From the NYT comes this quick look at the vaccination issues you might have heard about in the news…Vaccine Costs Soaring and Paying till it hurts… Vaccination prices have gone from single digits to sometimes triple digits in the last two decades, creating dilemmas for doctors and their patients as well as straining public health […]

Update to the Hobby Lobby decision comes as a result of a SCOTUS injunction the day before the 4th of July 2014 The nonprofit Wheaton College filed a petition to keep it from having to a file self-certification document certifying it is a religious organization and should be exempt from having to provide contraceptives. Sotomayer […]

Austerity by governments is a policy to reduce budget deficits by cutting spending and/or raising taxes. Basically governments withhold money from the economy. The result is that aggregate demand is reduced. Yet, there is another form of austerity where businesses lower pay to labor. In effect, businesses withhold money from the economy by reducing pay […]

As we will show, Congress provided protection for people like the Hahns and Greens by employing a familiar legal fiction: It included corporations within RFRA’s definition of “persons.” But it is important to keep in mind that the purpose of this fiction is to provide protection for human beings. A corporation is simply a form […]

I keep seeing references to the 1970’s stagnation that reflect a consensus belief that real GDP growth in the 1970s was significantly lower in the 1970s than in the 1980s.   But this is contrary to the data:   REAL GDP GROWTH( % )   1970…0.21……..1980…-0.04 1971….3.29……..1981….2.58 1972….5.25……..1982…-1.91 1973…..5,64…….1983….4.63 1974….-0.52…….1984….7.26 1975….-0.20…….1985…..4.24 1976….5.34………1986…..3.51 1977…..4.61………1987…..3.46 1978…..5.56………1988….4.20 1979……3.18………1979….3.68 […]

Laurence Ball wrote an article called The Great Recession’s Long-term Damage. He writes about how potential output has been reduced in many countries after the recession… “Through what mechanisms do recessions reduce potential output? This question is addressed in a number of recent papers (see Ball 2014). While the results vary, it appears that recessions […]

Paul Krugman has two sentences on the money in this article on Kansas, ALEC, and failed economics: The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. … But the effect won’t last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn’t about […]

Here are my confused thoughts about the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Harris v. Quinn decisions. Unfortunately, I am Waldmann not Mann and don’t know anything about the law. I will pretend that there is some logic behind the decisions. In Burwell v. Hobby Lobby the majority found that Hobby Lobby has religious freedom — […]

I haven’t read the opinions, concurrence, or dissents in either Hobby Lobby or Harris v. Quinn, so these comments are based on news summaries and quick commentaries by others.  But the biggest surprise in Hobby Lobby, I think, is the express approval, in the opinion and in Kennedy’s concurrence, of HHS’s on-the-fly setup devised in […]