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Sanders and Clinton both want to crack down on fracking. Is that such a good idea?

by ChristiBrien Posted on March 9, 2016

Sanders and Clinton both want to crack down on fracking. Is that such a good idea?

By on 9 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Could promises by Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to dramatically restrict fracking actually make climate change worse?

In Sunday night’s presidential debate, both Democratic candidates came out swinging against the controversial technique for extracting oil and natural gas. Sanders was blunt. “No, I do not support fracking,” he said. Clinton was a bit less direct. She said that she would hold fracking operations to such high standards that “by the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place.” (You can watch their responses above.)

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While Sanders’ statement basically matched what he has said before, Clinton’s appeared to be something of a shift from her earlier positions. As secretary of state, she backed a push to get fracking operations up and running in foreign countries and called natural gas “the cleanest fossil fuel available for power generation today.”

Now, it appears that either Democrat could try to curtail fracking substantially.

Many environmentalists would celebrate that, but some experts are warning that when it comes to climate change, limiting fracking could backfire. To understand why, you need to know a bit of background about the complex scientific debate surrounding the issue.

Environmental activists have criticized fracking for possibly contaminating subterranean water supplies, polluting air in communities near drilling sites, and contributing to climate change. They point out that methane, the main component of natural gas, is a greenhouse gas that is up to 90 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in the short term if it leaks into the air without being burned (though it lingers in the atmosphere for much less time than CO2).

When natural gas is burned in power plants, it produces far less CO2 than coal does. But methane leaks occur at nearly every step of the natural gas production process — from well to pipeline to storage. Right now, there’s a raging debate among scientists over whether the methane leaks from the natural gas system or the huge carbon dioxide emissions from coal are ultimately worse for global warming.

In Sunday’s debate, Clinton said that fixing the methane leaks would be a precondition for her to support fracking. Clinton and Sanders have both proposed new regulations on methane leaks that build on rules currently being formulated by the Obama administration. But both candidates say they want to go beyond simply fixing methane leaks and are actually promising to eliminate most fracking.

Here’s the problem: There’s a good chance that efforts to restrict fracking could lead to the burning of more coal. About 90 percent of the natural gas used in the United States is produced domestically, according to federal statistics; more than half of that is produced by fracking. The fracking boom has resulted in cheap gas replacing coal as the chief power source in many parts of the country. Gas now accounts for about one-third of U.S. electricity production, up from around 23 percent when Obama took office. That growth has been matched by a decline in coal consumption.

At the same time, the country has seen a steady reduction in greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP, an indication that the economy is becoming cleaner. The rapid growth of solar, wind, and other renewables is one important factor behind that trend, as are widespread improvements to energy efficiency. But the swapping of natural gas for coal has been arguably the most vital — note how the falling blue line (coal) mirrors the rising green line (gas):

Energy Information Administration

Less fracking would mean less gas production, which would mean higher gas prices, which would likely mean that gas’ share of America’s electricity supply would fall.

“Without natural gas, it would have been very difficult to achieve the emissions reductions from retiring coal plants that occurred over the last decade,” said Rob Barnett, a senior energy analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “Few politicians would want to turn the dial back on natural gas, if it meant we started burning more coal in exchange.”

In other words, some analysts said, if Clinton and Sanders are committed to confronting climate change, choking off the country’s supply of natural gas could be a big step in the wrong direction. That’s especially true if the drawdown of fracking isn’t paired with new policies aimed specifically at preventing a reversion to coal. Sanders has called for a national carbon tax, and both candidates have supported various incentives for renewables. But a carbon tax is unlikely to pass Congress, renewables are under siege in many states, and Obama’s plan to reduce coal consumption was recently put on hold by the Supreme Court.

“In the present legislative and regulatory environment, any severe curtailing of natural gas fracking would just lead to a bounce back of coal, not an expansion of renewables,” said Ray Pierrehumbert, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago. “A strong carbon tax or strong support for renewables and efficiency could possibly allow fracking to be phased out without causing a bounce back in coal, but that’s not the situation we are facing in the U.S.”

Not everyone agrees with that assessment. Coal is ultimately in a death spiral regardless of what happens with fracking, says Mark Brownstein, vice president of climate programs at the Environmental Defense Fund, a group that generally supports replacing coal with gas.

