Is Obamacare “Medicaid for the Middle Class?” –A Muddled Argument by Maggie Mahar Yet another catchy phrase, “Medicaid for the middle class,” is popping up in conservative propaganda. What are Obamacare’s opponents trying to say? Those who have latched onto this catchphrase make two very different arguments. The arguments actually contradict each other, but they […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: The Other Side of the Equation Obamacare is in the news every day, with much discussion of jobs and exchanges and insurance and many other topics. My beat is the other side, the provider side, and a great deal of confusion and chaos lives there. What are providers […]
It is time to get serious. There are widespread claims that firms are cutting hours worked and converting full time jobs into part time jobs because of Obama-care. So what does the data say. Below is a table of unpublished data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of part time employment by private and […]
It can be tough to articulate a cogent argument against high-frequency trading in the context of highly liquid, efficiently functioning securities markets, but I think Rajiv Sethi has done so (riffing off Michael Lewis’s typically scathing and revealing article on Goldman’s recent bad behavior). In brief, in my words: 1. Value investors are trying to buy shares in […]
Thoma Bait I might as well be honest. I am posting this here rather than at rjwaldmann.blogspot.com , because I think it is the sort of thing to which Mark Thoma links and my standing among the bears is based entirely on the fact that Thoma occasionally links to me. I think that Pigou, Samuelson, […]
The circular flow is a model used to show how money and products move through an economy. I am going to use a simplified version to show the effect of labor share of income on GDP. Many people think that labor income is not quantitatively different than capital income. I will show that the equilibrium […]
A lot of people, especially conservatives, complain about the so-called debasement of the U.S. dollar. For example, Craig R. Smith, who is apparently important enough to be interviewed by “FOX News, CNN, CNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, CBN, TBN, Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Newsweek,” wrote a book last year […]
by Maggie Mahar Under Obamacare, Will You Receive a Subsidy to Help You Buy Your Own Insurance? We Now Have Real Numbers That Will Let You Calculate How Much You Will Receive Note to Readers: A longer version of this post appeared yesterday on HealthInsurance.org. Up until now, when Obamacare’s supporters and reform’s opponents squabbled over […]
People see that corporate profits are up, way up. So they wonder, How can there be zombie companies out there if corporate profits are up so much? The answer is in the “rate” of profit, which had been growing since the crisis. But now we see profit rates slowing down. Robert Lenzner of Forbes wrote […]