"I have been but little in," said Ninian hastily...

NPR's All Things Considered did a lovely piece Wednesday night about the current tour by Carole King and James Taylor. Their music is so familiar, precious, and evocative for me, the tears were flowing readily. I'm sorry I didn't see their concert in DC; live performances, at least for the sort of artists I tend to listen to these days, have a special resonance that listening to their recordings don't. But thank heavens we live in an age when recordings are so easy to get and keep; some day all the people whose music I love will be gone, but their performances of their work will live on.

Speaking of people who are getting on in years and whose local concert I missed, I see that Gordon Lightfoot will be playing the Flynn Center in Burlington in October... (It's not ont eh Flynn's schedule yet, but it's on several fansite's tour lists...)

The Globetrotter can't understand why I loathe Marketplace (NPR's business news program). Partly it's because I hate its promotion of the Cult of Business, which worships and adores anything and everything having to do with making money, and either strips every happening or event of any context or meaning except profit or actively perverts things that have nothing to do with finance or business into some crippled, sickly version of themselves that is all about How To Make More Money. I have a special hatred of selfishness and greed, and corporate greed is in the top five of my list of Most Evil Things Ever. So that's the main reason I detest Marketplace.

But another reason I hate it is because they treat facts casually and recklessly or outright distort or lie about them. Case in point: today their "short" in the main NPR news had a snippet interview/factoid with an economist (?) about healthcare. He posed the question "In ten years, what will the average American family of four pay for health insurance?" and gave four possible alternatives, the largest of which, $31,000, was the answer. He stated that this was the projected cost of premiums for employer-provided health coverage in 2020. He then 'discussed' this with the 'interviewer' who 'asked' him, among other things, what the average American family earns, to which the 'economist' replied "$51,000".

[The scorn quotes are there because, although it was staged as an interview, the two of them were clearly reading from a script.]

So it sounds as if health insurance costs are going to take up a huge chunk of family income, right? about 60% of income, right?

Not so fast. ( Read more... )