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“Any way you slice it, you have old, inefficient, highly polluting coal-fired power plants in the U.S., and there are all sorts of economic and political and environmental factors that bear down on them irrespective of the price of natural gas,” he said. “The simple possibility of gas prices rising doesn’t change the fundamental pressure on coal.”

Fracking faces economic pressures of its own, unrelated to regulation of methane leaks or water contamination. The boom in oil and gas production is starting to come full circle, as the saturated market drives down prices, which in turn drives down production. In 2015, gas production dipped for the first time in years; the same crash happened in oil production in response to record-low global oil prices. In other words, the fracking industry is already contracting without any help from Sanders or Clinton.

And for what it’s worth, the candidates’ threats could be kind of toothless anyway, Barnett said.

“It’s unlikely the president has the authority to impose a national ban on fracking without new legislation from Congress,” he said. “And Congress simply isn’t likely to play along.”

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Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps

by Myrna Posted on March 9, 2016

Turns out, dumping compost on grasslands can do a surprising amount for the planet. Steve Russell/The Toronto Star/ZUMA When John Wick and his wife, Peggy Rathmann, bought their 540-acre ranch in 1998, it was in bad shape. Located in California’s Marin County, a windswept region northwest of San Francisco Bay, the land had been worn down by overgrazing; the grass was gone and the soil was degraded. Neither Wick nor Rathmann knew how to fix it because the couple didn’t have any ranching experience—Wick worked in construction management, and Rathmann wrote children’s classics like 10 Minutes till Bedtime and Good Night, Gorilla. So Wick consulted his friend Jeffrey Creque, a rangeland ecology expert. Creque helped Wick repair the soil by bringing back some grass—which gave the two an idea: They knew that in addition to enriching the soil, healthy grass, through photosynthesis, could remove carbon from the atmosphere. So was there a way, they wondered, to grow more grass on Wick’s land and slow global warming at the same time? The theory made sense: Carbon that is absorbed by grass can be stored for hundreds of years in the grass’ roots and surrounding soil—a much better spot for it than in the air, where it warms the planet in the form of carbon dioxide. Carbon-enriched soil, in turn, feeds grass so it can grow taller and suck down even more carbon. In rangelands, this cycle takes place on a massive scale: Between the grass and the soil, a third of the world’s carbon is stored in these expanses. But tilling and overgrazing unleash that carbon. These practices also cause topsoil erosion, which compounds the problem by making it hard for grass to grow. To make matters worse, rangelands are often home to cows, and manure releases methane and nitrous oxide gases into the atmosphere. In fact, livestock are responsible for nearly one-fifth of the globe’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Read the rest at Mother Jones. Originally posted here –  Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps ; ; ;

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Science Has Found a Brilliant New Use for Your Kitchen Scraps

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Medicare Wants to Try a New Way of Paying for Expensive Drugs

by ChristoMighell Posted on March 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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For drugs administered in clinics and hospitals, Medicare reimburses doctors a flat 6 percent of the price of the drug. This has never really made much sense, since it doesn’t cost any more to attach a $1,000 vial to an IV line than a $100 vial. So now the Obama administration is proposing a five-year test of a new system that pays a flat fee plus a smaller percentage of the cost of the drug. Here’s what it looks like:

The current rule is an update of an older rule that was even stupider than reimbursing based on price. But it’s still pretty stupid. If two drugs are about the same, and you can make $6 from one and $60 from the other, then you might as well prescribe the more expensive one. That’s exactly the wrong incentive. Not everyone sees it this way, of course:

The test program is also likely to meet stiff opposition from the pharmaceutical industry and some providers—especially cancer centers where many high-price specialty drugs are used—because of the drop in reimbursement….Providers may also feel they are being pressured by the federal government into selecting cheaper drugs they don’t feel are as effective.

This makes no sense. No one is being pressured into selecting cheaper drugs. You just won’t get paid an artificial bonus for avoiding them in favor of more lucrative options that don’t work any better. If that’s your idea of “pressure,” I’d recommend you go into a less demanding field.

The new system, I assume, is designed to recognize that administering a drug is mostly—but not entirely—a flat cost operation. The reason the cost isn’t completely flat is that clinics and hospitals have to pay for the drugs up front and keep them in stock. There’s a carrying cost involved in that, which means that expensive drugs really do cost a little more to administer than cheaper ones.

But not that much more. The new system seems well worth a try.

