Project Vote Smart is a nonprofit, non-partisan educational organization dedicated to providing unbiased information to voters. With founders from across the spectrum (e.g. Presidents Carter & Ford, Senators McGovern & Goldwater, etc.), zero funding from special interests and lobbyists, and 5000 volunteers doing their work, they “battle to protect all of us from the selfish interests that strip us of the most crucial component in our struggle to self-govern – access to abundant, accurate, and relevant information.”

VoteEasy is their simple and effective tool to help us draw some initial conclusions from the data. Respond to a series of questions with your position on each of the major issues and VoteEasy shows you which candidate best aligns with your views. You can even assign each issue an importance level, and, having entered your choices just once, you can see your matches for President, Senator and US Representative. I highly recommend VoteEasy – despite the annoying airplane sound it plays in the background!

Although we may feel that the wealthy seem to own an abnormally large share of the nation’s resources, actually viewing current data on income concentration can have a profound impact. For me, it has both strengthened a commitment  to my ongoing personal work in the community, and driven me to advocate for stronger policy-level adjustments as well.

Take a close look at the long-term trends in income distribution. As shown in this chart, the top 1% of earners in the United States garnered about 20% of the nation’s income in 2010.

This chart was generated using data downloaded on 11-Oct-2012 from the The World Top Incomes Database using the following parameters: Countries: Canada, Germany, United States; Years: 1920-2010; Variable: “Top 1% Income Share-including Capital Gains”

This reflects a dramatic, two-decade increase, to levels unseen since the Great Depression. While I am no fan of “Robinhood” policies that attempt to transfer wealth from the “haves” to the “have-nots”, I am troubled to see data which seem to indicate that the accumulated policies of the last generation may have accomplished exactly the opposite. Read on →

With my left thumb joint failing as I approach 60 years of age, I find myself rather frustrated in an attempt to be a judicious buyer of health care. I wonder if the term “free market” even applies to the provision of medicine in our country today. And I ponder what policies can help us out of this mess.

The diagnosis is basal joint arthritis; the therapy is joint replacement surgery. Two well-regarded surgeons, a fairly young doctor who I thought would champion the latest advances, and a seasoned veteran who I hoped would tend toward a more conservative course, are in alignment: although splints and injections might ease symptoms, long-term relief will come only with surgical repair.

For some of us, a good deal can also be therapeutic, and competitive shopping is deeply rooted in my genes, so I began asking for prices. Read on →

With the benefit of hindsight – and a healthy dose of tongue-in-cheek – I’ve drafted an alternate close that Barak Obama might have delivered in order to wrench a resounding victory from his otherwise lackluster performance in the first debate on October 3. You might think of this is as the “closing summation that wasn’t”.

<looking to the moderator…> Jim, thank you for moderating tonight’s illuminating debate.

<glancing toward the other candidate…> Mr. Romney, I want to thank you to you, too. With all the new ground you covered tonight, this has been more like a fruitful discussion than a debate. In just ninety minutes, Read on →

Many of you have heard me “rant” about the unsustainable cost of healthcare in the United States, where Wikipedia reports total heath expenditures to be between 15% and 17% of GDP–about half again as much as other developed countries. So it’s probably no surprise that I recommend the article, The Cancer “Breakthroughs” That Cost Too Much and Do Too Little, which ran in the September 3 issue of Newsweek Magazine under the title How Much Would You Pay for Three More Months of Life?

Notably, two new prostate cancer drugs that cost $93,000 and $120,000, respectively, only helped patients live three and a half to four months longer. And a new pancreatic cancer drug that costs around $15,000 increased the median survival rate by only 15 days.

I applaud Newsweek for helping spur a necessary national dialogue about health and life. Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society, is quoted as saying, “we need to talk about rational use of care.”

In addition to the financial considerations, we all know of people whose quality of live has been marginal-at-best during the extended lifetime their treatments afforded.

So, I encourage us all: please read and discuss this type of information. We all want the wonders of medical science to maximize our lifetimes and our quality of life, and we should continue to fund research and development that can do so. However, we must also ask ourselves, “When is it enough?” Recognizing that at some point the end does come for each one of us, learning how and when to accept the inevitable with grace will ultimately lead to more rational decisions, and far more peaceful transitions out of the life we know.

Jon Carroll, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, expresses so well — if a bit cynically — some of my fears about mixing religion and government. Please read his March 1, 2012 column My little missive to Rick Santorum. Hopefully it will help all of us  to raise our voices in favor of tolerance, and to demand a government and society based on understanding each other as individual human beings.