Paul M. Jones

... government has promised more than it can realistically deliver and, as a result, repeatedly disappoints by providing less than people expect or jeopardizing what they already have. But government can’t easily correct its excesses, because Americans depend on it for so much that any effort to change the status arouses a firestorm of opposition that virtually ensures defeat. Government’s very expansion has brought it into disrepute, paralyzed politics and impeded it from acting in the national interest.

via Big government on the brink - The Washington Post.

Reaching Earth orbit and only spending a thousand dollars per pound to get your spacecraft there--it's long been the shining goal of the launch business. Tuesday, Elon Musk, the founder of Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), made an announcement promising a new launch beast that could reach that mark in a couple of years--and shake up the space industry. He unveiled a new launch vehicle dubbed "Falcon Heavy." It's a derivative of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, which successfully delivered a pressurized capsule into orbit in December after a successful first flight last summer. But Musk says the Heavy will be able to blast five times as much payload into orbit.

via SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket - Private Space Technology - Popular Mechanics.

There’s a $1.6 trillion deficit but the feds are still hiring. As of March 23 they were hiring someone to run a Facebook page for the Deparment of the Interior (at up to $115,000 a year). They were hiring equal opportunity compliance officers at the Peace Corps and Department of Interior for $150,000 to $180,000 a pop. They were hiring deputy speechwriters for officials at relatively obscure agencies. …P.S.: The point isn’t so much that these federal employees are overpaid, though they are. The point is that if there were any actual sense of a deficit crisis in Washington these are jobs that would not be filled at all.

via If you worry about government cutting too much … | The Daily Caller - Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

Much as I hate to say it, probably so:

If the GOP really believes that they can get to anything close to a sustainable budget without raising taxes at least a little bit, then they are spending too much time reading their own press releases, and far too little time talking to voters outside of their tea party base.  I think it's probably possible to do more, on balance, with spending cuts than with tax hikes--but not all. Mathematically, it's certainly possible--but politically, it isn't.

via Do We Really Need to Raise Taxes to Close the Deficit? - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic. See also my take on it from last year: http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/1354.

Over the last fortnight I've made a deeply troubling discovery. The anti-nuclear movement to which I once belonged has misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health. The claims we have made are ungrounded in science, unsupportable when challenged, and wildly wrong. We have done other people, and ourselves, a terrible disservice.

via The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.

[Paul Ryan's] genuinely radical plan goes where Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich never did by terminating the entitlement status of Medicare and Medicaid. (It doesn't touch the third major entitlement, Social Security, though Ryan has elsewhere argued for extending its life by gradually raising the retirement age to 70.) Ryan changes Medicare into a voucher, which would be used to purchase private health insurance. He turns Medicaid into a block grant for states to spend as they choose. Though his budget committee isn't responsible for taxes, Ryan includes the boldest tax reform proposal since the 1980s, proposing to lower top individual and corporate rates to 25 percent and end deductions. While he's at it, Ryan caps domestic spending, repeals Obamacare, slashes farm subsidies, and more.

...

But more than anyone else in politics, Rep. Ryan has made a serious attempt to grapple with the long-term fiscal issue the country faces. He has a largely coherent, workable set of answers. If you don't like them, now you need to come up with something better.

via Paul Ryan's budget proposal and Medicare: The Republican's plan is brave, radical, and smart. - By Jacob Weisberg - Slate Magazine.

"Fat is not the problem," says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

via FuturePundit: Deep Fat Is Not The Problem.

It turns out that free markets are not just an absence of government intervention, or even a simple and clear set of rules. Liberal market economies require a huge amount of what you might call "software" to run: not just a good legal system, but respect for the law; not just a central bank, but consensus about the central banker's role; not just unrestrained trade, but a shared set of assumptions about what sorts of trades are fair; not just penalties but trust; not just anti-corruption laws, but a society that demands corruption cease, rather than attempting to use it to get around inconvenient but necessary rules.

via Doing Business In Iraq - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic.

... Thomas Jefferson wrote that the Virginia statute protecting religious freedom, which he drafted, deliberately covered “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination,” and that a proposal to mention Christ in the bill “was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend” all religions.

Which is as it should be. Read the whole thing. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » Islam and the First Amendment.