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Medicare Wants to Try a New Way of Paying for Expensive Drugs

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This PAC Is Raising Money for Donald Trump. But Where Is It Going?

by Lucile93R19 Posted on March 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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A newly formed political action committee is using Donald Trump’s name and trademarked slogan—”Make America Great Again”—in an unusual fundraising ploy. The group, the Great America PAC, has no connection to the Trump campaign, but it has been blasting out emails soliciting donations that it claims will be channeled directly to Team Trump. In a recent email, the PAC implored donors to help “build a grassroots wall of support around Donald Trump by chipping in at least $5 to have your name placed on his official FEC report by signing the ‘I Support Donald Trump’ petition.” On the PAC’s website, donors are asked to donate between $5 and $1,000.

The website notes that the first $5 of each donation will be sent to the Trump campaign. And Dan Backer, the group’s treasurer, tells Mother Jones that this money is indeed “earmarked” for Trump. What happens to the rest of the money, for any donations greater than $5, is not clear. The email does promise to use money the group raises to build a vaguely described grassroots operation that will help support Trump. But there’s no telling how much of the money gathered by this Trumpy PAC will directly fund pro-Trump activities.

The fundraising email is signed by Amy Kremer, a former chairman of the Tea Party Express. Kremer did not respond to a request for comment.

A recipient of the email might be forgiven for assuming it comes from an official Trump-approved outfit. The website prominently features the official Trump slogan: “Make America Great Again.” And there may be a problem with that. Trump trademarked that phrase for the purposes of “political campaign services, namely, promoting public awareness of Donald J. Trump as a candidate for public office; providing online information regarding political issues and the 2016 presidential election;” and for “fundraising in the field of politics.” The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Asked about the PAC’s use of the trademarked phrase, Backer, a Virginia-based attorney who has helped set up a number of conservative-oriented PACs that capitalize on current events, said the phrase is a quote from Ronald Reagan.

The Great America PAC was first registered with the Federal Election Commission on February 1. But it paid to run pro-Trump radio ads in Iowa in January—which is legal. The ads, which cost a total of $25,000, were produced and placed on air by a mysterious ad-buying firm called GRP Buying LLC, using a rented mailbox at a shipping center in Columbus, Ohio. The PAC has also spent $10,000 on television ads and $15,000 on email blasts.

Initially, this PAC tried to associate itself even more closely with Trump by using the name TrumPAC. But a PAC may not use a candidate’s name if it doesn’t have the candidate’s permission. (For example, last year a super-PAC backing Carly Fiorina was forced to create an elaborate acronym to keep its name: CARLY for America.) When the FEC contacted the PAC in February and inquired about its use of the TrumPAC name, Backer, an FEC critic who was the lawyer in a key Supreme Court case two years ago that removed caps on how much money donors can contribute to political campaigns and committees, had a sharp response. In a letter to the FEC, he stated he didn’t know anyone running for office named “TRUMPAC.” He informed the FEC that another party, whom he did not identify, had requested it change its name and that it would do so, but not because the FEC asked.

So how much has the Great America PAC raised with its Trumpish solicitations? It doesn’t have to file any disclosure reports until late March.

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This PAC Is Raising Money for Donald Trump. But Where Is It Going?

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Corals are in the middle of a “global bleaching event.” Here’s what that means

by LorriEstrada Posted on March 7, 2016

Corals are in the middle of a “global bleaching event.” Here’s what that means

By on 7 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

If you have ever been snorkeling in a tropical paradise and seen the psychedelic colors and teeming variety of otherworldly sea critters, you were gazing upon something increasingly rare: a healthy coral reef. That site also does a lot more than dazzle vacationers. Coral reefs occupy just 0.1 percent of the oceans’ bottom but provide habitat to a quarter of the world’s fish species. They also prevent erosion along coastlines and buffer the impact of storms, providing protection, food, and livelihoods for about 500 million people.

