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http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-system-cost http://truecostblog.com/2009/05/13/how-much-would-universal-healthcare-cost/

Google, in another push to reduce and rationalize its sprawling lineup of Web apps, is closing a host of products The only one people care about: Google Reader. (Seriously, will anyone miss the Google Voice App for BlackBerry?) Google is shuttering Reader, a product which allows people to quickly skim and read news articles from websites, as of July 1.

Washington, D.C. – Friday, U.S. Representative Stephen Fincher (R-Frog Jump) introduced the Welfare Integrity Act of 2013, requiring random drug testing for illegal substances for welfare applicants and recipients. The bill requires each state participating in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program to certify that applicants and current recipients are being randomly test for illegal drug use. In order to pass constitutional muster, the bill requires states to provide a consent and waiver form, where applicants are given the choice to waive their Fourth Amendment Rights and submit to a random drug test. If welfare beneficiaries fail a...

Swiss voters have overwhelmingly backed proposals to impose some of the world's strictest controls on executive pay, final referendum results show. Nearly 68% of the voters supported plans to give shareholders a veto on compensation and ban big payouts for new and departing managers. Business groups argued the proposals would damage Swiss competitiveness. But analysts say ordinary Swiss are concerned about a growing economic divide in the country. The vote came just days after the EU approved measures to cap bankers' bonuses.

I am a capitalist and a lifelong Republican. I believe that, in a meritocracy, some level of income inequality is both inevitable and desirable, as encouragement to those who contribute most to our economic prosperity. But I fear that government actions, not merit, have fueled these extremes in income distribution through taxpayer bailouts, central-bank-engineered financial asset bubbles and unjustified tax breaks that favor the rich. This is not a situation that any freethinking Republican should accept. Skewing income toward the upper, upper class hurts our economy because the rich tend to sit on their money — unlike lower- and middle-income...

Corporate executives warned Washington late last year they were delaying investment plans amid rising uncertainty over the fiscal cliff, raising risks for the economy. Turns out they did nothing of the sort. In its first analysis of U.S. gross domestic product in the fourth quarter of 2012, out today, the government said the economy surprisingly shrank at an annualized rate of 0.1% between October and December, partly due to a massive one-time drop in defense spending. However, details reveal a bright spot: Business investment in equipment and software — seen as a proxy for corporate spending — soared 12.4% in...

Most Republicans don't actually support the House Republican plan to avert the spending cuts known as the sequester, according to a new poll conducted for Business Insider by our partner SurveyMonkey. The poll asked participants to consider the core points of three sequester replacement proposals in Congress, without telling them the partisan affiliation of those plans. It found that in some cases, both Democrats and Republicans actually opposed their own party's plans and/or backed their adversaries' proposal. . . . Surprisingly, the plan that polled the strongest was the House Progressive Caucus plan. More than half of respondents supported it...

Earlier today, Ron Paul filed an international UDRP complaint against RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org with WIPO, a global governing body that is an agency of the United Nations. The complaint calls on the agency to expropriate the two domain names from his supporters without compensation and hand them over to Ron Paul. On May 1st, 2008 we launched a grassroots website at RonPaul.com that became one of the most popular resources dedicated exclusively to Ron Paul and his ideas. Like thousands of fellow Ron Paul supporters, we put our lives on hold and invested 5 years of hard work into Ron...

What began as a company's suspicion that its infrastructure was being hacked turned into a case of a worker outsourcing his own job to a Chinese consulting firm, according to reports that cite an investigation by Verizon's security team. The man was earning a six-figure salary. The anonymous company, identified only as a critical infrastructure firm, asked Verizon's Web security personnel to look into data that showed its virtual private network was being accessed from China — even as the employee whose credentials were used to log in from overseas was sitting in the company's offices, using his computer. As...

For most of modern history, two-thirds of the income of most rich nations has gone to pay salaries and wages for people who work, while one-third has gone to pay dividends, capital gains, interest, rent, etc. to the people who own capital. This two-thirds/one-third division was so stable that people began to believe it would last forever. But in the past ten years, something has changed. Labor's share of income has steadily declined, falling by several percentage points since 2000. It now sits at around 60% or lower. The fall of labor income, and the rise of capital income, has...

