What’s Corroding Our Bridges? July 11, 2014July 11, 2014 So I’m headed off to Ricky Jay’s Congress of Wonders. I don’t ever do anything like this, not least because the train to this thing leaves from Track 8-1/2 at Penn Station and I am 100% muggle. Also because so many emails pile up when I stray from my normal routine. If Ricky Jay is as good as I think, he may be able to turn them all into a bunny. I would really like that. Random notes: 1. On yesterday’s news that WheelTug signed another 200 more planes, upping its order book by 25%, grandparent Borealis traded 836 shares (not quite $10,000 worth), finishing unchanged at $11. Undeterred, I hold on. 2. On the news that smallpox was discovered in an unguarded storage room someplace, stock in smallbox antiviral drug maker SIGA was off a bit from its close a week before. Undeterred (albeit less deeply invested), I hold on. 3. Whoever invented seedless watermelon is an unsung hero. An amazing achievement. We must be coming up on its — what — 20th anniversary? I think there should be parade. 4. Despite Democrats’ attempts to destroy the economy, impose Shariah Law, and so forth, the economy seems to be picking up steam — normally financial collapses take a decade to emerge from, not 6 years — and the stock market floats in record territory. What’s more, Obamacare — the coup de grace that will make all our bridges collapse (and here you thought it was our failure to put people back to work revitalizing the nation’s infrastructure) — actually seems to be working. It appears the proportion of uninsured Americans has already dropped from 20% to 15% and that Obamacare is already helping a lot more people than its critics believed it would. (More still, once Republican governors stop withholding Medicaid expansion from the working poor, who tend to vote Democrat.) What’s more, as the Times summarizes a new survey from the Commonwealth Fund, most of the folks who have coverage under the new law are happy with it — even 77% of Republicans. The margin of error in the survey is apparently large, and it’s still early. The fat lady has only begun to sing. But someday historians may determine it wasn’t Obamacare that caused our bridges to collapse — it was Benghazi.