by Bruce Webb In my view you can boil Supply Side down to a simple aphorism: “If you tax something, people will use less of it”. And all things being equal and depending on how you define ‘something’ this seems economically and psychologically plausible, higher prices drive down demand. Unfortunately in the real world all […]
Back on July 28th I posted on what I considered to be the most important provision of the original House Tri-Committee Health Care Bill in Sec 116: Golden Bullet or Smoking Gun Smoking Gun referred to the belief by Republicans that this bill was designed to ultimately transition to Single Payer, and Golden Bullet to […]
by Bruce Webb CBO Director’s Blog Manager’s Amendment to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act CBO Analysis/Score Senate Health Care bill Manager’s Amendment Also I would like some links to current and historical numbers on Medical Loss Ratios. I found some claims from a commenter at Dean Baker’s Meet the Press (and past commenter […]
by Bruce Webb I posted the below last Christmas Eve. Which was too late to actually discuss the issue. People decry the commercialization of Christmas, which is fair enough. And on econoblogs we discuss income inequality a lot, plus we wonder why working class people simply accept the logic of “no poor person ever gave […]
I don’t pretend to know Joe Lieberman’s motivation, but it’s working to perfection if his goal is to divide Party leaders (Obama, Reid, etc.) from the Democratic progressive base. I don’t remember seeing this level of outrage from movement progressives before, and I wonder if the only possible way to quell it is to secure […]
by Bruce Webb A bipartisan group of Senators is making a push to tie an increase in the debt ceiling to establishment of a Commission whose focus in on reducing the growth of entitlements. Now clearly Medicare spending growth at its current rate is not sustainable, which fact makes the current full-throated defense of that […]
by Bruce Webb In recent weeks there has been some furor over the new push to tie an increase in the debt ceiling to the establishment of a new Deficit Commission based on proposals but forth on the Senate side in Conrad-Gregg or on the House side in Cooper-Wolf. Ezra Klein today tells us (rather […]
by Bruce Webb There has been some discussion here and there about whether the HCR bills in place do enough for cost control. I think that this is the wrong question at the wrong time and points out a bigger issue in progressivism, that is what exactly is our project? Comment by me to this […]
Gen. Anthony Zinni, USMC, (Ret.) Remarks at CDI Board of Directors Dinner, May 12, 2004 And what I thought I would do tonight is go through the ten crucial mistakes to this point that we’ve made. Because I think it helps frame what, in fact, has happened over time … and is going to be […]
by Bruce Webb In the course of an exchange between me and a fellow Bear, the question arose if social spending had a crowding out effect on other social spending. In particular if we have a small problem in Social Security and a big problem in providing health care would solving the first problem put […]