Last night AB noted that the “donut hole” in the prescription drug benefit created by the Republican Congress in 2003 is worse than you probably thought. But that may actually turn out to be the smaller of many problems with the plan. A bigger one may be a growing sense that it is unfair, even […]

From the archives: the percentage of total drug costs costs paid out-of-pocket by a typical Medicare beneficiary under the Bush Part D plan: And that’s how it’s designed to work; in practice, it’s even worse. Note: The section of the graph where the percent out of pocket actually increases as drug costs increase is the […]

Even conservatives Arnold Kling and Tyler Cowen are struggling to figure out the underlying premise behind Bush’s health care proposals. Tyler asks “whether people overinvest or underinvest in private sector health insurance”. Quite frankly – I don’t know either.

CNN reports on the exit polls from the election Palestine: According to one exit poll from Bir Zeit University, Fatah garnered 46.4 percent of the vote and Hamas won 39.8 percent. That translates into 63 seats for Fatah and 58 for Hamas, according to the exit poll. I listened to an NPR discussion of the […]

This week’s Econoblog from the Wall Street Journal Online is up. Jim Hamilton and I discuss economic forecasting – the good, the bad, and the ugly. Kash

PGL notes that the argument made by supply-side tax cut advocates centers on the notion that cutting taxes on capital income will encourage risk-taking and thus increase capital formation – i.e., cause an investment boom. PGL’s post nicely points out some theoretical problems with this argument. But there are huge empirical problems with the argument, […]

In the latest praise of the 2003 tax cuts emanating from the National Review, David Gitlitz makes two assertions. One is the old Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc rag that simply because real GDP growth has been strong since the passage of the 2003 tax cut, the cause of this growth must have been the […]

The title is from a sign held up by those protestors during the appearance of Attorney General Gonzales at a Georgetown Law School Forum. Gonzales had earlier said on the Today Show that the standard under the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness, but check out what the text really says: The right of the people to […]

We’re now in the final week of the 19-year long Greenspan Era. Overall, the period was marked by plenty of strong economic growth, two recessions that were among the mildest on record, and consistently moderate inflation that has gradually trended downward. But there’s also some fodder for criticism in the record of monetary policy under […]

How good are economists at forecasting economic variables? That will be the topic for discussion at this week’s Econoblog at WSJ.com (look for it late Wednesday or early Thursday). James Hamilton (co-author of Econbrowser) and I will be discussing some of the forecasting successes and failures of the economics profession, and their implications. As a […]