on health care

not this, this

As a Canadian living in the United States for the past 17 years, I am frequently asked by Americans and Canadians alike to declare one health care system as the better one.

Often I’ll avoid answering, regardless of the questioner’s nationality. To choose one or the other system usually translates into a heated discussion of each one’s merits, pitfalls, and an intense recitation of commonly cited statistical comparisons of the two systems.

Because if the only way we compared the two systems was with statistics, there is a clear victor. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to dispute the fact that Canada spends less money on health care to get better outcomes.

the second link originated at boing boing, but the Denver Post link was infected, apparently.

stiglitz on bailout double standards

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

[Joseph Stiglitz] via [boing boing]

HIGHER MINIMUM WAGE AS A STIMULUS

A new research brief from Kai Filion at the Economic Policy Institute highlights the stimulative impact of raising the minimum wage. Back in 2007, Congress obliged President Bush to sign a long-delayed minimum wage increase into law by attaching it to a must-pass war appropriations measure. After ten years in which the value of the minimum wage was continuously eroded by inflation, Congress raised the minimum from $5.15 to $5.85 an hour in 2007. In 2008, it went up to $6.55. Next month, it’s headed up to $7.25. And the economy is benefiting. So far, minimum wage increases have generated $4.9 billion in spending according to Filion, while the next increase will produce $5.5 billion in additional spending. As Filion succinctly explains “by increasing workers’ take-home pay, families gain both financial security and an increased ability to purchase goods and services, thus creating jobs for other Americans.”

The issue brief also takes on the most familiar minimum wage misconception – that raising pay inherently means increasing unemployment. Surveying a bevy of recent studies that have failed to detect significant increases in unemployment when the minimum wage rises, the issue brief considers factors like improved productivity, better employee retention and the stimulative effect of increased spending which may help explain why, in practice, jobs don’t disappear when low pay gets a mandatory boost.

[link]

you want people to spend money, give them some to spend.

advanced economics.

library sued for “hate crime”

wisconsin library which carries a young adult book with a gay protagonist is being sued by fundamentalists for traumatizing them

A loopy band of Christians in Wisconsin is suing a library for $120,000, claiming they had been traumatised by a book which they say is “explicitly vulgar, racial, and anti-Christian”.

According to this report, they are also demanding the right to “publicly burn or destroy by other means” the novel for young adults – Baby BeBop, by acclaimed Los Angeles writer Francesca Lia Block.

The suit against the West Bend Community Memorial Library in Wisconsin has been brought by Robert C Braun of the Christian Civil Liberties Union and three others – Joseph Kogelmann, Rev Cleveland Eden, and Robert Brough – “all of whom are elderly”. They are each demanding £30,000 in damages.

you’re on your own folks.

from the Harper website:

Though grounded in the realities of L.A. and urban life-at both its grittiest and most beautiful-Block’s work is otherworldly and almost transcendent in its reach. The daughter of a poet and a painter, Block has been influenced by the visual arts, by her childhood love of Greek myths and fairy tales, as well as by music and dance. While at the University of California at Berkeley, Block’s early influences expanded to include the magic-realist fiction of Gabriel Garc’a Marquez and Isabel Allende, as well as the modernist poetry of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

Block has described her work as “contemporary fairy tales with an edge,” where the real world and its troubles find solace through “hope and magic…” Although she has received numerous awards, including citations from the American Library Association, School Library Journal, and The New York Times Book Review, responses from her readers are the most rewarding. “I have received letters from lovers who read my stories to each other in bed, people who have named themselves, their pets, or bands after my characters, gay kids who tell me my books let them know ‘it’s okay to be gay,’ and wounded kids thanking me for helping them feel empowered. These are the greatest gifts I could receive.”

frances mcdormand on acting

With most people when there’s a pain in their life there’s mental scar tissue that forms over the pain and helps you go on living. An actor’s scar tissue really never covers over things the same way, not if you’re going to be sensitive. With good technique, an actor can do that and walk through life without going insane.

lately

what i’ve been watching

just finished le silence de lorna, which is quite good and showcases the mesmerizing kosovan actress arta dobroshi, who learned french in 2 months for the role, and kicks ass. you’ll be seeing more of her. lorna should be out soon on disc in the US, but i’ve been bored with the trickle of decent dvds lately and couldn’t wait. . .

other films i’ve liked lately: stephanie daley, black test car, i’ve loved you so long, van gogh (pialat), let the right one in, happy go lucky, what makes sammy run?, the spy who came in from the cold, the great happiness space: tale of an osaka love thief, other men’s women, frozen river, a perfect spy (BBC series), cargo 200 (remarkable, searing portrait of 80s Russia), city of sadness, man facing southeast, japanese girls at the harbor, frost/nixon, profit motive and the whispering wind, the second and last season of intelligence (excellent canadian series), red angel, all the days before tomorrow.