Obamacare may make health care unaffordable for smokers, thanks to a provision that allows insurance companies to charge them 50% higher premiums than non-smokers. While younger smokers may be given a lower penalty, the costs of this policy for the old are enormous: Take a hypothetical 60-year-old smoker making $35,000 a year. Estimated premiums for […]

We wrote yesterday that Ukraine’s plans to harness its vast natural gas resources have incensed Russia, Ukraine’s traditional energy supplier. Just how mad is Russia? The Financial Times reports: Russia has demanded that Ukraine pay billions of dollars for failing to import an agreed amount of gas, just as Kiev has taken a significant step […]

California has only just recently clawed its way into a budget surplus, but the state government is already planning to move ahead with two of its most expensive planned projects. The New York Times reports: Emboldened by a brighter fiscal horizon, Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday recommitted himself to two ambitious projects, a high-speed rail line and a huge water […]

Today’s WSJ profiles the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which has been making particularly large, high-risk/high-reward investments to cover flagging investment returns during the financial crisis. Since 2008, the fund has moved more than a quarter of its money into “alternative” investments, more than any other large fund in the country. The operation now “looks and feels more like […]

The average Black household income was once 10 cents to the dollar relative to the average white family. Thomas J. Sugrue has an excellent piece in this month’s Washington Monthly on that persistent and growing gap. He identifies the factors that systematically prevented Blacks from building up and passing on wealth: exclusion from social security and GI bill benefits, […]

Suddenly there’s hope that China-Japan relations are on the mend.China’s new leader Xi Jinping met yesterday with Natsuo Yamaguchi, a Japanese envoy tasked with the mission of easing tension over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The meeting was entirely cordial, a far cry from the nationalist and antagonistic rhetoric from both sides […]

The EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), launched in 2005 to curb carbon dioxide emissions, is breaking down as the price of carbon flatlines. The Financial Times has the story: The world’s biggest carbon market was left in disarray on Thursday, with prices briefly crashing almost 40 per cent in a matter of minutes, after European […]

Why struggle to pay American rent when you can could afford a maid and a beachside villa for just $1,100 a month? International Living reports on a couple who retired from a stressed out and financially tight life in Florida to a peaceful life near a beach in Coronado, Panama: After paying $135,000 for the house, Ellen and […]

Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi has caught another break in the run up to Italian elections: a major Italian bank has revealed huge losses from derivatives that could push it into partial nationalization. That might not matter on its own, but many of the leaders of the parties running against Berlusconi had close ties to the […]

From time to time something goes wrong in every enterprise, and we had just such a breakdown this week. A post on the surprisingly large gap between the results that were widely predicted in the Israeli election and the actual results crossed an important line and did an injustice to someone we very much admire.There […]