A year ago, I warned that something “really, really terrible” was about to happen to the globe’s corals. Since then, that thing has come to pass. The world over, from the South Pacific to the Caribbean to coastal western Africa, reefs are expelling zooxanthellae, the symbiotic algae that feed them and give them color. That’s because corals can only maintain contact with their algal lifeline under certain water temperatures, and climate change has triggered a decades-long warming of the oceans. Add a particularly powerful El Niño like we’re in now — essentially, cranking up the fire under a simmering pot — and you get what’s known as a “global bleaching event.” We are now experiencing only the third one in recorded history. Here’s a timeline, from the XL Catlin Seaview Survey:

XL Catlan Seaview Survey

There are two particularly disturbing things about this current bleaching event. The first is its duration: It started in 2014 and “could extend well into 2017,” Mark Eakin, who directs Coral Reef Watch for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. Already, this is the longest coral bleaching on record — the previous ones lasted less than a year, he says. And he expects that this year, bleaching will expand and “hit more reefs” and be “more extreme” than last year.

The second is how little time has passed since the previous global-scale bleaching, which took place in 2010. Once coral lose their zooxanthellae, they quickly begin to decline in health. But given time, they can recover — and many did between the last two coral bleaching events in 1998 and 2010. But this new one is only four years after the last. The shortened interval between bleachings means less recovery time and more losses, Eakin says.

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Warming water isn’t the only way climate change damages corals. About a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels ends up in the oceans, where it drives down pH levels. As a result, the oceans are currently 30 percent more acidic than they were at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. Heightened acidity impedes the growth of any species in the oceans that develop hard surfaces — everything from oysters and crabs to, yes, corals. A recent Nature study found that coral reefs grew 7 percent faster under pre-Industrial Revolution pH conditions than they do now. Slower growth makes it harder to recover from recurring insults like bleaching, Eakin says.

Since the 1970s, the Caribbean region has lost 80 percent of its corals and the Great Barrier Reef along the Australian coast has declined by half. Eakin says climate models suggest the Caribbean’s corals face the biggest threat going forward, and they portend a “fairly dire future” for reefs worldwide. If current greenhouse gas emissions hold, he says, by 2050 we could see global bleaching happen every year — in short, a seascape no longer capable of supporting its vital ecosystems, ones that are are richer in biodiversity than rainforests.

The only hope for averting such a fate, he says, is a global greenhouse gas emissions deal that holds global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius. Even then, we’ll also have to address what he calls the “local stressors that act in concert to damage corals,” including overfishing and industrial and agricultural pollution. There’s also a direct effect of all those beach holidays in coral-rich regions. A 2015 study by University of Florida researchers estimated that as much as 14,000 tons of sunscreen lotion enters the ocean in coral reef areas annually. Most of it contains a chemical that makes corals more prone to bleaching at extremely low water concentrations (more here).

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China’s greenhouse emissions might already have peaked

by YukikoQ52ojac Posted on March 7, 2016

China’s greenhouse emissions might already have peaked

By on 7 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

China is the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases, the heat-trapping pollution that is causing global warming. So what China spews into the air — how much, and when — is crucial to the planet’s future.

There might be some optimistic news on that front today.

For years, experts have expected China’s greenhouse gas emissions to continue growing over the next couple decades. But according to a new study, Chinese emissions may have actually peaked in 2014 — and could soon begin a steady decline. And if those emissions didn’t peak in 2014, researchers say, they definitely will by 2025, years ahead of China’s official 2030 goal. (Researchers say the pace and scale of change in China’s economy make it hard to pinpoint the exact year emissions will peak — or to say for sure if they already have.)

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The new findings appear in a paper released Sunday night by the U.K.’s Center for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. It was authored by Fergus Green and the famous climate change research economist, Nicholas Stern.

China’s current peak-emissions target of 2030 was enshrined in the historic U.S.-China climate agreement reached at the end of 2014. That deal paved the way for the global Paris agreement late last year.

But there has been a growing body of research suggesting that China could reach that goal much sooner. The new analysis is based on economic forecasts that take into account the shifting and contracting nature of the Chinese economy, which is moving away from energy-intensive industries like construction and steel-making and towards service-related sectors. The Chinese government has instituted a three-year moratorium on approving new coal mines, and is scrambling to alleviate the country’s air pollution crisis.

The study follows Chinese statistics published last week showing the country’s coal consumption dropping 3.7 percent in 2015, marking the second year in a row that the country has slashed coal use and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as news the country will close 1,000 coal mines this year alone.

As part of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan — a blueprint used by the Chinese government to lay out economic and social priorities — China announced last week it will attempt to reduce its carbon dioxide intensity by 18 percent between now and 2020, according to the Washington Post.

The new research is putting pressure on Chinese officials to do even more to fight climate change.

