healthcare

This is a question I have been struggling with since the sovereign debt crisis began.  So let me run a little of it by you.  This may be half-baked but I would love some comments. In a perfect world, we would have full employment…

Last summer, I heard from a source close to the Obama Administration that the public option was mostly a bargaining tool and that the Obama Administration would only use it in order to pass healthcare reform. Translation: the Obama…

“We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” --John Winthrop Joe Biden is buying none of this America-as-an-empire-in-terminal-decline meme.  The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne caught up with the Vice…

The Democratic defeat in yesterday’s Massachusetts Senate race puts a punctuation mark on the grinding erosion of support for the Obama Administration and its economic policy in a tough first year. Clearly voters were sending the…

Byron Wien was amazingly accurate last year in his economic predictions even though his annual list is an attempt to build a non-consensus list of likely outlier events. So, I was eager to see Byron Wien's 2010 surprises, which were…

I will have some commentary on this in a future post or an updated version of this one. Update 1600 ET: you can see my commentary in the next post here. The Surprises of 2010 The United States economy grows at a stronger than expected…

Hat tip FiveThirtyEight. once you remove the U.S., there's a strong correlation between spending and life expectancy, and this is super-clear from the scatterplot. For more information behind this chart, click the link below.…

Hat tip Prieur du Plessis. Source Chip Bok, 28 Dec 2009 - Comics.com

While many companies can use the huge increase in market returns to mask a looming pension crisis, the problem is still acute. Because of actuarial accounting, pension funding problems are pro-cyclical.  Companies look flush with cash…

I will limit my comments in this post since I am so thoroughly disgusted with Washington’s giveaways to special interests.  But I have to bring up health care reform and its likely non-impact on improving American’s economic situation…