Rethinking the Economy

Matthew Yglesias says the folks pushing the public option need to calm down. Without the public option,
It wouldn’t be an ideal health plan or the best bill you can imagine. But it’s no exaggeration to say that it would be the greatest progressive legislative accomplishment in four decades, and that’s nothing to sneer at.
In the [...]

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In an aggressively global economy, do we really have any power anymore? If we try to change the rules in the US, won’t business just outsource everything to China?
Actually, according to BusinessWeek, Europe just showed us we’ve got a lot more power than you think. Europe’s in the middle of passing a bunch of new [...]

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There’s one thing Democrats and Republican politicians agree on when it comes to healthcare reform: digitizing healthcare records could be a godsend. When it works, it can improve patient care, reduce medical errors, and save billions of dollars a year — a crucial consideration given the threat that skyrocketing healthcare costs pose to our economic [...]

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We need to remove from the investment banking and the commercial banking industries a lot of the practices and prerogatives that they have so lovingly possessed. If they are too big to fail, they are too big to be allowed to be as gamey and venal as they’ve been — and as stupid as they’ve [...]

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An interesting article by Newsweek’s Sharon Begley about how Greenpeace acts as a check on corporations by helping companies interested in protecting the environment and smacking upside the head companies that aren’t — in short, by Stacking the Deck in Favor of the Good Guys:
As [Kimberly-Clark] CEO Thomas Falk began a speech to [...]

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If a lioness wants to catch more gazelles, she could practice sneaking up on them. She could work on her sprinting skills. In short, she could increase her odds of succeeding according to the current rules.
But if a lioness was a business, she’d have another option. She could try to get a law passed discouraging [...]

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