How getting money from the government can be injurious

In order to bring suit against someone in court, the plaintiff has to show that they have ‘standing’, which means that they have suffered a fairly direct injury of some sort that the court can redress. In response to my post on the cases bought against Obamacare because of its use of federal subsidies in the form of tax credits to make health insurance affordable to low income people, reader Mark Dowd posed the good question of how the people who were suing could have standing to do so. How can getting money from the government to purchase health insurance be considered to cause an injury?
[Read more…]

Vote ‘No’ on Issue 7

The Cleveland area is going through another round of wealthy sports owners putting the squeeze on residents to enrich themselves. To recap, a couple of decades ago the county passed taxes to pay for building three major sports stadiums downtown for baseball, basketball, and football. Of course, while people paid for the stadiums with their taxes, team owners were the ones who reaped the benefits.
[Read more…]

The super-wealthy’s rise

The Occupy movement did us the valuable service of focusing attention of income inequality and giving rise to the meme of the 1% vs. the 99%. While that is catchy, the reality is that it is what is going on with the top 0.1% that is really telling. The class struggle that is intensifying is no longer between the wealthy and the rest of us, but between the super-wealthy and the rest.
[Read more…]

The BRICS on Crimea

In covering Ukraine and Crimea, much of the western press has given the indication that Russia has been isolated internationally on this issue. But that is not quite the case. Much of the analysis has focused on the G8 grouping of nations that is dominated by US allies such as the NATO countries. But there are other economic groupings such as the BRICS alliance consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and it turns out that that alliance has unanimously backed Russia’s position.
[Read more…]

Another legal challenge to Obamacare

One of the key features of the highly complicated Affordable Care Act is the subsidy that is given to lower income people to enable them to afford to purchase health insurance. These subsidies are provided through both the state exchanges for those states that set them up and through the federal exchanges in those states that decided that they wanted to have no part of the ACA or decided to let the federal government set them up. So far, 16 states have set up their own exchanges and 34 exchanges are run by the Department of Health and Human Services. The subsidies come in the form of tax credits provided by the IRS.
[Read more…]