April 11, 2009
May 26, 2008
May 23, 2008
April 5, 2008
Paul Krugman: Voodoo Health Economics
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, April 5, 2008
Elizabeth Edwards has cancer. John McCain has had cancer in the past. Last weekend, Mrs. Edwards bluntly pointed out that neither of them would be able to get insurance under Mr. McCain’s health care plan.
It’s about time someone said that and, more generally, made the case that Mr. McCain’s approach to health care is based on voodoo economics — not the supply-side voodoo that claims that cutting taxes increases revenues (though Mr. McCain says that, too), but the equally foolish claim, refuted by all available evidence, that the magic of the marketplace can produce cheap health care for everyone.
As Mrs. Edwards pointed out, the McCain health plan would do nothing to prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to those, like her and Mr. McCain, who have pre-existing medical conditions.
The McCain campaign’s response was condescending and dismissive — a statement that Mrs. Edwards doesn’t understand the comprehensive nature of the senator’s approach, which would harness “the power of competition to produce greater coverage for Americans,” reducing costs so that even people with pre-existing conditions could afford care.
This is nonsense on multiple levels.
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March 20, 2008
March 17, 2008
Paul Krugman: The B Word
Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 17, 2008
Last week, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and John Lipsky, a top official at the International Monetary Fund, both suggested that public funds might be needed to rescue the U.S. financial system. Mr. Lipsky insisted that he wasn’t talking about a bailout. But he was.
It’s true that Henry Paulson, the current Treasury secretary, still says that any proposal to use taxpayers’ money to help resolve the crisis is a “non-starter.” But that’s about as credible as all of his previous pronouncements on the financial situation.
So here’s the question we really should be asking: When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren’t also bailing out the people who got us into this mess?
Let’s talk about why a bailout is inevitable.
Between 2002 and 2007, false beliefs in the private sector — the belief that home prices only go up, that financial innovation had made risk go away, that a triple-A rating really meant that an investment was safe — led to an epidemic of bad lending. Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs.
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March 11, 2008
Reuters: McCain Budget Numbers Don’t Add Up
Andy Sullivan, Reuters, March 11, 2008
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – John McCain’s reputation for “straight talk” has helped him clinch the U.S. Republican presidential nomination but budget experts say his numbers do not add up.
McCain’s promises to reduce wasteful spending if elected president in November would not begin to cover the costs of his proposed tax cuts, analysts say.
He also has not yet explained how he would rein in the health-care and retirement costs expected to swamp the federal budget as some 77 million people retire from the U.S. work force in the coming decades.
On top of that, a President McCain would inherit a $400 billion budget deficit, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost nearly $200 billion per year and a similar bill for interest payments on the $10 trillion national debt.
Many experts said McCain’s proposals would make the fiscal picture worse.
“This is one of the most fiscally irresponsible plans we’ve seen by a presidential candidate in a long time,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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The Trickle-Down Twins