Jonathan Chait argues both that the debate about Romney and Bain is idiotic and he participates in it. His contribution is definitely idiotic if he is right that the debate is stupid. It is also idiotic if it isn’t stupid, because he ignored what is true and what is false when writing about what is […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health care thoughts: Bundling Medical Payments The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is chocked full of pilot programs, mandates, guarantees, prohibitions, penalties, taxes and experiments. One of those experiments may define the future of Medicare funding for surgeons, and then may define the future of most of the […]
Via alternet comes this bit of news: …John Allison, a former bank CEO and a leader of the Rand movement, has just become president of the Cato Institute, the oldest and most influential libertarian think tank. This received only a modest amount of attention when it surfaced late last month, and you had to be […]
It’s no secret I am a bad economist: I don’t believe rent control is a bad thing, I consider most of the job-matching models to be ludicrous when someone tries to use them to claim unemployment compensation extends people’s period of unemployment, and I really, really, really don’t believe the equity premium is anything but […]
The US real trade balance has been bouncing around current level for the last two years –being neither a significant contribution nor a significant drag on growth. This is a significantly different picture than the nominal trade balance shows where the trade deficit is still widening. Much of the apparent stability in the real […]
In a comment to my post yesterday titled “Romney’s VERY Private Equity,” which asked how Romney was able to metasticze his Bain-era IRA account to accumulate more than $100 million—Investment in Apple stock? In precious-metals funds? A quiet Louvre heist? I asked—reader Steve Hamlin wrote: Beverly, Re: Romney’s IRA contributions, there was a WSJ article […]
Lifted from Robert’s personal blog comes this thought: Ballance in the Washington Post Again – Robert’s thoughts This is part of a series. As usual, I think the latest is the all time winner. The concept of Ballance is that reporting and commentary must reach balanced conclusions no matter what the facts are. It is […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Crazy like Foxes? Several governors are announcing they will not begin building the state health exchanges required by PPACA (Obamacare). Some of this is pure partisan, and some a stall until November. Failure to comply will result in the feds installing exchanges in those states. The states […]
by Mike Kimel A Partial Review of Bulls Bears and the Ballot Boxby Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb A couple of years ago, Michael Kanell of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and I wrote Presimetrics. In it, we looked at how Presidents did on a wide range of issues – everything from abortions to the national debt. We measured […]