Category: Uncategorized

Ross Douthat had a response to my response to the various promotional pieces about Melissa Kearney’s new book. Douthat’s response is generally OK but, in addition to clarifying my point, I do want to respond to one part of Douthat’s piece here, as he says something that has been annoying me for a while but… Continue reading Response to Douthat on Two-Parent Families

Melissa Kearney is promoting a book where she dares to speak a truth that nobody else is brave enough to say: marriage and two-parent families are very good. So stigmatized is this view that in the last three days alone, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post (twice) have featured pieces promoting… Continue reading Doing the Marriage Thing Again

It seems like everyone in the country is talking about this song from Oliver Anthony. The song contains a few lines about the distribution of income that most of the commentary has focused on. I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day Overtime hours for bullshit pay … ‘Cause your dollar ain’t shit and it’s… Continue reading Oliver Anthony and Distributive Justice

Late last year, I laid out in a very clear way why universal benefits cost less than means-tested benefits and why people who think otherwise are simply getting mixed up in accounting definitions rather than dealing with economic realities. In the first part of this argument, I iterate through three successive policies that go like… Continue reading Winship’s Mental Block on Taxes

When I was in middle school, the United States invaded Iraq. For reasons that are not clear to me now, but probably having to do with my father’s anti-war politics, I decided I was against the invasion and that I should vocalize this in school and elsewhere when the topic came up. This was an… Continue reading Dropping a Subscript