Healthcare, Politics

Tuesday Night Linkorama

  • Paycheck Fairness is basically a sop to lawyers.
  • While the plagiarism charge won’t wash with the public, here’s a reminder of why it’s important.
  • The DNC drinking game. Gotta love it.
  • Boy do these alternative medicine idiots infuriate me. My opinion of Christian Applegate went up substantially with the way she dealt with her cancer. If my mother had had breast cancer, if I had the BRCA1 gene and if I had cancer at the tender age of 36, I’d have done the exact same thing.
  • It’s getting better all the time:

    The number and percentage of Americans without health insurance actually declined slightly in 2007 compared to 2006. The share without insurance in 2007, 15.3 percent, is actually lower than it was a decade ago.

    Median household income is not falling: “Between 2006 and 2007, real median household income rose 1.3 percent, from $49,568 to $50,233—a level not statistically different from the 1999 prerecession income peak.”

    The share of households earning a middle-class income of between $35,000 and $100,000 in real 2007 dollars has indeed shrunk slightly compared to a decade ago, but so too has the share earning less than $35,000 a year, while the share earning more than $100,000 continues to rise. The middle class is not shrinking; it is moving up.

    The 12.5 percent of Americans living below the poverty line in 2007 was statistically unchanged from 2006, and remains below the 13.3 poverty rate in 1997. The poverty rate has been trending downward since the early 1990s during a time of growing trade and immigration flows.

    The Gini coefficient, a statistical measure of income inequality, was .463 in 2007, down slightly from earlier in the decade and virtually the same as it was a decade ago.