WalterJon finds a brilliant judge’s response to a “birther” case: The Court observes that the President defeated seven opponents in a grueling campaign for his party’s nomination that lasted more than eighteen months and cost those opponents well over $300 million. Then the President faced a formidable opponent in the general election who received $84 […]
Andrew Samwick: Government bureaucrats don’t reduce costs. Market competition reduces costs. The challenge for health care reform is to get the market competition into the places where we want it — providers and insurers competing to deliver better services at lower prices — and out of the places where we don’t want it — insurers […]
Via a former editor’s Twitter feed, the Simon Fraser Institute decides to segment the costs of Canadian health care. For the good of the people, of course: It is critically important, however, that Canadians understand the true cost of Medicare. Armed with a more meaningful estimate, Canadians will be able to better assess whether or […]
Via Dr. Black, CR describes Washington, D.C. real estate as “the commercial version of the subprime situation.” Two points: CR knows better, most of the time, than to believe that there was a “subprime situation” in any sense other than “We Are All Subprime Now.” [edited for tone] Possibly more importantly, Washington, D.C., is one […]
Ken Houghton is talkin’ about his generation. Pete Davis, Mark Thoma (who at least has the decency to phrase it in the form of a question), N. Gregory Mankiw, and Brad DeLong explain why there should not be any penalties against providers of West Virginia water (h/t Bitch). Because fungible is fungible, even if it […]
So I ran DataFerret in Batch mode. (I’m using other data and thought I would be nice. Never again, apparently.) Got the popup that said, “We’re gonna do it, dude. You can pick it up later at URL.” And the URL was (1) complicated and (2) not copyable from the popup. Haven’t gotten an e-mail […]
Ken Houghton distracts us from the important things with an examination of monopoly power, asymmetric information, and perpetuating a bad business deal. By the time Gary Bettman got to Phoenix, his lawyer was lying to the court: “There are three things that it takes to be an owner of an NHL franchise. One, you’ve got […]
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.” […]
From what I can tell, this is an accurate sequence: 6 August 2001: Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) given to GWB entitled “bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” 11 September 2001: On the 36th Anniversary of Augusto Pinochet’s US-President-ordered, CIA-supported, Coup in Chile, Bin Laden’s forces, weel, strike in the US. ca. 26 October 2004: […]
Ken Houghton notes that the first thing anyone learns from Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade is how pernicious the U.S. subsidy of its cotton industry is.* Now the WTO has discovered the obvious: American goods will face [$294.7] […]