Update: This post from 6/28 has been re-posted today 7/04 as I believe it was lost in last Thursday’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the health care ACA. Robert Waldmann has also subsequently expressed an opinion on how Germany should proceed. Re-posted:The NYT carries a data filled op-ed by Gunnar Beck, and takes […]

Via AlterNet, Lynn Parramore describes: Job Insecurity: It’s the Disease of the 21st Century — And It’s Killing Us A massive, Xanax-fueled public health crisis driven by chronic employment worry is headed our way. Remember Dilbert, the mid-level, white-collar Cubicle Guy of the ’90s who could never seem to get ahead? In the 21st century, […]

Seems the devil really isin the details.  Or lack thereof.  Or (in this case) both.

G. has to leave the Eurozone. No not Greece Germany. Germany and a bunch of small Northern countries use the undervalued Northern Euro as their currency while we use the over valued Mediterranian and Irish (or Catholic and Orthodox) Euro. We need one more flexible exchange rate somewhere between them and the Sea. If Greek […]

‘Small business representative’ still has some meaning for people, but of course the term is gamed constantly in the political arena. Via Alternet comes this example: This morning, NPR’s Yuki Noguchi wanted to know how an ordinary small business owner feels now that the Obama health care law has been upheld. So she turned to […]

There is and will be a lot of conversation about the efficacy of the ACA (Affordable Care Act), whether it is a step to deal with the health care cost juggernaut or mostly a boon to private insurers.  What is true is that ‘medical inflation’ has resumed to previous levels of year to year increase […]

lifted from Robert’s site: Katherine Eban reported in the notorious left wing rag “Fortune” that everything Republicans have been saying about “Fast and Furious” up until yesterday when they found Eric Holder for contempt of Congress (for only handing over 7,600 pages of documents and insisting that ongoing investigations are protected by executive privilege) is […]

Dean Baker notes that liberals have let the right wing get away with the small government mythology… It is astounding how liberals are so happy to work for the right by implying that conservatives somehow just want to leave markets to themselves whereas the liberals want to bring in the pointy-headed bureaucrats to tell people […]

Paul Krugman writes that Keynesian thought has progressed. I disagree in comments with the usual I do not think that Keynesians accept that there is a natural rate of unemployment. The concept is inconsistent with hysteresis. OJ Blanchard and LH Summers are definitely Keynesians. They presented a model without a natural rate in 1986. I […]