Ed Kilgore’s thought develops as he finally faces facts. He wrote It is entirely unsurprising that Paul Ryan and his many supporters have been advertising the [skip]in his budget proposal as the greatest thing since the Clinton-era welfare reform legislation. What is surprising is that some progressives seem to be going along with the characterization […]

One interesting Romneycampaign tic is to use “numerous” to mean two. Examples of this abuse of “numerous” follow. 1. “After extensive hearings the bipartisan [Massachusetts] Ballot Law Commission came to the same conclusion as numerous independent fact checkers in finding that Mitt Romney ended his active employment with Bain Capital in 1999.” The numerous fact […]

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Re-admissions, Resident Rights and Pie  A follow up to a post on evidence based medicine….  PPACA is putting extreme pressure on hospitals to reduce Medicare re-admissions. Hospitals are putting increasing pressure on nursing home to reduce re-admissions, particularly due to diabetes.  Nursing homes are under constant pressure to […]

At this point, the question mark is needed just in case the Romney campaign is deliberately trying to trick the rest of us. This seems to me to be politically insane. Ryan is the guy who wanted to end Medicare and replace it with a fundamentally different program based on vouchers whose value would not […]

PolitiFact, a Tampa based organization  that evaluate the truthfulness of political claims or ads does a very interesting evaluation of an Obama ad about  how much Romney pays in taxes.  The ad says that Romney ‘s tax rate of 14% is probably less than you pay.   http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/09/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-most-americans-pay-higher-tax-ra/ PolitiFact says that if you include payroll taxes […]

One could add a few names, and people did in comments.  One could also add a couple more thoughts  to Jonathon’s criterion, two of which could be admitting to mistakes and fixing parts of the model one is using if missed called, and a caveat around whether an economist could explain his/her model well and […]

by Linda Beale Romney is still hiding his tax history (Part IV) As I noted in several prior posts about the reasons that multiple years of the Romneys’ tax returns are essential to evaluating Romney as a presidential candidate, the fact that Romney has adamantly refused to release returns other than the 2010 actual return […]

by Kenneth Thomas U.S. Trade Deficit Largely Due to “Intra-Firm” Trade The vast majority of the U.S. $727 billion trade deficit in goods for 2011 is due to “intra-firm” or “related party” trade, that is, trade between two units of the same corporation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. This is significant because such trade […]

by Rebecca Wilder World Trade Turning Down Something different for today: world trade. Recently, South Korea and Taiwan released July 2012 trade statistics, where annual export growth was seen contracting at a 8.8% and 11.6% rate, respectively. The annual pace of export growth in Taiwan contracted for the fifth consecutive month, where that in South […]

Of course see Mike Kimel’s Presimetrics, familiar to most AB readers, and posts at Angry Bear can be listed here Paul Krugman write on the meme: Dooh Nibor Update: And the Romney people respond with deep voodoo, invoking the supposed fabulous growth effects from his tax cuts. And who could argue? Remember how the economy […]