“China’s international commitment to peak emissions ‘around 2030’ should be seen as a highly conservative upper limit from a government that prefers to under-promise and over-deliver,” the report says.

China was put in an awkward position Monday when it was forced by news of Green and Stern’s report to say its emissions were, in fact, still growing, in order to defend its 2030 target as appropriate. Chinese leaders are famously sensitive about the country’s slowing economy, and fearful that scrutiny of its economic and environmental policies could lead to widespread discontent.

“You asked whether our emissions had peaked in 2014 — certainly not,” said Xie Zhenhua, the country’s top climate change envoy, according to Reuters. “In fact, our carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing.”

Last week, America’s own top climate official, Todd Stern, told reporters in Beijing that there could be international pressure if China’s targets appeared to be too easy to achieve. “It will be up to the Chinese government whether they increase their target but there will obviously be a lot of international opinion looking forward to additional measures — whether it is China or anyone else,” he said, according to Reuters.

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Donald Trump’s 47 Percent Moment

by JenniHarlow Posted on March 7, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, Mitt Romney, the twice-failed GOP presidential candidate, delivered a speech that blasted Donald Trump, the current Republican front-runner, calling the tycoon “a phony, a fraud” and citing Trump’s “dishonesty” and his “bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics.” It was a clear move on Romney’s part to rally the GOP establishment against the celebrity real estate mogul whose endorsement he warmly embraced during the 2012 campaign. Naturally, Trump responded in kind. Within hours, at a campaign rally in Portland, Maine, he lashed out at Romney.

Trump noted that Romney had “failed horribly” four years ago. He claimed that Romney had begged Trump to endorse him in that race: “I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees.’ He would have dropped to his knees.” His audience roared with laughter. And Trump went on:

It was a campaign that should have never been lost. You’re running against a failed president. He came up with the 47 percent. He demeaned 47 percent of the people in our country, right? The famous 47 percent. Once that was said, I’ll be honest, once that was said, a lot of people thought it was over for him.

On Monday, after Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) assailed him, Trump returned to this line of attack, tweeting, “Lindsey Graham is all over T.V., much like failed 47% candidate Mitt Romney. These nasty, angry, jealous failures have ZERO credibility!”

In Trump’s view, Romney lost partly due to the infamous remarks, reported by Mother Jones, in which Romney said at a private fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans “believe that they are victims…that government has a responsibility to care for them…that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Romney noted that these people do not pay income taxes and do not “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” His comments indicted nearly half of the nation as moochers and freeloaders who do not contribute to society.

For Trump, that insult helped doom Romney’s campaign. But last year, Trump voiced a strikingly similar sentiment. During a June 2015 one-on-one interview on Fox News, host Sean Hannity asked Trump if he, as president, could get 50 million Americans out of poverty. Of course, Trump said, and he added:

I would create incentives for people to work. People don’t have an incentive. They make more money by sitting there doing nothing than they make if they have a job. We have to create incentives that they actually do much better by working. Right now they have a disincentive. They have an incentive not to work.

This was a routine conservative contention: Assistance programs cause people not to work. And Hannity pressed Trump: Would he insist that recipients of food stamps, welfare, and other government assistance “have to work for it?” Trump replied that this could be necessary, and he remarked that Bill Clinton had pushed such a approach with welfare reform. Then Trump made a broader point:

The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent.

So one half of the nation is carrying the other half, and the attitude of those in the latter half is, “we don’t have to do anything.” This is darn close to Romney’s 47 percent analysis, but 3 percentage points greater. Trump was depicting 50 percent of Americans as people seeking a free ride.

Both Romney’s and Trump’s comments hail back to a right-wing talking point—this is a country of takers and makers—that distorts actual statistics. In 2011, 46.4 percent of US households did not pay federal income taxes. (The number was higher that year than the usual 40 percent or so, due to the recession that hit during the Bush-Cheney years.) This is the stat that Romney had obviously had in mind. The problem comes—the demeaning, as Trump would put it—when folks who do not pay income taxes are equated with lazy ne’er-do-wells merely angling for a handout. That’s not what the numbers show. In 2011, 60 percent of those who didn’t pay income taxes did pay taxes for Social Security and Medicare. These people essentially did not make enough money to qualify for the income tax. Another 22 percent of the people who didn’t pay income taxes were retirees. Only 8 percent of US households paid no federal taxes at all. According to a Washington Post analysis, that was “usually because they’re either unemployed or on disability or students or are very poor.”

