J. Goodrich

SAT SCORES DOWN! The horror! I woke up to the news that the SAT scores this year are the lowest since 1999! What is happening here? The simplest answer is that more students are taking the test. Given its intended objective to predict college performance in the first few years, those who have traditionally taken […]

ON RIGHTS AND MARKETS. Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times gives us the conservative case against expanding the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP): to let the markets reign, and then strikes it down in a very clever way: Suppose, for a moment, that the Heritage Foundation were to put out a press release […]

PEOPLE ARE MORE EXPENSIVE THAN CARS. Guess who made that profound comment and when? It was Mitt Romney last year, explaining the new Massachusetts health insurance policy which included an individual mandate. The policy was modeled on car insurance, and Romney explained the individual mandate in the policy with these words: “We insist that everybody […]

MORE ON COLLEGE RANKINGS. A recent New York Times article discussed the shadow side of the U.S. News & World Reports annual college rankings: It is in the interest of the colleges to game them by, say, evaluating other colleges negatively or by inflating their own apparent applicant pool so as to allow the college […]

MEANWHILE, IN IRAQ. The emergency political summit called by president Jalal Talabani has failed. The Sunnis are still outside the government. As Kevin Drum points out: It’s not exactly news or anything, just further confirmation of the obvious: the eventual fate of Iraq (outside the Kurdish north) is the establishment of a Shia theocracy closely […]

AND THE COMMON WOMAN CHIMES IN. Paul and Ezra have both written on David Brooks‘ most recent truckstop column, and I noticed with great interest the headlines of their posts: “Conservatives and the Common Man” and “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Brooks tells us that a masculine man doesn’t worry about the rich but […]

THE MORALE DILEMMA. Is the morale among U.S. military in Iraq low or high? Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack argued for the latter case in their July New York Times op-ed piece: Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; […]

ON LIFE EXPECTANCY. The United States ranks 42 in life expectancy among 222 countries. Why is this the case when the U.S. leads the world in health care spending? There are several explanations, many of them discussed in the linked article, that focus on the changes the U.S. health care system needs. But it’s also […]

PILLOW TALK. Ana Marie Cox wrote about Elizabeth and John Edwards on Wednesday at Swampland. John Edwards does not support gay marriage, but Elizabeth Edwards does. What does this mean for those who might vote for Edwards were it not for his views on this one issue? On a call previewing tonight’s LGBT forum, an […]

TO THE OWNER OF A HAMMER, EVERYTHING LOOKS LIKE A NAIL. To President Bush, it’s always the right time for a tax cut. The most recent group suffering from excess taxes are the American corporations: President Bush said yesterday that he is considering a fresh plan to cut tax rates for U.S. corporations to make […]