This chart looks at the absolute cost (adjusted for inflation) of housing since 1890. Notice anything interesting? The bursting of the housing bubble seems like an ironclad instance of Stein’s Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. The good news is, this means you won’t be living with your parents or six roommates in a two bedroom in Brooklyn. My first question looking at this was: How can you adjust something like this for inflation when housing costs are intimately and causally related with inflation? Way above my pay grade, but I wonder. My buddy Sean, who works in the urban planning world, had this to say in an e-mail: “Another problem with the chart is that it’s not fair to benchmark the index in 1890.  The introduction of FHA-guaranteed mortgages in the 1930s dramatically altered the housing market, though its effects weren’t truly realized until after WWII.  It makes more sense to benchmark it to 1945.  That market was steady at...

The management at Wal-Mart has signaled its support for a law that would mandate all companies provide health insurance to their employees. As Justin Gardner at Donklephant points out, this is notable in part because Wal-Mart has in the past had a reputation for doing things like militantly keeping workers’ hours juuuuust below the full-time threshold where benefits kick in. It’s possible that Wal-Mart is doing this out of some newfound sense of civic responsibility, or because they really believe what they say in their statement: “We are entering a critical time during which all of us who will be asked to pay for health care reform will have to make a choice on whether to support the legislation,” says the letter, signed by Wal-Mart President and CEO Mike Duke, SEIU President Andy Stern and Podesta. “This choice will require employers to consider the trade off of agreeing to a coverage mandate and additional taxes versus the promise of reduced health care cost...

This post comes from our friends at The College Politico. The day that the small twitter army dedicated to getting the White House press corps to put up South Park versions of themselves as their icon on Twitter has been working tirelessly towards is now one step closer. Yes, this post is the official proclamation of victory on the #cartoonmajor front of our campaign! As of today Major Garret of Fox News is SouthParkified! Here is his tweet of acceptance into the #TWoonhunks twitter army: From this one small tweet grew an unstoppable movement that has now produced real change. Where as we used to have but one SouthParkified White House reporter, Jake Tapper of ABC, we now have three. The second convert, who got caught up in the #cartoonmajor saga, is Asylum’s Tommy Christopher. The future is bright for our movement thus we cannot rest on our accomplishments and must continue to fight the good fight until there isn’t a White House press corps twitter icon left standing that...