In 1996, Australia Enacted Strict Gun Laws. It Hasn't Had a Mass Shooting Since.

At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.
What happened next has been the subject of several academic studies. Violent crime and gun-related deaths did not come to an end in Australia, of course. But as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog pointed out in August, homicides by firearm plunged 59 percent between 1995 and 2006, with no corresponding increase in non-firearm-related homicides. The drop in suicides by gun was even steeper: 65 percent. Studies found a close correlation between the sharp declines and the gun buybacks. Robberies involving a firearm also dropped significantly. Meanwhile, home invasions did not increase, contrary to fears that firearm ownership is needed to deter such crimes. But here’s the most stunning statistic. In the decade before the Port Arthur massacre, there had been 11 mass shootings in the country. There hasn’t been a single one in Australia since.
There have been some contrarian studies about the decrease in gun violence in Australia, including a 2006 paper that argued the decline in gun-related homicides after Port Arthur was simply a continuation of trends already under way. But that paper’s methodology has been discredited, which is not surprising when you consider that its authors were affiliated with pro-gun groups. Other reports from gun advocates have similarly cherry-picked anecdotal evidence or presented outright fabrications in attempting to make the case that Australia’s more-restrictive laws didn’t work. Those are effectively refuted by findings from peer-reviewed papers, which note that the rate of decrease in gun-related deaths more than doubled following the gun buyback, and that states with the highest buyback rates showed the steepest declines. A 2011 Harvard summary of the research concluded that, at the time the laws were passed in 1996, “it would have been difficult to imagine more compelling future evidence of a beneficial effect.”
Whether the same policies would work as well in the United States—or whether similar legislation would have any chance of being passed here in the first place—is an open question...
Source: http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/1...

The latest schoolhouse slaughter shows we have been defeated →

Regular mass gun violence is a particularly American phenomenon, and it’s dissolving society in a particularly American way. With every mass shooting and every utter failure of public policy to respond, the American notion of liberty looks more and more suicidal, a Faustian bargain exchanging sensible restrictions for a nihilistic, diabolical freedom. After the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history, which happened in Las Vegas only last year, conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly articulated this grim view most clearly: “Once again, the big downside of American freedom is on gruesome display,” he wrote. “This is the price of freedom.” Liberty stands now in opposition to life and the pursuit of happiness; no longer do all three seem concurrently possible, and it’s clear which of them we’ve chosen.

Trump "Privatizes" America →

SHARMINI PERIES: Michael, the American Society of Civil Engineers agrees with you that this is inadequate in terms of funding, that the Trump plan is just not sufficient. In fact, it needs, they say, just to deal with the backlog a $4.6-trillion investment by 2025 and Trump's plan doesn't even come close. What do you make of this?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, to begin with, Trump's plan would triple the cost of what the engineers say to $22 trillion and the reason is that it's a Thatcherite privatization plan. Trump's plan reverses the last 150 years of public infrastructure. And in fact, it's the biggest attack on industrial capitalism in over 100 years, more serious than a socialist attack. 
Now, America's first professor of economics at the first business school, Simon Patten, said public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production, but unlike labor, land, and capital, the role of public infrastructure is not to make a profit. It's to provide public services that are basic for the economy's living standards and capacity to produce at a subsidized rate. So, America got rich and came to dominate the world industrial economy by subsidizing all of the basic costs. Low-cost roads, low-cost infrastructure. The government bore these costs so that, in effect, public infrastructure subsidizes the economy to lower the cost of production. 
Trump's plan is to vastly increase it because he forces all of this into the marketplace. Instead of offering, say, roads at the cost of production, he'd actually triple the cost of production by insisting that it be privately financed, probably by hedge funds and by bank credit that would add the interest charges, the capital gains charges, the management fees, the oversight charges and the fines for criminal fraud that goes with it by factoring all these prices into the cost.