So many of the those who didn’t pay income taxes are working and paying some form of tax, and many others within this group—pensioners and poor people—shouldn’t be expected to pay income taxes. These people are not shirkers who say, “We don’t have to do anything.”

But Trump, like Romney, seems to believe the country is indeed equally split between strivers and loafers. And last year Trump had no reluctance in demeaning 50 percent, not 47 percent.

His comment, not surprisingly, didn’t cause a stir. He’s been spraying a fire hose of outrageous remarks since he entered the presidential race, and this one got lost in the wash. It’s also a statement fully in sync with his arrogant schtick that divides the world into winners and losers. Though he’s now blasting Romney for the original 47 percent insult to Americans, Trump, too, apparently views many Americans as parasites. The only difference is that his estimate is higher.

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Donald Trump’s 47 Percent Moment

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Tax Plan Showdown: Now We Have Bernie Sanders Too

by WinnieHeim2 Posted on March 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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And now we are five. The Tax Policy Center has analyzed Bernie Sanders’ tax plan, and we now have data for everyone still running except John Kasich, who hasn’t produced any tax proposals yet. The full reports are here: Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Sanders. Click the links for details. Or just look at the charts below for the nickel summary.

As before, the Republican plans are all the same: a tiny tax cut for the middle class as a sop to distract them from the enormous payday they give to the rich, and a massive hole in the deficit.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s plan is fairly modest. It leaves the middle class alone and taxes the rich a little more. Once her domestic proposals are paid for, it’s probably deficit neutral. Bernie Sanders is far more extreme. He’s basically the mirror image of the Republicans: he’d tax the middle class moderately more and soak the hell out of the rich. This would raise a tremendous amount of money, which he’d use to pay for his health care plan and his other domestic proposals. It’s impossible to say for sure how this would affect the deficit, but the evidence suggests that it would blow a pretty big hole since he plans to spend quite a bit more money than he’d raise.

So that’s that. Quite a choice we have this year.

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Tax Plan Showdown: Now We Have Bernie Sanders Too

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Top Ten List of Things That Are Going Great in America

by HalPXOcxgddti Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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I get requests from time to time:

I can do better than that. How about a top ten list of all the things going well in America right now?

  1. Unemployment = 4.9 percent. By virtually every measure, more people are re-entering the labor force and more people are finding work.
  2. Inflation = 1.4 percent. The annual inflation rate for food is 0.8 percent.
  3. Economic growth = 2.4 percent. This could be better, but it’s not bad: the US economy is stronger than China, Japan, or Mexico. We’re not losing, we’re winning.
  4. The average price of a gallon of gas is $1.81, its lowest price in a decade.
  5. 20 million people have gained health insurance since 2013, and health care costs are rising at the most moderate rate in decades.
  6. The abortion rate has been declining for 30 years and is now lower than at any time since the early 70s.
  7. Among teens, alcohol use is down, crime is down, violent behavior is down, illicit drug use is down, sexual intercourse is down, condom use is up, pregnancy is down, and cigarette smoking is down.
  8. High school test scores and graduation rates are up.
  9. There were only 22 US military fatalities in the Middle East in 2015, the lowest number since 9/11.
  10. Net illegal immigration has been negative for seven straight years. Since 2008, the population of undocumented workers in the US has fallen from 12 million to 11 million.

Unfortunately, there is also one big thing that’s not going so well:

  1. Despite a reasonably strong economy, wages have declined since 2000 and have rebounded only slightly over the past couple of years.

It’s quite possible that this one thing is more important than all the others put together. And needless to say, anyone can put together their own list of ten things that are going badly: police shootings, ISIS, income inequality, etc. Nonetheless, when you look at the big picture, there’s an awful lot going right at the moment.

From:

Top Ten List of Things That Are Going Great in America

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I Will Be Live-Blogging Tonight’s Republican Debate

by ElliottRundle Posted on March 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Republican presidential candidates are holding yet another debate tonight. However, there’s a silver lining: this time around, the moderators can ignore Ben Carson without feeling guilty about it.

Anyway, it’s in Detroit, and it will be aired on Fox at 9 p.m. Eastern. Join me here for real-time comment, fact-checking, and all-around mockery.

Excerpt from:

I Will Be Live-Blogging Tonight’s Republican Debate

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