"Do you know how to make God laugh? You tell him your plans." Hari Sheldon – Foudation's Fear
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 13th, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money It’s the same answer to every problem: Cut taxes, it’s magic! In exactly the same way leprechauns and unicorns are magic. Tax cuts are the pixie dust of the GOP, just sprinkle them and believe really, really hard and you can fly! It reflects an economic outlook on about [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 9th, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money Economist’s View: How Close to Deflation are We?. The gist here is that actual inflation is very near to slightly below zero. Using inflation fears as a reason to avoid further stimulus is simply unfounded. Deflation is a much more pressing concern. A more important question is what can [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 6th, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money Economist’s View: Why is the American Jobs Machine Broken?. This is an important discussion that, at it’s heart, is about “who killed the American dream”? He points to a long piece from Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel) summarized thusly: The piece is long, detailed and worth reading in [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 2nd, 2010
Paul Krugman continues to tilt at windmills: Op-Ed Columnist – Myths of Austerity – NYTimes.com. Which brings me to the subject of today’s column. For the last few months, I and others have watched, with amazement and horror, the emergence of a consensus in policy circles in favor of immediate fiscal austerity. That is, somehow [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Apr 7th, 2010
Jonah Goldberg, Quarter Slave (Conceptually). Fivethirtyeight.com posts a reply to Jonah Goldberg’s latest attempt to establish false equivalence between taxes and slavery from the op-ed pages of USA Today. Goldberg wants to tell us we’re slaves to teh gubbermint until “Tax Freedom Day”, which is sometime this week. Overblown rhetoric aside, the real question is: [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jan 3rd, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist – Chinese New Year – NYTimes.com. Krugman suggests that some protectionism against the Chinese may be a good thing: Recently Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, dismissed foreign complaints: “On one hand, you are asking for the yuan to appreciate, and on the other hand, you are taking all kinds of protectionist measures.” Indeed: [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Dec 15th, 2009
Economist’s View: “We Project a $242 Billion Surplus for Medicare by 2020, Not a Deficit”. It seems to me to be a btter way ay looking at how all the moving pieces work together. Improving health in turn spurs economic growth, it really seems intuitive once you say it out loud.
Posted in Blog Post on Oct 27th, 2009
From my perspective this is just stating the obvious, but in Washington politics always trumps economic common sense. …Washington is mired in a warped political debate. Congressional Republicans say continued economic weakness is proof that February’s stimulus package failed. Lawmakers in both parties fret that large budget deficits preclude more stimulus, lest the burden of [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Oct 12th, 2009
Including people who have given up and looking and those who have part time job, but want full time employment the unemployment rate looks closer to 18%. Put another way, it approaches the level seen during the 1930s. I think I need a drink… The part-time business gets to one of the many failings with [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 23rd, 2009
Some call it recovery – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com. Paul says while it might be a “recovery” in terms of conventional definition, but job creation still lags. The question seems to be why isn’t job creation part of the definition of recovery.
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 7th, 2009
Economist’s View: Jobs Report Roundup. Good round-up by Mark Thoma. It does not appear that prosperity is just around the corner, but things are looking less bad. It still looks like it may be Q1 or Q2 of 2010 before we stop shedding jobs and start seeing positive employment numbers.
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 27th, 2009
The Economist brings us a quick, concise look at how we got into this economic crisis in animated graphs from The Great Depression to today. It shows the story really took off after 1980 with exploding trade and federal budget deficits. If it makes some out there happy, blame accrues to both Democrats than Republicans [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 22nd, 2009
Good piece by Leonhardt on health reform here: Economic Scene – Support for Health Reform Requires Facing Facts on Costs – NYTimes.com. So what’s in health reform for the majority of voters who already have health insurance? David Leonhardt makes a try to answer: $6500 per year per household. That’s what we spend over and [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 17th, 2009
Lawmakers Warned About Health Costs CBO Chief Says Democrats’ Proposals Lack Necessary Controls on Spending via Budget Analyst Assails Cost of Congress’s Health-Care Proposals – washingtonpost.com. Look, the current situation in US health care simply isn’t sustainable. Obama campaigned against repealing the exemption on employer health benefits. It’s a huge subsidy to the fraying patchwork [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 13th, 2009
Economist’s View: Money Monopoly -Mark Thoma Legislators from both parties support legislation that would allow the state to accept IOU’s issued by the state because of the ongoing fiscal crisis in California as legal tender for the payment of taxes and state fees. This would effectively establish a new state controlled currency. If it passes, [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 1st, 2009
Oxdown Gazette » American Prospect’s Public Health Plan Debate, Part I. This is an interesting debate about the relative virtues of “strong” vs “weak” public plans and the interaction with insurance exchanges. I was in grad school for an Masters in Public Health at Emory, specifically looking at the role on insurance on the delivery [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 30th, 2009
Health care is not a bowl of cherries – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com. Krugman notes that Kenneth Arrow pointed out 45 years ago that competitive markets don’t work in health insurance market. I read and quoted Arrow in a paper I wrote years ago while studying health policy and economics in college. How is [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 16th, 2009
Economist’s View: “Russian Flat Tax Myth and Fact”. If facts do matter then here’s a study that says the productivity gains claimed by supply-side economics fans are small. Mark Thoma notes: The lack of a significant productivity response undercuts the main supply-side argument that cuts in taxes produce increased growth in output that generates a [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 2nd, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist – Reagan Did It – NYTimes.com. Krugman lays the blame for the current ecomonic melt down squarely on the Reagn administration. For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis inevitable — took place in [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 30th, 2009
Calculated Risk: Government: GM, Chrysler “may well require” Bankruptcy. A news round-up on the auto industry tough love bailout from Calculated Risk. Makes you wonder (again) why the financial industry got several orders of magnitude more money with fewer (or none at all) strings attached? I guess that the financial industry has a helluva lot [...]
Date: 12/09/2007