“Under the current administration, we have . . . seen an explosion in the spending for welfare programs,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed in support of a new, House-passed rule requiring the annual budget resolution to detail past and projected growth of entitlement programs and propose reforms to them. The rule will “allow us to begin to responsibly control the growth of these welfare programs and ensure they can help those who need them most,” he argued. But, Rep. Cantor’s statement ignores two key facts: ■First, safety net programs are not a primary cause of the nation’s long-term budget...

Following up my previous post, I want to look at the main areas of disagreement in macroeconomics. As well as trying to cover the issues, I’ll be making the point that the (mainstream) economics profession is so radically divided on these issues that any idea of a consensus, or even of disagreement within a broadly accepted analytical framework, is nonsense. The fact that, despite these radical disagreements, many specialists in macroeconomics don’t see a problem is, itself, part of the problem. I’ll start with the central issue of macroeconomics, unemployment. It’s the central issue because macroeconomics begins with Keynes’ claim...

On September 12, 2012, the Census issued its report on Income, Poverty, and Healthcare Coverage in the United States: 2011. While the full report has some nice charts, one that was conspicuously missing was on income inequality. The data for such a chart was in the tables, and so I was able to construct the chart above from them. Mean household (not individual) income for each quintile (20%) is expressed in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars. One feature that jumps out at you are how relatively flat mean income has been for the bottom 80% over the last 45 years and how...

Dean Baker responds to inconsistent worries about robots displacing labor and the ability of a smaller number of workers per retiree to support Social Security: ... we seem to be seeing rapid improvements in productivity growth ... that are drastically reducing the demand for labor. Yet all the gains from these improvements seem to be going to owners of capital as the labor share of output has been falling sharply. The distributional issue ... is extremely important, both for workers who are not seeing gains in living standards, and also for the economy as a whole, since a continual upward...

Derek Khanna, the Republican House staffer who wrote an eminently sensible paper on copyright reform that was retracted less than a day later has been fired. So much for the GOP's drive to attract savvy, net-centric young voters. After all, this is the party that put SOPA's daddy in charge of the House Tech and Science Committee. But it's pretty terrible for Khanna -- what a shabby way of dealing with dissent within your ranks. Staffer axed by Republican group over retracted copyright-reform memo [Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica] (via /.)

After dabbling in creationism earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., clarified that he does believe that scientists know the Earth is “at least 4.5 billion years old.” “There is no scientific debate on the age of the earth. I mean, it’s established pretty definitively, it’s at least 4.5 billion years old,” Rubio told Mike Allen of Politico. ”I was referring to a theological debate, which is a pretty healthy debate. “The theological debate is, how do you reconcile with what science has definitively established with what you may think your faith teaches,” Rubio continued. “Now for me, actually, when...

The Republican Party has long promoted itself as the party of business. Republicans understand the needs of business, we are told, and if the country would leave the economy in their hands business would boom. All we need to do is to give those at the very top of the income distribution – the “job creators” – more income through tax breaks, and then sit back and wait for the magic happen. Our investment in the wealthy will produce remarkable economic growth, and everyone will be better off. The Bush tax cuts were a test of these claims about supply-side...

Laura D’Andrea Tyson: ... The single most important factor behind the projected growth in federal spending is the growth in health care spending, driven primarily by the growth in Medicare spending per beneficiary. The outlook has already improved as a result of significant changes in the delivery and payment of health care services in the Affordable Care Act. As a result of these changes, growth in Medicare spending per enrollee is projected to slow to 3.1 percent a year during the next decade, about the same as the annual growth of nominal G.D.P. per capita and about two percentage points...

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) will study dangers posed by biotechnology, artificial life, nanotechnology and climate change. The scientists said that to dismiss concerns of a potential robot uprising would be "dangerous".

I know that it’s unattractive and bad form to say “I told you so” when one’s advice was ignored yet ultimately proved correct. But in the wake of the Republican election debacle, it’s essential that conservatives undertake a clear-eyed assessment of who on their side was right and who was wrong. Those who were wrong should be purged and ignored; those who were right, especially those who inflicted maximum discomfort on movement conservatives in being right, ought to get credit for it and become regular reading for them once again. I’m not going to beat around the bush and pretend...