by Linda Beale [also posted on ataxingmatter] Both President Obama and Senator Max Baucus, key players in the health reform debate, have now indicated that one source of funding for health care reform on the table is a possible limitation in the exclusion from income of employer-provided insurance. See, e.g., Connolly, President Pivots on Taxing […]
rdan Linda Beale writes some thoughts on public plans for health care and points us to Ezra Klein and Robert Reich. Update: Singapore is returned to comments. Going to ataxingmatter is worth the time, as Klein and Reich summarize public plans being put out there.
Robert Waldmann I think I should explain a claim I made in the post below. I assert that the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) does not imply the rational expecations hypothesis (REH). The EMH states that asset prices are the same as they would be if everyone had rational expectations. The strong form EMH adds the […]
Robert Waldmann I usually try to be semi polite. I especially don’t usually deliberately write rude things about smart economists. However, here goes. Evidently Tyler Cowen* wrote In a strict rational expectations model, we might expect some people to overtrust others and one view of rational expectations is that investors’ errors will cancel one another […]
Robert Waldmann Casual discussion of macroeconomics suffers from the fact that one can get any result one wants by playing with lags. I’m not saying that I think formal econometrics adds much. However, things could be worse. Discussion of the ups and downs of the stock market is even weirder. Courtney Schlisserman at Bloomberg seriously […]
Robert Waldmann Everyone is commenting on how, according to the New York Times, critics of the health care public option claim that it will provide the same health insuranceas private plans at lower cost to consumers and that this is a problem “unfair competition”. (simple rule when they say “unfair competition” they mean “competition”). As […]
By Spencer. I recently ran across an interesting example of how looking at an economic series from different perspectives creates very different conclusions. The original demand collapse at the start of this recession created an inventory problem across virtually all sectors of the goods economy. We now seen to be in a position where the […]
rdan Square footage or even volume Per Capita/house is a measurement of what? Taking part in the comment conversation on a couple of posts I have written led me to consider the way we think about home size. Typically, as one reader complained, homes are merely judged by their square footage and disregard the number […]
rdan Micahel Winship in Perspective asks: And remember Halliburton, the international energy services company of which Cheney used to be the CEO? After the fall of Baghdad, Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR were the happy recipients of billions of dollars in outside contracts to take care of the military and rebuild Iraq’s petroleum industry. Waste, […]
lifted from comments, written by reader Jack Tom said: “Some of the reported sales methods sound like they’re somewhere between ‘bullshit promises’ and mild deception. Then again, it’s car dealers on the other end of the transactions.” “I probably shouldn’t underestimate Congress’s inclination to protect those undeserving of protection, but remember these are car salesmen, […]