Health and Economic Development Primer in one easy lesson (via SocProf’s Twitter feed): This is not surprising to see the contrast between the prosperous (at least until now) areas, in green where chronic illnesses prevail but are diseases tied to aging, as opposed to the semi-periphery and periphery where infectious / parasitic diseases are prevalent […]

Spent the past few minutes reading Alea. jck notes that, over the past five years, the Pound has grown in importance at the expense of the yen and that the Euro has done the same against the dollar. If this goes against your memory, you’re not part of the IMF. Even better is when jck […]

With a hat tip to Rebecca’s post below, normalized borrowing growth in several sectors over the past 25 years. (Source: FRB Flow of Funds data) Yes, there are three very similar (shades of blue) lines—but they are all household and non-profit data. (The growth in “credit market instruments” is, presumably, primarily driven by the non-profit […]

I’m late to seeing this, and Bruce has probably already covered it, but Doug Elmendorg at the CBO inadvertently gives away the game on the Administration’s approach to—let alone opinion of—the Social Security “Trust Fund”: The balances in trust funds have accrued because income associated with those programs has exceeded the expenses; when that happens, […]

The readers of the Fiscal Times learn what everyone looking at the alphabet-soup of back-door taxpayer theft (or, as Ben Bernanke calls them, facilities) knows: There are many ways policy could have been improved; providing more help for state and local governments is high on the list, but I’ll focus on another way: using fiscal […]

by Tom Bozzo, cross-posted from Marginal Utility Competition in (increasing) service quality doesn’t reduce costs: Dane County’s two hospitals that deliver babies are each spending close to $40 million to spruce up maternity units and related facilities for a simple reason: Young women are key health care consumers, often deciding where their families will seek […]

Update: Brad DeLong appears to confirm that Obama’s inner circle would be best served by being placed in a circular firing squad, given live ammo, and being told to “do what is right.” The plethora of disingenuous claims that Barack Obama “won” with the McConnell-Obama “compromise” are legend. See, for instance, the idiocy of Andrew […]

Update: Brad DeLong looks at the data and suggests that the problem may be that the current President is as innumerate as the previous one. Mark Thoma quotes James Kwak: So no, I don’t think Obama is abandoning his principles for political advantage; I think these are his principles. And while I’m upset at him, […]

In honor of his finally being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: And his co-inductee, who now does wait for no one:

The NYT pretends that the Cuomo/Rattner battle is about personalities, but briefly let’s the mask slip: Neither side seems willing to budge, each insisting he is the wronged party: the attorney general feels deceived and affronted, and the Wall Street money manager feels persecuted for conduct he views as standard business practice. “‘Feels’ deceived and […]