The many cases of people receiving cancellation letters from their health insurance companies which include the claim that the policy will be cancelled as of Jnuary 1 because of the ACA and which offer insurance at much higher premiums have caused a political crisis for Obama nd other Democrats. I have a number of confused […]

Jon Chait is not impressed by Bill clinton. Bill Clinton Wants You to Keep Your Plan, Won’t Say How Bad Secretary of Explaining Stuff! organizing skittish red-state senators is one thing; organizing Bill Clinton is another. The former president now says that the government should change Obamacare to allow everybody in the individual market who […]

Many economists say we still have a big output gap and that we will eventually return to the potential GDP trend from before the crisis. It is not a wise view. Let me reveal a mystery to explain. The following graph shows annual % growth for real GDP and potential GDP (center of business cycle). […]

I was going to leave Richard Cohen alone: Gawker, LG&M, Dr. Black, etc. etc. all covered him.  There’s nothing to say that Katherine Weymouth didn’t already, save possibly that I’m thinking of burning all my non-existent copies of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” in effigy. But I can’t resist coming out of what appears to be a […]

I posted yesterday about potential GDP being the center of the business cycle and how labor share reflects potential GDP. I want to go deeper into this using data. P. Krugman wrote yesterday… “We don’t know how much capacity the economy has, but we do have strong reason to suspect that running the economy below […]

There are a couple of easy ways to check out current Federal Public Debt to the dollar or even the penny. One you could check out the National Debt Clock which also is conveniently mirrored (in simplified form) in Times Square. In the top left you will find the number for ‘US National Debt’ at […]

For the moment, let’s go with old saw that “economics is the study of scarcity.” (Though I disagree with it; the proper study of economics is human reaction functions.) What’s scarce these days? Certainly not supply. In an 80%-service economy suffering high unemployment and a unprecedentedly low labor/population ratio, higher demand for massages is not […]

The mystery revealed in this post is that potential GDP and labor share reflect each other. One thing people must realize is that potential GDP describes the center of the business cycle. (See video below for visual explanations.) It seems most people think potential means the top end of the business cycle, but they would […]

Via Economist’s View, Paul Krugman notes a pattern in out post racial rhetoric: So what’s this all about? One reason…, Daniel Little suggested in a recent essay, is market ideology: If the market is always right, then people who end up poor must deserve to be poor. I’d add that some leading Republicans are, in […]