by Rebecca Australia is another on the short list of countries that “escaped recession” (another is Poland, which I wrote about earlier). As much of the developed world struggles with job loss and weak economic groundwork, Australia managed to push through the global meltdown with just one quarter of negative growth, -2.8% annualized growth in […]
rdan Calculated Risk reminds us: …U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum, through July. The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products. Import oil prices increased to $62.48 in July – up about 50% from the prices in […]
rdan Echo engineers for js-kit, our comments company, and I have revised our link to transfer Haloscan comments to Echo, and re-designed our link to Echo directly, so I can then manipulate the html to produce a comment section to our satisfaction. This includes re-writing parts of the template. The trouble with the comments in […]
rdan Here is a link to an MSNBC President Obama and healthcare video plus a CBS full transcript.
Robert Waldmann is going to obsess about one sentence in Obama’s vital health care speech “Likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers.” This doesn’t say anything new, but it worries me. The problem is that it sounds vaguely like […]
rdan My Cobra payment comes to $1,654.44 per month for a premium health insurance plan that includes medication benefits and somewhat low deductibles ($25 Dr. visit and $75 emergency room visit). This is for a consortium of towns and is not for tiny business groups which MA also has, so it is not an individual […]
rdanHere is the text and some pictures of President O’bama’s speech to kids yesterday. Update: Link corrected.
by cactus A friend of mine – I’m gonna call him Gilbert – was telling me about some happenings at his office that might sound familiar, as I’ve heard quite a few variations on this theme recently. Gilbert is a middle manager at a Fortune 500 multinational, which, like many companies large and small, had […]
Robert Waldmann The Baucus plan would give employers an incentive to discriminate against workers from lower income families. The incentive is to not give a job to someone who needs a job. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted this yesterday. This blog noted it on July 27. CBPP has argued this already but […]
Or at least why the best case for BarryO and Co. is that I’m just not going to bother to vote for the next several years: Apparently, the American swing voter tends to think, “If I’m going to get screwed over, I want it to be by someone who is aggressive as possible about it.” […]