pays to service the debt by $1,289.89 for taxpayers earning in the $100,000 to $200,000 range.

BARTLET Which is another way of saying …

OBAMA You’re lying, Governor.

The guy who once casually tried to make a $10,000 bet with a rival now brings us this:

“Is $100,000 middle income?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“No, middle income is $200,000 to $250,000 and less,” Romney responded.

His campaign later clarified that Romney was referencing household income, not individual income.

The Census Bureau reported this week that the median household income — the midpoint for the nation — is just over $50,000.

Right — if your household only makes five times the national average, you’re “middle class”. I mean, when you only make $250,000, you can’t even afford an elevator for your cars!

Bill Clinton’s speech last night at the DNC was a stunning piece of oratory.

Even more stunning? How much of it he ad-libbed. The Atlantic compares the speech as handed out to the media vs. what he actually said; the difference is remarkable.

John Hodgman writes this excellent essay that is, in part, about winning — but also about how winning isn’t an easy road and involves both compromise and disappointment:

…the cost of losing is very high. As a supporter of health care reform, same-sex marriage, women’s rights, tax fairness, a domestic policy responsive to the realities of the present day as opposed to toxic nostalgia, and an international policy that punishes our enemies more than it rewards our private contractors, I may not always agree with the speed or execution of Obama’s policies. But I know that a loss this year would not be seen as a noble failure. It would be seen as a repudiation of these values for a long time to come. Losses transform ideals into irrelevant fantasy, and idealists into weepy self-pitiers, like old-school Red Sox fans and Tea Partiers and people who really believe some day that Firefly might come back.

Forbes, that notoriously left-wing member of the “mainstream media”, asks which of the Presidents of the last 50 years has grown federal spending the least. Which one would Ronald Reagan “have to give… a thumbs up when it comes to his record for stretching a dollar”?

Oh, I think you know the answer.

(Naturally, the comments section is filled with threats and obscenities. Sometimes it can be hard for some folks to accept that facts have a left-wing bias.)

MA’s 21st Middlesex has long been represented by Charley Murphy, who announced that he wouldn’t be running again after the cutoff date for withdrawals. As a result, the Democratic primary there is all write-in, because Murphy will be the only candidate on the ballot.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Dave Fionda for some time on local land use issues, and I can attest that Dave is committed to improving the lives of his neighbors, and very dedicated to hearing and advocating for their concerns. Dave has served on the Town Meeting for Burlington, his local School Council, and worked with many town committees and departments.

I hope that the voters of Bedford, Burlington, and Wilmington MA will write-in Dave Fionda when they go the primary polls on September 6 — and then vote for him in the general election.

Don’t use an RSS reader? You can now follow our new posts via Twitter at @BrayNewWorld.

BIll O’Reilly said that if the Supreme Court upheld the ACA, he’d apologize for being an idiot.

To my astonishment, the man kept his word.

Okay, Bill. Points for that.

(Only watch the first minute of the clip. The remainder is Bill O’Reilly letting people talk about how poor Bill O’Reilly is so persecuted.)

As America looks forward to the rollout of National Romneycare, how has it gone in the state that pioneered it? The Christian Science Monitor took a closer look:

“The bill imposed new costs both on the federal government and on people who had insurance policies in Massachusetts, and we found that the cost of private health insurance had gone up because of Romneycare,” [a conservative economist] says. This could be interpreted as having the same effect as a tax increase, which he says has a negative impact on job growth.

Still, according to Beacon’s Hill’s state competitiveness report on March 6, Massachusetts is the top state in the country for economic growth and income.

But what about the costs? Surely those high premiums in Massachusetts make this unaffordable on a national level!

Massachusetts health care is also often criticized for being too expensive: The premiums are higher than anywhere else in the country.

[Harvard professor] McDonough argues that although those figures are correct, they don’t give the full picture. “You get a revealing portrait when you look at it based on ability to pay,” he says. Massachusetts premiums are higher, but so is household income – and when measured as a percentage of income, health insurance is cheaper in Massachusetts than in Texas, which has the highest share of uninsured residents in the nation.

(emphasis added in both quotes)

Conclusion: we can expect affordable health care that doesn’t show significant impact on economic growth. Truly, we must repeal Obamacare and prevent this national nightmare.

The Atlantic compares the fiscal unions of the USA and EU, and how the USA does…

…fiscal transfers (don’t worry, that’s just another word for money) between the rich California-Connecticut-Illinois-New Jersey-New York quintuple and poorer states like Tennessee. If similar, seamless transfers existed in the EU, the rich north would have to send to Portugal and Greece at least an additional 30 cents for every dollar they paid in taxes, year after year after year.

When you hear commentators say, “the euro zone must begin to transition toward a fiscal union,” what they are saying, in human-speak, is that the Europe needs to be more like the United States, with balanced budget laws for its individual members and seamless fiscal transfers from the rich countries to the poor, to protect the indigent, old, and sick, no matter where they reside.

The Germans call this sort of thing “a permanent bailout.” We just call it “Missouri.”

As a resident of Massachusetts, I demand fiscal austerity from the money-drains that are these Southern red states! *pounds fist*