American doctors are paid much more than doctors in other countries, without US patients seeing much return on their money. So argues Slate writer Matthew Yglesias in a recent piece riffing off of last week’s explosive Time article on the price gouging of US Hospitals: The last time the OECD looked at this (PDF), they found that, adjusted for local purchasing […]

While Texas runs an $8.8 billion surplus, Illinois is heading in the opposite direction. A new report by the Civic Federation estimates that Illinois’ “unpaid bills” will triple to $22 billion in the next five years unless something can be done about the state’s pensions.   The Chicago Sun-Times reports: Without meaningful reform, pension costs will continue […]

Conventional wisdom says that education, particularly in science and math, is the key to America’s economic future—as well as the key to finding a good job after graduation. According to Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic , the conventional wisdom is dead wrong.In his ad hoc category of “Americans+” (U.S. born grads, along with green card holders and […]

On his first official trip abroad, Secretary of State John Kerry is sending a message to the Syrian rebels that, after months of dithering and halfhearted support, the Obama administration is planning to step up assistance of their effort to unseat Butcher Assad: “We are determined that the Syrian opposition is not going to be […]

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, known to his critics as “Governor Oops,” is laughing all the way to the head of the pack. Forbes’s list of the Ten Best Cities for Jobs, based on unemployment rate, job growth, and per capita income, has Texas cities nabbing the top four spots, as well as five of the top […]

US demand for oil is down, and thanks to fracking, domestic supply is up. Yet in a bizarre reversal of supply and demand imports of Middle Eastern oil are at a nine year high and gas prices are spiking. Who’s to blame? Our refineries. The Financial Times reports: For the first time since 2003, Saudi imports accounted for […]

How has the nation’s largest public pension fund managed to devour California? From its founding along cautious, fiscally conservative principles in the 1930s in the shadow of the stock market crash, CalPERS gradually upped its political clout and successfully convinced the state legislature to grant it increasingly lavish and ultimately unsustainable pension packages. If you […]

Add another notch to Texas’s growing list of achievements: The Lone Star State is projected to run an $8.8 billion dollar surplus at a time when other states are struggling to pay the bills. The surplus comes thanks to a mix of spending cuts, increased tax revenue, economic recovery, and the shale gas boom. As the Economist reports, […]

The Great 9th, as the former cotton-picker and City Hall janitor who became Los Angeles’s first African American City Council member called it, is losing its position as a hub of black political power.  The LA Times reports: Two generations [after Lindsay], with the seat open and the March 5 election approaching, the area that […]

Mexicans don’t want to leave their native country any more than Americans do theirs, according to a new Gallup Poll. Only 11 percent of Mexicans said they would emigrate if given the chance, down from 21 percent in 2007 and equal to the 11 percent of Americans who would do the same.Fears that America will be […]