Most read Realitybase posts in June 2013

The Citigroup Plutonomy Memos With key quotations from documents that are being disappeared. This post has been the #1 response to a Google search for "plutonomy memo."

The Dysfunction and Corruption of Our Healthcare System, Its Damage to the National Economy and other Basic Healthcare Matters (Guest Post) Describing a system that is destroying global competitiveness of American business, that violates fundamental insurance risk principles, and that has inherent conflicts of interest preventing quality national health care delivery and cost efficiency; and proposing a solution.

The minimum medical loss ratio provision in the healthcare bills will raise healthcare prices. Doing the arithmetic to show the perverse incentive this Obamacare provision gives insurers to allow medical costs to go up in order to increase insurer profits.

What's killing American females? A recent study shows that Americans rank last in life expectancy in a group of 21 high-income countries, that American females are falling behind much faster than American males, and that Americans rank near the bottom in almost all causes of death. Several charts.

The American Dream died in February 1973. With graphs showing stagnation of inflation-adjusted middle class incomes since the 1970s after strong and steady post-WWII growth.

The history of US per-capita petroleum consumption will surprise you.  A graph and other data show US per-capita consumption of petroleum is down substantially from the 1970s, has been very stable since 1983 because of CAFE standards, and has fluctuated only slightly with retail price changes.

The Recession Is Coming! The Recession Is Coming! (Republished with corrected chart.) December 2007 post with charts showing America's middle class had already been in recession for 7 years and asking if we really care about them.

Wages for college graduates in the cross hairs of US business. How US employers are driving down domestic wages by offshoring, importing guest workers, and deliberately creating an oversupply of American college grads.

US job creation has been declining since April 2000 and is now in freefall. Discussion around a dramatic graph showing the US employment-to-population ratio strongly increasing until 2000 followed by a devastating loss in 10 years of all the gains made in the previous 20 years.

The Copenhagen meeting on global climate change failed in part because economists' blather about "efficiency" distracts from the real issues. This is a detailed analysis of the effects that imposing a single price on all CO2 emissions would have on coal, natural gas, and petroleum. For example, a price of $80/ton would increase the price of coal by a factor of more than 7 and would substantially end the use of coal while increasing the use of natural gas and even petroleum. The same carbon price would increase the price of gasoline only 80 cents per gallon and would be a negligible inducement to reduce consumption because 80 cents/gallon is not a lot of money for drivers of cars are that are becoming very fuel efficient because of CAFÉ standards. The real issue is that valuable reserves of fossil fuels must be left in the ground, and nobody knows how to do that politically.