Market Competition as a Path to Making Medicare Available for All
A. Introduction Since taking office just two years ago, the Trump administration has done all it legally could to undermine Obamacare. The share of the US population without health insurance had been...
View ArticleEnd Gerrymandering by Focussing on the Process, Not on the Outcomes
A. Introduction There is little that is as destructive to a democracy as gerrymandering. As has been noted by many, with gerrymandering the politicians are choosing their voters rather than the...
View ArticleTaxes on Corporate Profits Have Continued to Collapse
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released earlier today its second estimate of GDP growth in the fourth quarter ot 2018. (Confusingly, it was officially called the “third” estimate, but was...
View ArticleAllow the IRS to Fill In Our Tax Forms For Us – It Can and It Should
A. Introduction Having recently completed and filed this year’s income tax forms, it is timely to examine what impact the Republican tax bill, pushed quickly through Congress in December 2017 along...
View ArticleThe Survey of Establishments Say Employment is Rising, But the Survey of...
A. Introduction Those who follow the monthly release of the Employment Situation report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (with the most recent issue, for April, released on May 3) may have noticed...
View ArticleThe Increasingly Attractive Economics of Solar Power: Solar Prices Have Plunged
A. Introduction The cost of solar photovoltaic power has fallen dramatically over the past decade, and it is now, together with wind, a lower cost source of new power generation than either...
View ArticleThe Growing Fiscal Deficit, the Keynesian Stimulus Policies of Trump, and the...
A. The Growing Fiscal Deficit Under Trump Donald Trump, when campaigning for office, promised that he would “quickly” drive down the fiscal deficit to zero. Few serious analysts believed that he...
View ArticleThe “Threat” of Job Losses is Nothing New and Not to be Feared: Issues Raised...
A. Introduction The televised debate held October 15 between twelve candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination covered a large number of issues. Some were clear, but many were not. The...
View ArticleAndrew Yang’s Proposed $1,000 per Month Grant: Issues Raised in the...
A. Introduction This is the second in a series of posts on this blog addressing issues that have come up during the campaign of the candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, and which...
View ArticleHow Fast is GDP Growing?: A Curiosum
A. How Fast is GDP Growing? The Bureau of Economic Analysis released today its first estimate (what it calls it’s Advance Estimate) for the growth of GDP and its components for the third quarter of...
View ArticleThe High and Rising Cost of Health Care in the US
A. Introduction What to do about health care has been a central issue debated by the candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Different proposals have been made, but two...
View ArticleThe Performance of the Stock Market During Trump’s Term in Office: Not So...
A. Introduction Stock market performance is often taken to be a good measure of how the economy as a whole is performing. But it is not. For most Americans it is simply irrelevant, as the...
View ArticleThe Plans for Medicare-for-All and Medicare-for-All-Who-Want-It: A Comparison...
A. Introduction The US health care funding system is a mess. One consequence is that despite spending far more than any other country in the world for its health care system (about 18% of GDP...
View ArticleAn Update on the Different Employment Estimates from the Survey of...
A. Revisions in the Jobs Numbers The pace of job growth in 2019 was slower than had originally been estimated. While such revisions to the initial job growth estimates are not unusual (there is a...
View ArticleThe Democratic Primaries Thus Far: Bernie Sanders’ Vote Numbers
A. Introduction One of the main arguments Bernie Sanders has made for why he should be the nominee of the Democratic Party to run against Trump is that he would spur a much higher turnout, especially...
View ArticleThe Ineffectiveness of Travel Bans for Addressing the COVID-19 Pandemic
A) Introduction The US is sinking into what looks likely to be its biggest public health crisis in over a century (i.e. since the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918/19). But President Trump continues to...
View ArticleA Very Faint First Sign to be Hopeful on Covid-19: Except Not Yet for the US
Source: New York Times, “Coronavirus Deaths by U.S. State and Country Over Time: Daily Tracking”, downloaded March 25, 2020, with deaths reported as of 8:20am on March 25. As in any epidemic where...
View ArticleThe Rapid Growth in Deaths from Covid-19: The Role of Politics
Deaths from Covid-19 have been growing at an extremely rapid rate. The chart above shows what those rates have been in the month of March, averaged over seven day periods to smooth out day-to-day...
View ArticleTrump’s Mismanagement of the Covid-19 Crisis: South Korea Shows What Would...
Source: David Leonhardt, Newsletter of April 13, 2020, The New York Times I normally only include charts I have developed myself in this blog, but the chart above, from David Leonhardt of the New York...
View ArticleCovid-19: Using Fatality Rates to Estimate the Degree of Undercounting and...
The United States terribly bungled the introduction of testing for the virus that causes Covid-19, with a delay of more than a month during a critical time. Even now, the testing rate is still less...
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