Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

"...a more collective approach to survival."

By John Ballard



What she said.

Appearing on CNN yesterday morning, Senator Orrin Hatch (R, Utah) groused about what he called the
�Europeanization� of health care. Translated, that means that we have decided to take a more collective approach to survival. If you cannot afford health insurance, your fellow citizens will help you pay for it.


Hatch is correct: in 2014, a family of four earning $88,200 (or four times the federal poverty level) will get a subsidy to help buy insurance in the new Exchanges. $88,200 may sound like a fortune if you live in Idaho (where median income for a family of four is $58,000), but in Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Jersey, $88,200 is actually less than median income for a family of four. Even in New Hampshire, median income for a family of four is $87,396. (Half of all families of four earn less; half earn more. In other words, a family that size bringing home $88,200 in New Hampshire is smack dab in the middle of the pack.) See this fascinating table that shows median income for individuals as well as families including of two to six people in all fifty states. It�s startling to see how widely incomes vary in different parts of the country.


She concludes "I think that most Americans will find that the more they learn about reform, the less scary it becomes."

Yep.



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2 comments:

  1. HyperIonMarch 24, 2010 at 12:38 PM

    who is "she"? why not name her?

    ReplyDelete
  2. John BallardMarch 24, 2010 at 1:14 PM

    Is the hyperlink broken?
    Maggie Mahar is a fellow at The Century Foundation and the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much (Harper/Collins 2006) and Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982�1999 (Harper/Collins, 2003), a book that Warren Buffett recommended in Berkshire Hathaway's annual report.
    Before beginning to specialize in health care, Mahar was a financial journalist. She has written for Institutional Investor, The New York Times, and Barron's, where she served first as senior writer and then as senior editor from the late eighties through the late nineties. There, she covered Wall Street, Washington, and social policy as well as markets and politics in Russia, Japan, and the Middle East. After leaving Barron's, she wrote a column about international markets and economics for Bloomberg.
    Before becoming a journalist, Maggie Mahar was an English professor at Yale University, from which she holds a B.A. and a Ph.D. in English literature. She lives in Manhattan where she continues to blog and write about health care.

    ReplyDelete

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