Pro-lifers are anti-safety?!?

How is it that the party that puts such emphasis on being pro-life wants to gut safety regulations because the latter are anti-business?

Safety regulations reduce worker injuries and deaths.  How can a pro-life party be so anti-life once a child is born?  It figures.   It doesn't want to provide health care for the already born.  It doesn't want to put any restrictions on gun control; guns are very anti-life.  It wants to sell more and more weapons to other countries.  It wants to increase the nuclear arsenal; nuclear weapons kill thousands of unborn children.

I think many of these pro-life politicians took the hypocrite oath: first do harm.

Paul Krugman's use of "free marketer"

I'm surprised the economist Paul Krugman is using "free market" as loosely as the so-called "free marketers" do.  "Free market" too often means fewer and fewer sellers doing whatever they please.  A true free market has many buyers and sellers, both buyers and sellers are free to enter and leave the market, both buyers and sellers have all the information they need to make a decision, and all costs are paid for in the transaction.

How many independent pharmacies are there is our cities? You can probably count on one hand the corporate pharmacies.

How many situations like Epipen where the buyers are not really free to leave the market?

As to full information how much do the sellers know about you while fighting with dozens of lobbyists to hide information about their products. GMOs?

Externalities? These "free marketers" don't want the government to regulate worker safety and don't want government to regulate the pollutants from their smokestacks, farms, and mines going downwind or downstream.

Posted at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/opinion/progressive-family-values.html?comments#permid=19921473

Mantra should be "Tax and Invest"

For at least thirty years Republicans have been accusing Democrats of "tax and spend" as if all the evils in the country were caused by taxation and government spending.  As too often is the case, the Democrats have been on the defensive rather than making strong arguments for taxation and spending as necessary to invest in a civil society.

E. J. Dionne, Jr. stated this counter-argument succinctly, "And it should be expanding public investments in the nation’s future, not cutting them."  - "Can America still lead?" Washington Post, 2011-08-07, republished in the Star Tribune, 2011-08-09

I scribbled a few notes on our copy of the Strib about how inconsistent "tax and spend" complainers can be:

Spend on nuclear power subsidies, but don't invest in medical care for its side effects.

Low taxes for mining companies but no investment in the health care and safety of their workers or in the repair of the destruction of the environment.

Spend on a mammoth war machine, but little investment in conflict resolution.