Internal Monologue

Internal Monologue has long been an advocate of this : A national movement aimed at sidelining the Electoral College in presidential elections got a big boost Monday when Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation adding California to the list of states supporting the drive. Brown's signature makes California the ninth state to sign on to the effort, which would hand the electoral votes of all participating states to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide. Currently, California's 55 electoral votes go to the person who wins the most votes in the state. Note that this law only kicks in if states with a majority of the electoral college votes have a similar law. The Electoral College is a national embarrassment and needs to be sidelined. It is a vestige of anti-democratic forces that have no legitimate place in today's polity. This is a great way to get around the EC without amending the Constitution. The latter would be very difficult to do, becau

...when Google pays $12.5 billion dollars for Motorola , primarily to use its portfolio of patents in lawsuit wars. This is a lame-ass state of affairs and doesn't benefit anyone except lawyers and patent trolls.

The basic point of this TED talk is that at-risk children are woefully under-capitalized in our society. Early childhood intervention provides the public a fantastic rate of return that any venture capitalist would jump on immediately. This is exactly the sort of thing that will help our society be strong, and unfortunately it's exactly the sort of thing that gets cut, because the constituents lack political power.

Here's a chart that shows what dollar value various government agencies assign to a human life when doing their cost-benefit analyses. Via Yglesias . Some commenters reacted negatively to the very idea of cost-benefit analysis and human life. I guess my reaction to that is: "Grow up." Yes, it seems heartless and cold-blooded to place a dollar value on human life. But any safety decision we make (requiring seat belts, helmet laws, disease prevention, etc.) implicitly places a dollar value on human life. Indeed, many government policy decisions (health care, war, whether it is more important to fight unemployment or inflation) make an implicit statement about the value of human life. I think making those implicit statements explicit can help us make more just decisions.

The Oatmeal . A sample:

The main fault line in American politics these days is not between liberal and conservative. It's between conservative and bat-shit crazy. Conservatives have been raising the debt ceiling for years. Now suddenly right-wingers want to take the world economy hostage by threatening not to raise it. This is crazy, and weakens America. Thank you conservatives, for speaking out against this nonsense : Sane conservative economists recognize that not raising the debt ceiling on August 2nd would be a disaster. Sane conservatives understand that the ratings agencies will lower our credit rating if we won’t raise the ceiling, and that we have almost $500 billion in maturing treasuries that we need to roll over in August alone which, as UBS argues , is a problem [...]

If members of Congress think like partisans who want to capture the White House, then the smart strategy for them is to refuse to do whatever it is the president wants. The content of the president’s desire is irrelevant. But the more ambitious his desire is, the more important it is to turn him down. After all, if the President wants a big bipartisan deal on the deficit, then a big bipartisan deal on the deficit is “a win for President Obama,” which means a loss for the anti-Obama side. When Obama didn’t want to embrace Bowles-Simpson, then failure to embrace Bowles-Simpson was a valid critique of him. But had Obama embraced Bowles-Simpson, then it would have been necessary for his opponents to reject it. That’s why now that Obama has a position well to the right of Bowles-Simpson, his opponents are still against Bowles-Simpson. - Yglesias