"Do you know how to make God laugh? You tell him your plans." Hari Sheldon – Foudation's Fear
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 29th, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money The Bush Deficit Bamboozle – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com. OK, even by contemporary standards, this is rich: the official Republican stance is now apparently that Bush left behind a budget that was in pretty good shape. Mitch McConnell: The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 2nd, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money 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 [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 21st, 2010
Unreal Blog Physics, Philosophy and Money Krugman continues tilting at windmills in his quest to get policy makers to understand Economics 101: The Congressional Budget Office, in its analysis of President Obama’s budget proposals, predicts that economic recovery will reduce the annual budget deficit from about 10 percent of G.D.P. this year to about 4 [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jun 6th, 2010
Calculated Risk: Weekly Summary and a Look Ahead. This is really depressing. The stimulus package passed early in the Obama administration helped a bit, but not enough. It was scaled back in size and watered down by turning 40% of it to tax cuts, the least effective means of stimulus. This was done in an [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Apr 16th, 2010
Senator McConnell is in bed with bankers to derail serious financial reform. He’s following a script given to him to serve that end. Op-Ed Columnist – The Fire Next Time – NYTimes.com. In his speech, Mr. McConnell seemed to be saying that in the future, the U.S. government should just let banks fail. We “must [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 27th, 2010
All the bitching, groaning and outright threats from the right are all too familiar: What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Mar 1st, 2010
This was a gem from Krugman, I don’t usually copy an entire post, but this was worth it: Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about. It goes like this: Person [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Feb 1st, 2010
My personal favorite Nobel Prize winning economist has a take on why Canada came out of the recent banking disaster relatively unscathed, while the US economy and financial institutions took a major beat down. It all comes back to the regulatory environment. The US decided, or rather the captains of industry in banking and a [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jan 22nd, 2010
Krugman puts a stake in the ground on HCR: Op-Ed Columnist – Do the Right Thing – NYTimes.com. A message to House Democrats: This is your moment of truth. You can do the right thing and pass the Senate health care bill. Or you can look for an easy way out, make excuses and fail [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jan 11th, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist – Learning From Europe – NYTimes.com. Krugman tries to talk sense to reflexive Euro-bashers. Adopting a more humane attitude by taking steps to ensure everyone in the richest nation on earth has access to health care isn’t going to turn us into some kind of socialist dystopian nightmare. And the idea that Europe [...]
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 Nov 3rd, 2009
Krugman is right more often than his colleagues in economics. There’s a reason he’s a Nobel prize winner in economics. The good news is that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, is working just about the way textbook macroeconomics said it would. But that’s also the bad news [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Oct 21st, 2009
Facts are stubborn things: Serious students of health care have known for a long time that the magic of the marketplace doesn’t work in health care; the United States has the most privatized health-care system in the advanced world, and also the least efficient. The pale reflection of this reality in the current discussion is [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 23rd, 2009
Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Aug 1st, 2009
Birthers of a nation – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com. Are people in the south really that stupid? Apparently they are…
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 27th, 2009
The more I think about the influence of Blue Dogs in the health reform debate, the more convinced I am that they should form their own party. Them seem to share little in the way of values or goals with democrats. Maybe they should shed their DINO disguise and join with Chuck Hagel and Joe [...]
Posted in Blog Post on Jul 17th, 2009
I’m not sure what the answer is, but what we’ve been doing doesn’t seem to work for anyone, except maybe Goldman Sachs. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007. Such growth would [...]
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 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 Apr 14th, 2009
Who says economists have no sense of humor? A missed opportunity on This Week – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com. So I was all ready to talk about Rick Warren on today’s panel, only to learn that he had cancelled out at the last minute. The show replaced him with pirates, plus an extended roundtable. [...]
Date: 07/30/2006