Month: June 2019

• Democratic Debate Ignores Illegal Immigration’s Cause: No Visas. Cato Institute.
• How China Really Sees The Trade War: Xi Still Believes He Has The Upper Hand. Foreign Affairs.
• The Fed is doing something new: listening to low-income workers. Vox.
• If Only Turing Was Alive To See This. Slate Star Codex. Machines pretending to be humans pretending to be machines pretending to be machines– awesome!
• The Law That Makes It Easy to Go to War with Iran. New Yorker. As a veteran it drives me nuts that Congress has ceded its national security responsibilities to the President.

Last week, President Trump announced a change to federal healthcare rules which will affect employers that offer Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRAs). HRAs are vehicles which employers fund with tax-free money for an employee to use to purchase healthcare. Before this recent rule change, HRAs were not allowed to be used to purchase health insurance on the individual market. Starting in 2020, employers will be allowed to fund HRAs instead of offering group insurance policies to their employees.

• SNAP Caseload and Spending Declines Have Accelerated in Recent Years. CBPP. The recovery is real but no one seems to believe it. Times are pretty good!
• Biofuels Haven’t Cut Gasoline Prices Or Emissions. Oilprice.com. US – Iran conflict just took a huge step down the “unintentional war” path. Not good.
• US Accuses Iran of Oil Tanker Attacks. Rigzone.
• Brexit: UK firms ‘not even close to ready’ for no deal. BBC. My bet is that most firms would figure it out quickly when the time comes, but that’s a very low-confidence bet. Lots of risk here still.

Continuing a streak of going heavy on off-topic articles. But… DINOSAURS!!

• Make School Hard Again. Reason. HT Tyler Cowen.
• The Day the Dinosaurs Died. New Yorker. “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.”
• Josh Brown: The power of compounding can help you double your money, again and again. CNBC & Ritholz Wealth Management.
• What a War With Iran Would Look Like. Foreign Affairs. “Even if neither side wants to fight, miscalculation, missed signals, and the logic of escalation could conspire to turn even a minor clash into a regional conflagration.” I’ll add an extra quote, not included in this article, from Eisenhower: “Preventive war was an invention of Hitler. Frankly, I would not even listen to anyone seriously that came and talked about such a thing.”
• Maybe Big Businesses Aren’t So Bad At Innovation. Futurity.org. “The idea that large firms can buy small firms to replace their own R&D is just disastrous. If we have to start rebuilding the R&D engine from scratch, it will be impossible,” Knott says. “The second is that large firms shouldn’t try to operate like small firms to become more productive—they already are more productive.”