Although there is no formal definition, most economists agree a depression is a prolonged slump with a 10% or more decline in real GDP. By that definition, California is entering a depression, a locomotive engine plunging off a missing bridge, pulling 49 hapless states behind it.

This is what losing your kidney function looks like. This is what a diabetic who didn't have health care for a year and a half looks like. This is what our glorious "uniquely American" system of health insurance looks like. I don't want sympathy; I want single payer universal health care. I want people in this country to get the preventive care they need to keep this from happening.

We want health care equality. We also want our health care to be more affordable and better quality. To achieve all of that, we will need to reform our current system by retooling the methods of financing. By changing the way that health care is paid for, single payer health care can eradicate the disparities and inequalities while simultaneously improving quality of care for everyone. This increase in quality will also cost less. I'm eager to talk to you about how this can only be accomplished with single payer.

As the prospective price of new reactors continues to soar, and as the first "new generation" construction projects sink in French and Finnish soil, Republicans are introducing a bill to Congress demanding 100 new nuclear reactors in the US within twenty years. While billing itself as the party of free enterprise -- especially when it comes to health care -- the GOP has made itself the unabashed champion of a technology that can't raise private capital without taxpayer backing, can't get private insurance, can't manage its wastes, and shows no sign of offering a meaningful solution to the problem of carbon emissions.

Even though the stimulus has been in effect for several months, economists have few tools for gauging its effects. This lack of useful data has given rise to a lot of sniping from politicians and pundits who oppose the stimulus. I have some suggestions for rebuttals to their attacks.

I won't talk about gun control. That's an ongoing issue and reasonable people can reasonably disagree on whether and how different laws might have prevented one or more of these politically-motivated murders. I want to talk about rage control. On July 4, as we celebrate our birthday as a nation -- as a people -- make a conscious effort to turn away from anger.

There's a rather young guy who lives down the street from me. He has cerebral palsy and has been unable to walk since I have known him, which is about 8 years. He has to use a walker and a wheelchair for mobility. He didn't finish school and I have wondered at times is he is not "borderline intellectual functioning" based on conversations with him. If he could get proper care this would not be nearly so bad, he would not have to deteriorate quite so fast and maybe not that bad at all. He's just 36, so he's pretty young. And there are hundreds of thousands or millions of stories similar to Danny and we have to fight tooth and nail to eke out a semblance of assistance for them?

If anyone was the picture of health and vitality, it was Lori Albright. As a senior accountant with the Washington State Employees Credit Union she had a well paying, respectable career. And most importantly in this country, she had health insurance. She didn't have token insurance. She didn't have junk insurance. She had the kind of health insurance that we all hope to have, at least according to AHIP and the AMA. American health insurance polices are no match for the realities of serious illness and injury, however, and Lori's family discovered this the hard way.

Ask Shannon Hilt, who's seen our broken system for forming unions firsthand, and she'll tell you that there's no question: Workers need the Employee Free Choice Act. Hilt spent three years as a field examiner for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), overseeing the elections process and investigating unfair practices. She says the system we have now, one in which companies, not workers, have all the power, isn't free, it isn't fair and doesn't protect workers.

I think it is safe to say Republicans don't much like government, much less respect what it can and does accomplish. Therefore, it seems to me they don't listen when some department issues a report produced by subject matter experts. Now our government is far from perfect. But I think it is about time we start to promote that government does in fact work.

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