Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Medicare for All has been in the news for months, and it will be a key campaign issue in the upcoming elections. Although I wrote about some of the problems with the concept months ago, that was based upon predictions about what might be in the legislation. Since the Medicare for All Act has been filed, we can clearly see what implementing this might mean for you and your family. Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith has written an excellent…

Kerby Anderson Neal Gabler, writing in The Atlantic, begins his essay with this disturbing statistic from a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. The survey asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. They found that 47 percent of respondents said they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something. In other words, they could not come up with the $400 any other way. Gabler asks: Who knew? He then answers that he knew, because he…

Kerby Anderson For decades, sociologists have documented the phenomenon of extended adolescence. This is where someone who is an adult still acts like a teenager. One classic example would be a 35-year-old who has part of their rent and bills covered by parents and continues to take college classes. Jean Twenge in her latest research on the trailing edge millennials (who she calls iGen) are extending this phenomenon even further. She documents that teenagers are becoming adults even later than…

Penna Dexter In the aftermath of the recent college admissions scandal, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan issued a warning in a column she titled: “Kids, Don’t Become Success Robots.” Ms. Noonan sees a certain kind of narcissism in these parents who have attained great success themselves, but who will cheat to get their kids in schools they don’t qualify for. We’ve gotta ask: Is this really about their kids? Or about them? These parents, she explains, “aim their children at…

Kerby Anderson Americans don’t know much about the Constitution, and it apparently is getting worse. Nine years ago, I wrote and recorded a commentary about constitutional illiteracy. Back then I quoted John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute) who testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning the rule of law. He provided some alarming statistics based upon a survey done about ten years ago. They found that only one in four Americans could name more than one of the freedoms…

Kerby Anderson We are a divided country, but it may be worse than we imagined. An article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussed what is called “motive attribution asymmetry.” That’s a technical term for the assumption that your ideology is based on love and your opponent’s is based on hate. Put another way: we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys. They discovered that the average Republican and the average Democrat today are as…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month the Federal Reserve reported that credit card debt for Americans hit $870 billion as of December. That makes it the largest amount ever. Obviously, credit card debt goes up in December because of shopping for Christmas, but this number is way above the credit card debt load in the past. Nearly 480 million credit cards are in circulation, which is up 100 million from a decade ago during the recession. Using credit cards to purchase…

Kerby Anderson Last week I went to my doctor for a check-up and took my family out to dinner. My experience as a consumer was very different between the two. The restaurant had total transparency. The menu not only had the prices of the items but pictures of most of them. We knew exactly what we were getting and how much it would all cost. I even mentally calculated the tip before I received the bill. At the doctor’s office,…

Kerby Anderson In a recent column, David French reminds us that not so long ago, “religious liberty lawyers were a quirky, somewhat cool, and tiny subset of the legal profession.” They were defending the rights of home-school families and the religious rights of Native American Indians. You could fit the “entire religious–liberty bar in a single mid-sized hotel conference room.” That is no longer true today. He calls these conservative religious-liberties lawyers the “virtual Seal Team Six of the culture…

Kerby Anderson In a previous set of commentaries, I talked about the interview Nick Pitts and I did with Jonathan Haidt on his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Then I saw an essay that quoted his earlier book, The Righteous Mind, where he talked about “the conservative advantage.” As a liberal, he wrote the book because he “was convinced that American liberals did not get the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen.” In one study he did…

Kerby Anderson The political justification for more government intervention into America’s health care system is the claim that health care is a right. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act in the past made this claim. Current members of Congress pushing the Medicare for All Act also make the claim that health care is a right. Let me start by saying that health care is not a right, at least as properly understood. But even if you accept that it is…