Or: You Just Can’t Make This Shit Up “Health Care Costs Put U.S. at Significant Disadvantage Compared with Global Competitors” I’ll let you read the details, but short story: Whodathunkit? And what do they recommend? Creating greater consumer value in the health care marketplace by using health information technology and empowering consumers with more information […]

Or: Even a Stopped Clock is Right, Eventually For quite a while I’ve been explaining the rabid, frantic vehemence of tea partiers and Republicans in general with a single visualization: They’ve got their backs against the seawall, and a massive, overwhelming demographic tidal wave is looming over them. The terror that situation provokes among old, […]

Anti-taxers love to haul out the legendary napkin-inscribed Laffer curve to demonstrate that lower taxes would yield more government revenue. But this ploy only works because they assume that we’re at or past the high point — that higher taxes would move us down the right slope. (Note the cross-marks-the-spot in the image here?) But […]

I did a couple of posts a while back asking (and concluding) what would result from the Fed ending their interest on reserves policies. (Not suggesting they do so — just wondering what the effects of that one change would be.) I got a lot of good answers and discussion, but nobody mentioned the very […]

Poking around in FRED while thinking about money created by banks and by government, I came up with the following graph, which I found to be pretty eye-popping: Federal Debt Held by the Public as a Percentage of Total Credit Market Debt Owed That’s a pretty profound secular shift. But far from delivering any obvious […]

Via Chris Mooney to Digby to Krugman then me — this remarkable item from a Pew report: College-educated Republicans are more likely to deny scientific reality. They don’t spend their time in college (or life) trying to learn how the world works; they spend it learning how to mine, harvest, cherry-pick, and twist any “facts” […]

I’ll just share two of these. HT Yoram Bauman.   via 14 Ways an Economist Says I Love You. Cross-posted at Asymptosis.

Imagine an economy that consists of two households, one firm, one bank, and one government. The government issues $50 to each household (maybe they do some work for it), crediting their bank accounts and running a $100 deficit. Voila! There’s money! Now one household works for the firm, creating $50 in value, goods. The firm […]

It’s nice to see Matthew Yglesias embracing Modern Monetary Theory, but I wonder if he totally gets it: The point of collecting taxes isn’t that the government needs money (it can print money) it’s that if the quantity of taxes is too low relative to the stock of money, then the money loses its value […]

Middle Class Political Economist: Basics: Length of Unemployment is Worst Since World War II.. (HT Brad DeLong.) The key graph: Assuming the economy is “trying” to reach equilibrium, this suggests that it “wants” less workers. If that is a secular trend, as suggested by the steadily lengthening jobless recessions since the 80s, …we’re faced with […]