The Return of Monopoly →

On July 15, 2015, Amazon marked the twentieth anniversary of its founding with a “global shopping event” called Prime Day...
Prime Day is now an annual event; last year it marked the largest sales day in Amazon’s history. The sale has become a secular holiday, akin in its economic wallop and social ubiquity to Super Bowl Sunday or the Fourth of July. Today, nearly half of the nation’s households are enrolled in Prime. That’s more Americans than go to church every month. More than own a gun. And more than voted for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton last November.
The rise of Amazon, and its overwhelming market dominance, has accelerated the collapse of traditional retail outlets. Amazon’s stock has risen by 300 percent since 2012, and Wall Street analysts have compiled a “Death by Amazon” index to track the retail companies most likely to be killed off by the online giant. This year alone, three retail stalwarts—Walmart, JCPenney, and Rite Aid—plan to shutter or sell off nearly 1,200 stores, and nearly 90,000 Americans have been thrown out of work since October. One of every eleven jobs is tied to shopping centers, which generate $151 billion in sales taxes each year. All of which is rapidly being lost to a single company. In June, Amazon announced its largest-ever acquisition, paying $13.4 billion to buy the Whole Foods grocery chain. Such is the power of the “everything store” and its “one-click ordering.”
Amazon did not come to dominate the way we shop because of its technology. It did so because we let it. Over the past three decades, the U.S. government has permitted corporate giants to take over an ever-increasing share of the economy. Monopoly—the ultimate enemy of free-market competition—now pervades every corner of American life: every transaction we make, every product we consume, every news story we read, every piece of data we download. Eighty percent of seats on airplanes are sold by just four airlines. CVS and Walgreens have a virtual lock on the drugstore and pharmacy business. A private equity firm in Brazil controls roughly half of the U.S. beer market. The chemical giant Monsanto is able to dictate when and how farmers plant its seeds. Google and Facebook control nearly 75 percent of the $73 billion market in digital advertising. Most communities have one cable company to choose from, one provider of electricity, one gas company. Economic power, in fact, is more concentrated than ever: According to a study published earlier this year, half of all publicly traded companies have disappeared over the past four decades.
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Increasing concentration of ownership has also led to unprecedented levels of corporate crime. In case after case, courts in Europe and the United States have ruled that giant companies are operating as “cartels,” engaging in illegal conspiracies among themselves to divide up their turf. As a result, they have been able to fix the price of almost everything in the economy: antibiotics and other life-saving medication, fees on credit card transactions, essential commodities like cell-phone batteries and electric cables and auto parts, the rates companies pay to exchange foreign currency, even the interest rates on the municipal bonds that cities and towns rely on to build schools and libraries and nursing homes. A single price-fixing scandal by the world’s largest banks—fixing the global interest rates known as LIBOR—involved more than $500 trillion in financial instruments.
But the price we pay for increasing monopolization goes far beyond such corporate rip-offs. Monopoly increases income inequality by concentrating wealth in major cities: St. Louis, for example, has lost a long roster of hometown companies to mergers and acquisitions, including Anheuser-Busch, TWA, Ralston Purina, May Department Stores, A.G. Edwards, and Panera Bread. Rural America has been especially hard hit, as local stores and family farms have been “disrupted” by giant supermarket chains, seed companies, fertilizer giants, meat processors, and grain traders. And don’t blame automation: Corporate America’s investments in workplace technology have plunged by 30 percent over the past 30 years. Even robots are subject to the power of monopoly.
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To succeed at breaking up today’s economic overlords, Democrats must pursue three related approaches to antitrust. First, they must stop monopoly before it happens. That means using the antitrust authority of the federal government to crack down on mergers. “Monopoly is made by acquisition,” notes Jonathan Taplin, the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. “Google buying AdMob and DoubleClick, Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp, Amazon buying, to name just a few, Audible, Twitch, Zappos, and Alexa. At a minimum, these companies should not be allowed to acquire other major firms, like Spotify or Snapchat.” When it comes to stopping mergers and acquisitions, Democrats should become far more aggressive.
Second, Democrats should work to rebuild structural barriers to monopoly in a wide range of industries, as they did in the 1930s with Glass-Steagall in banking. A content distributor like AT&T should not be allowed to buy a content provider like Time Warner. Online ad companies should be barred from owning browsers and ad blockers. And Amazon should not operate as both a marketplace and a competitor within that marketplace. It’s one thing, say, to run a big trucking company—but if you’re allowed to own the highway itself, other truckers won’t stand a chance.
Third, Democrats should move to split up or neutralize the power of corporations that have the ability to dominate and control entire realms of commerce. Amazon has forced publishers to offer it steep discounts on books, Monsanto is organizing the genetics behind much of our food supply, and the Cleveland Clinic exerts power over doctors throughout northeast Ohio. Such monopolies must either be regulated aggressively or broken up.

Bubbles: Are They Back? →

First, an economy-threatening bubble does not just sneak up on us. Often the discussion of bubbles implies that we need some complex measuring tools to uncover an economy-threatening bubble that’s lurking in some far corner of the data.

This is absurd on its face. If a bubble is large enough to threaten the economy, it is hard to miss. This was true of both the stock bubble in the 1990s and the housing bubble in the last decade.

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In the case of the housing bubble, inflation-adjusted house prices had risen by more than 70 percent above their long-term trend. This unprecedented run-up in house prices occurred at a time when rents were essentially moving in step with the overall rate of inflation, suggesting that there was no major shift in the fundamentals of the housing market. Furthermore, vacancy rates were already at record highs even before the bubble burst, providing clear evidence that house prices were not being driven by a shortage of housing.

