Everyone's got them. Mine are here.
Politics, technology, science, economics and video games discussed.
Economist: "What is Trumponomics and how does it differ from standard Republican economics?"
Trump: "We have nations where…they’ll get as much as 100% of a tax or a tariff for a certain product and for the same product we get nothing, OK? It’s very unfair."
This betrays his fundamental misunderstanding of trade between nations and competitive advantage.
Read MoreIn the US, there's a massive debate about universal healthcare. Republicans tend argue that it's too much of a budget cost or that citizens should be 'free to choose their own' healthcare. Democrats tend to argue that healthcare should be a basic right offered by the state. Lost somewhere in translation here is the economic case for universal coverage. Neither party seems to want to go into it, but it's important to understand how healthcare isn't a regular market, and why it gets so expensive when individuals have to shop for their own coverage.
Read MoreBloomberg Report: The U.S. Lags in Life Expectancy Gains
In the past 40 years, America has dropped from above average to below average life expectancy among developed countries, despite the fact that we spend significantly more per capita on healthcare.
“Life expectancy [in the U.S.] is now more than a year below the OECD average of 80.1,” the OECD said in a press statement, “compared to one year above the average in 1970.”
- Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report
Every single country doing better than us has some form of socialized healthcare. Purely privatized healthcare for the vast majority of Americans is not fine. The Affordable Care Act may have some serious issues in both implementation and, you know, affordability, but the system is a step in the right direction. It needs to be fixed, not scrapped.
Unless, of course, someone got serious about an actual single-payer system.
For as much crap as the Affordable Care Act has gotten (and a lot of it rightfully so), I was able to sign up in 20 minutes for a plan that costs $55 a month. While it's not the best coverage, it's also not the worst, I get to keep the old doctor I had when I was insured through Trion, and is infinitely better than "Did you get sick or injured? Too bad, sucker."
So, that's pretty decent, I guess.
The entire process took just about 20 minutes. The user flow wasn't great, and the response waiting for information from the server wasn't particularly great either, but California's implementation is certainly better than anything that existed previously.