With a name like Austin you knew I'd move to Texas sooner or later.
If you haven't heard (or cared), members in Congress and the White House are fighting over the national debt limit. Not that Congress and the White House fighting should be newsworthy, by itself, but the stakes of the debate are much higher than many realize, including potentially some of the Congressional representatives involved in the debate. I follow these sort of things closely, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts explaining what the issues are and why you should be concerned with what happens. I've structured...
If you've watched the news, read the financial section of a newspaper, or read a blog about the US economy, then you've probably also heard that the US consumer is broke. Unfortunately, "broke" has...
As US election season approaches, I thought I'd refresh myself on the size and distribution of government expenditures. This graphic is a "square pie chart" representing the total $6.5T in US government...
This "square pie chart" shows the sources and uses of US health care expenditures in 2008, as reported by the Department of Health and Human Services. National health expenditures totaled $2.34T in...
This Thursday, President Obama will meet with members of Congress for a bipartisan health care summit at the Blair House, to be televised live and in its entirety on C-SPAN. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Republican leader in the Senate, will be attending with other Republican senators. House Republicans have yet to announce if they will attend as well. The present situation is surprisingly straightforward: Democrats believe health care is being stymied by political tactics, while Republicans are betting that...
Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a novel method for navigating written content- hypertext. Around the same time, a company called "The World" became the first commercial dial-up Internet provider. Incidentally, "WWW" didn't event exist- that was invented in 1991. Today rough estimates put the number of Internet users at roughly 1 in 4 humans on the planet. In North America, the rate of Internet use is closer to 3 in 4. US cell phone penetration has hit roughly 80% and already by 2008 cell phone ownership...
As of December 2009, the US unemployment rate is at 10% representing 7.7M people unemployed. Over the coming months, the rhetoric and legislation from Washington D.C. is likely to be focused on “creating jobs,” a goal that is as assuredly amiable in the abstract as it is likely to stoke a discussion that will be substance-poor in the details. The topic is politically and technically intricate, but the basic question facing policymakers and the American public is the following: “How should we create American...
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