by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Another Major Event On the 23rd the Obama administration will publish the administrative regulations for Medicaid expansion. http://www.medicaid.gov/Federal-Policy-Guidance/Downloads/REG-03-16-12.pdf As reported by Modern Healthcare, eligibility will be simplified to an income test as a percentage of the federal poverty level. This may expand Medicaid by as many as […]
Jonathan Haidt reports an interesting experimental result: Two three-year-olds walk up to a marble-delivery machine that has two bins. Each stands in front of one bin. Three scenarios: 1. One bin has three marbles in it, the other has one: the winner is unlikely to share to equalize the takings. 2. There are two ropes […]
by Linda Beale Graphs Show It Clearly–the richest are much richer and most of us are poorer David Cay Johnston has employed a couple of key graphic images that tell a significant story about the way that US laws have favored the rich–including tax administrative procedures that have reduced real audits of the rich and […]
by Rebecca Wilder Does the US Corporate Saving Rate Portend a Lower Unemployment Rate? An interesting thing happened in Q4 2011: the corporate saving rate declined following two quarters of gains. Nominal net saving by the domestic business sector fell 3%, while nominal gross fixed investment and inventories surged 6% – the two pushed the […]
by Linda Beale Public Transit Benefit was down, is now up again (in Senate) One of the tax provisions that lapsed last year was a very popular tax expenditure supporting public transportation–a tax credit for commuters using mass transit was allowed to lapse back to a $125 monthly benefit from the stimulus level of $230 […]
Paul Krugman notes Angry Bear Robert Waldmann in the micro/macro conversation in the New York Times: There has been an ongoing discussion in the econoblogosphere about the usefulness or lack thereof of “microfoundations” in macroeconomics, which in practice means trying to write down models in which aggregate behavior is justified in terms of the actions of […]
Mark Thoma and Simon Wren-Lewis both responded to a complaint about the rational expectations assumption by noting that they had colleagues who study boundedly rational learning. I see a third alternative — giving up. That is, we might conclude that we don’t understand expectations formation and that we won’t for a long while, so we […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Major Event The Department of Health and Human Services has issued the final regulations for the operation of state health insurance exchanges. Summary at: http://www.healthcare.gov/news/factsheets/2011/07/exchanges07112011a.html Lots of reading ahead.
Simon Wren-Lewis gets me going again He wrote Rational expectations do not prevent us understanding sustained periods of deficient demand when an inflation targeting central bank hits a lower bound. Indeed they help, because with rational expectations inflation targeting prevents inflation expectations delivering the real interest rate we need, as I have argued here. and […]
by Linda Beale Illinois’s Tim Johnson (Rep.) Squirms under Norquist No-Tax-Increase Pledge Back in 2002, Tim Johnson represented a safely red district in Illinois and the radical right was pressing on his back with its reaganomics-inspired program to cut-taxes-to-shrink-(nonmilitary)-government-and-eliminate-public-infrastructure-and-social-justice-programs; de-regulate-to-free-up-big-business; privatize-wherever-you-can-especially-schools-bridges-and-other-essential-services. Not to be outdone, Tim Johnson signed the no-tax-increase pledge on the dotted line, […]