“The practice of medicine was accepted to be a chancy way to make a living, and nobody expected a doctor to get rich, least of all the doctors themselves.”  – Lewis Thomas, The Youngest Science, p. 4 (Penguin, 1995 edition, quote via Google Books) Lost in the discussion of Paul Ryan’s “plan” is the group […]

More on the health-care later, but let me be clear: Congressman Paul Ryan’s “plan” is NOT a budget. Budgets show Sources and Uses. As the CBO analysis makes clear, this “budget” is no more a budget than Ryan’s last round of fakery. To wit: The path for revenues as a percentage of GDP was specified […]

Much is being made of the reported gains in same store sales by major retailers. But it may be best to take these reports with a grain of salt. Until late last year price increases in the retail sector were minimaland the reported retail sales increases reflected real gains. Through year end the Y/Y deflator […]

Economists’s claims that taxes should not be paid by corporations is based on the premise that government should be relatively  inefficient and/or run a deficit in perpetuity. Discuss.

by Beverly Mann Justice Kennedy’s Hard-Right Turn After (and Because of?) Citizens United Anyone who watches the Supreme Court closely surely recognizes that Justice Kennedy last year took a hard-right turn, effectively removing himself from the role of swing voter and siding nearly always with the Court’s four-member rightwing bloc in ideologically determined cases. This […]

I want to open a pizza place. I find an available space; a previous pizza place that went out of business. The only catch is that there are four other pizza places nearby, none of which is overcrowded, except at the peak of peak hours. One–a block or two away, on another street–is the oldest […]

Wisconsin Supreme Court election update They seem to have gone to sleep over in Wisconsin. I did too but now I’m awake.The current state of the supreme court election is that 3,596 of 3,630 precincts have reported and the incumbent conservative Walker ally is Prosser is ahead of the challenger Kloppenberg by 733,074 to 732489, […]

Health Care Thoughts: ACO Draft Regulations On March 31st the Obama administration issued the draft regulations for Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). ACOs are to eventually be the centerpiece of cost savings for the entire US health care system. This is the first peak at how the ACOs might be defined. In the “they never […]

The point of this article is to demonstrate that Germany has enjoyed increased ‘competitiveness’ as measured by productivity levels and relative prices. But the clarity of Germany’s ‘competitiveness’ cannot be established by using German data in the form of a black box – a bird’s-eye view of the region is the only way to see […]