Health

The United States health system consists of over 400 insurance companies and thousands of different plans.  Indeed, in the early 1990s, after Taiwan concluded a worldwide investigation of health plans in preparation to designing its own, its Minister of Health reportedly was said to have been asked what aspect of the U.S. health system he had … Read More

Campaign Finance Reform

The impact of money on politics has become increasingly pronounced as a 2012 chart by Mother Jones makes clear States, cities and the federal government have tried in various ways to curb the corrupting influence of money on political elections and political decision making.  But these laws have almost always been overturned by the US Supreme … Read More

Advertising

In 2002 Google Answers responded to a question about the number of ads that Americans are exposed to each day, from radio and tv commercials to newspaper ads and billboards. The sources sited ranged from 247 to 3000. No estimate was made of internet popup or other ads, which would boost the number stratospherically. Except for … Read More

Sports

Sports not only builds strong bones and teamwork.  Sports teams build community.  We root for our home teams, whether they be high school or college or professional.  But sports has become big business and increasingly our home teams have become absentee owned.  And the absentee owners in all leagues threaten to pick up and go to … Read More

Open Source / Open Standards

Open standards and open source are essential to local self-reliance. Citizens and communities should have the right to modify the technology they use in order to improve it and solve problems. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, has compared software to a recipe. When cooking, you do not need permission to alter the pancake recipe to your taste. When you come across a problem in software that you are using, you should have the right to fix it.… Read More

Universal Access to Pre-School

Preschool has been shown to increase students’ performance in high school, increase test scores, decrease the likelihood of being arrested for a violent offense as a juvenile, and decrease the likelihood that a child will experience abuse and/or neglect.

Asset Building – Individual Development Accounts

From the Homestead Act to the GI Bill to home mortgage deductions, Americans have recognized that it is good public policy to help people build assets. Like the distribution of assets in the U.S., however, the distribution of incentives is skewed. Ninety percent of the benefits of the two largest asset-building programs in the country – … Read More

Single-Payer and Universal Health Care

Citizen-led efforts to institute more universal health care programs are cropping up across the country. Some are very similar to the Canadian health care system. They call for a single-payer system, meaning that medical care would be paid for out of a single publicly administered pool of money, rather than by myriad managed care plans. In … Read More

Glass-Steagall Act & the Volcker Rule

The Glass-Steagall Act created federal deposit insurance and erected a strict barrier between commercial and investment banking activities. It was repealed in 1999. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, many people, including prominent economists, policymakers, and even bankers, have called for restoring Glass-Steagall. The Volcker Rule, a provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, imposed some limits on the mixing of commercial and investment banking activities, but not the firm wall that Glass-Steagall had provided. … Read More

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