The global economy has been on a serious roll since 2004. According to IMF data, we’re in the midst of the biggest global boom since the 1970s. Of course, the ’70s weren’t so great in the U.S. and, while the ’00s have been better, they haven’t felt better for a lot of people. The charts below (created by Time.com’s Feilding Cage using …

As already noted, I’m loving these Dick Armey posts on Swampland. In his latest, he writes:

Social Security is not a retirement system. It is an intergenerational transfer program. Our 21st century economy is marked by a global economy and multiple zigs and zags in the typical career path. Today’s 401(k) funds, diverse mutual fund

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From Mike Adams’ minute-by-minute coverage of today’s Estonia-England European Championship qualifier at guardian.co.uk (the game’s not over yet; England’s ahead 3-0 with about 10 minutes left);

GOAL! Estonia 0 – 2 England (Crouch 54) Beckham, in plenty of space, sends over a dipping cross that Crouch allows to bounce in front of him

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It’s just that most of us don’t express our concerns quite like this:

The impending collapse of Social Security and Medicare will be the largest bankruptcy in human history. It is an avalanche aimed squarely at the American economy.

Now, I’ve been guilty of some Social Security and Medicare alarmism of my own in the past. And I remain …

At the request of Chunglee Wang, here’s the text of my commentary (they ran the long version) on PBS’s Nightly Business Report Monday night:

You hear a lot of complaints these days from Capitol Hill and parts of corporate America that China is manipulating its currency to keep it from rising against the dollar. As a matter of fact,

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That’s eBay powerseller Brandi Ramos (purveyor of big and tall clothing to men of 52 nations) on the left, and eBay CEO Meg Whitman on the right. I sat with them at the Webby Awards last night, where Meg, Brandi, and a couple of other successful eBay merchants (Lanny and Deena Morton, who sell sporting goods) accepted a Lifetime …

One Fred Jones, in the comments to an earlier post on health care, makes the following claim:

The real problem is not insurance, or lack of it, but the skyrocketing costs of the underlying healthcare itself. Why isn’t young Klein concerned with why doctors are pretty much guaranteed to become millionaires in the US and why they are

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I don’t want to spend my day debating health care with Dick Armey, especially since, as noted previously, I don’t really know what I’m talking about. So I’ll just let young Klein the ever-popular young collectivist E. Klein do the hard work on Armey’s claim that “health care regulations leave us worse off by an amount equal to 11 percent …

The family went and had breakfast with the frogs this morning at the American Museum of Natural History. You couldn’t actually eat in the room with the frogs, but we did get to see some of the frogs being fed a nutritious (if probably not locavorean) meal of fruit flies and crickets. The photos are so tiny because if I ran them any …