Hillary Clinton had a clear strategy going into Sunday night’s fourth Democratic presidential debate: Hug President Obama — at all costs. “We have the Affordable Care Act,” Clinton said. “That is one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country.” “I’m going to defend Dodd-Frank and I’m going to […]
Second, single-payer would require a lot of additional tax revenue — and we would be talking about taxes on the middle class, not just the wealthy. It’s true that higher taxes would be offset by a sharp reduction or even elimination of private insurance premiums, but it would be difficult to make that case to […]
What I do not see on AB is Bernie’s Plan. Take a moment and read what his plan is before you comment. If you read the plan, you will see Bernie subsidizes the expansion of single payer based on taxes on all households, separate taxes on the rich in income and also capital, the elimination […]
Bernie Sanders has proposed a federal national health insurance system which will provide no-deductible no copay insurance to all US legal residents. Needless to say, this will be expensive. Amazingly, Sanders focused on what taxes he proposes be increased to pay for the program. Kevin Drum is very favorably impressed by the (relatively) honest budgeting […]
I am fairly sure it is a coincidence, but current US GDP is not disappointingly low compared to an almost incredibly crude forecast based on data from before 1990. This graph (which you have to click more to see) shows the natural log of US real GDP and a quadratic trend estimated using data from […]
UPDATE: To see the winning Clinton claim, read my my comment to Robert Waldmann’s post above. —- Last week when Chelsea Clinton made he now-infamous statements about Sanders’ single-payer healthcare insurance plan—specifically, the one he proposed as a bill in 2013, but presumably a blueprint for the one he plans to propose—I wondered how Sanders […]
About a week ago , I wrote about the events leading up to the dilemma faced by Western Carolina University faculty and administration with being offered a $2 million grant from a Koch Brothers foundation. What I did not mention is the recent domination of the North Carolina university system by Republican minded-administrators such as […]
On Wednesday, General Electric announced that it was going to relocate its headquarters from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Boston beginning in 2016. Even without the headline, you probably already guessed that the relocation was subsidized — in this case, by both the state of Massachusetts ($120 million) and the city of Boston ($25 million). 800 jobs […]
Back in 2008, after he was elected but before he took office, I wrote a piece countering what I thought was the strongest attack on Obama’s Natural Born Citizen status. Even then I dismissed out of hand the ‘Kenyan Birth’ version since it required a rift in space-time plus a magical infusion of gold to […]
Most economists do not put stock in the stock market. That is to say that they do not include the stock markets in their analyses. Yet, economists should have a sense of what the markets will do if they are actually good economists. Economists seem to think that the stock markets are ruled by psychology […]