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Should we be concerned about a bubble now? Stock prices and housing prices are both high by historical standards. The ratio of stock prices-to-trend corporate earnings is more than 27-to-1; this compares to a long-term average of 15-to-1.

House prices are also high by historic standards. Inflation-adjusted house prices are still well below their bubble peaks, but are about 40 percent above their long-term average.

In both cases, these markets are high, although in ways that are at least partly explained by the fundamentals of the market. In the case of stock prices, the profit share of GDP is almost 30 percent above its trend level. If this persists, then the ratio of prices-to-earnings is much closer to the long-term average. Of course, a big cut in the corporate tax rate increases the likelihood that a high-profit share in GDP will continue.

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The run-up in house prices also seems less disconcerting when we consider there has been a parallel run up in rents. While rents have not increased as much as house prices, they have been substantially outpacing the overall rate of inflation for the last five years. Low-interest rates would also help to explain house prices being above long-term trends, as they justify a higher ratio of sales prices-to-rents.

Here also, there is a risk that higher rates could send prices tumbling. This could be an especially bad story for moderate-income homeowners, since the bottom tier of the housing market has seen the largest price increases over the last five years.

But even in a bad story, where for example higher interest rates send both stock and house prices back towards their trend levels, we don’t have to fear an economic collapse and probably not even a recession. The high stock market is not driving investment, which remains very modest despite near record-high after-tax profits. Housing construction has come back from its post-crash lows, but is roughly in line with its long-term average share of GDP.

Why American doctors keep doing expensive procedures that don’t work →

Some reasons we have one of the least efficient healthcare systems among the richest countries:

The stent controversy serves as a reminder that the United States struggles when it comes to winnowing evidence-based treatments from the ineffective chaff. As surgeon and health care researcher Atul Gawande observes, “Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm.”
Of course, many Americans receive too little medicine, not too much. But the delivery of useless or low-value services should concern anyone who cares about improving the quality, safety and cost-effectiveness of medical care. Estimates vary about what fraction of the treatments provided to patients is supported by adequate evidence, but some reviews place the figure at under half.
Naturally that carries a heavy cost: One study found that overtreatment — one type of wasteful spending — added between $158 billion and $226 billion to US health care spending in 2011.
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While virtually all doctors support evidence-based medicine in the abstract, clinicians and medical societies seek to maintain their professional and clinical autonomy. Physicians are sensitive to being second-guessed, even when their beliefs about how well treatments work are based on their own experiences and intuitions, not rigorous studies.
Politicians, who recognize that the public holds them in much lower regard than physicians, are hesitant to challenge the belief of many Americans that “doctor always knows best.” The American faith in markets leads to a cultural discomfort with government-imposed limits on the supply or consumption of medical technology...
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Every health care system has to wrestle with tradeoffs among access, innovation, cost control, quality and the efficiency of resource allocation. Other countries, including the UK, may require a favorable cost effectiveness ratio before a treatment is placed on the national formulary — meaning that some treatments, such as some cancer drugs, won’t be recommended for routine funding if they are too expensive relative to their clinical benefits.
Many Americans would bridle at that kind of explicit rationing. Despite concerns about the rising cost of health care, for instance, Medicare routinely covers treatments that produce small benefits at significant social cost. In contrast to the British approach, Medicare generally covers treatments deemed “reasonable and necessary” — a definition that doesn’t include analysis of comparative effectiveness or cost in relation to other treatments...

Damage Bigly →

... The sweeping tax bill gives a huge tax cut to corporations and to wealthy individuals, and will add roughly $1 trillion over the next ten years to the federal deficit. It will widen further the already enormous gulf between the very wealthy and the rest of America. And it sets the stage for an attempt by Republicans in Congress in 2018 to shrink the federal deficit by cutting benefits to a large number of Americans through reductions in Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs.
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However, the harm to the judicial branch and Trump’s personal imprint on it are considerably greater when one considers the lower courts. By mid- December, Trump had appointed twelve judges to the US Court of Appeals, one level down from the Supreme Court, the most this early in any presidency since Richard Nixon’s. Virtually all of them are from the right. At the level of district or trial courts, Trump’s nominations have included figures like thirty-six-year-old Brett J. Talley, who has never tried a case and was unanimously rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. This proved too much even for Chuck Grassley, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who refused to confirm him.
Meanwhile, a new proposal is being circulated by a right-wing legal scholar to expand the number of appellate judgeships (now 179) by two- or threefold, and to increase the number of district judges as well, with the avowed purpose of “undoing the judicial legacy of President Barack Obama.”2 In short, while the courts have served as an occasional constraint upon Trump during his first year in office, he is moving quickly to reshape the judiciary so that, in the long run, it may prove to be less independent and less constraining than it has been.