McArdle explains:
Part of Obamacare was a transitional “High Risk Pool” program to cover people who were unable to get insurance until the rest of the law’s provisions kicked in in 2014. The program allocated $5 billion. Medicare’s chief actuary assumed that it would attract 400,000 people; the CBO projected 200,000–but only because they assumed […]
Archive for the 'Economics' Category
Feb3rd2012
Feb1st2012
Remember a while back, during the Wisconsin governor Walker fiasco, the debate that raged regarding government workers and their wages with respect to private sector workers? You had right wing economists arguing that federal workers were indeed overpaid and left wing economists arguing the opposite. An honest observer might have found it difficult to know […]
Jan30th2012
Atleast part of the reason is a dwindling supply:
In tech circles, the C-suite at a publicly traded company is no longer the be-all and end-all. Just look at the troubles Yahoo! (YHOO) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) have recently had finding new leaders. HP canned former SAP (SAP) Chief Executive Officer Léo Apotheker after just 11 […]
Jan26th2012
Megan McArdle on President Obama’s speech:
I think the speech made it even clearer that other speeches have that the president’s vision of the world is a lightly updated 1950s technocracy without the social conservatism, and with solar panels instead of rocket ships. Government and labor and business working in tightly controlled concert, with nice […]
Jan24th2012
If you care about maximizing government revenue that is:
Most of the discussion by economists of the appropriate capital gains tax rate is about a very narrow criterion: the effect of capital gains tax rates on capital gains tax revenues. But in a 2009 study done for the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation (IRET), […]
Jan19th2012
University Of Chicago economist John Cochrane writes:
Intuitively, this is related to the theorem that you shouldn’t tax intermediate goods, or have tariffs for moving goods around the country. Romney’s income was taxed once, when he made it. It’s not efficient to tax it again, because he chose to save it rather than spend it immediately on […]
Jan18th2012
You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video
A worthwhile clip.
Jan16th2012
“Conservatives will also find that Europe is much less open to immigration than the United States, that Europe generally has much lighter taxation of investment income, that few European countries uphold American-style strong separation of church and state, that European countries generally afford accused criminals fewer procedural rights, and that Europe has much less in […]
Jan12th2012
What about life expectancy statistics — a favorite of the critics, since Americans don’t score very high? It turns out that when you remove outcomes doctors have almost no impact on — death from fatal injuries (car accidents, violent crime, etc.) — U.S. life expectancy jumps from 19th in the world to number one! — […]
Dec28th2011
NYU economist Mario Rizzo gives a list of some of the questions and issues that serious people ought to consider on inequality:
There seems to be very little concern, in the popular press, for the causes of unequal distribution. This includes, especially, the causes of the increasing unequal distribution over the past few decades. […]
Dec21st2011
Bloomberg Businessweek reports:
Moments before a single-engine aircraft and a helicopter collided over the Hudson River near Manhattan in 2009, an air-traffic controller who should have been advising the plane’s pilot was on the phone, joking with an airport worker about a dead cat.
Nine people, including three teenage boys, died. The Teterboro, New Jersey, controller, whom […]
Dec20th2011
Leftists like to portray the European economic model as more “poor” friendly than the United States economic model. But that depends on what your preferences are: if you are poor and would prefer less disposable income with more government services, then yes, the European model would be preferable. However, if you are poor and would […]
Dec7th2011
Megan McArdle On Fiscal Stimulus
Published by in Economics, Fiscal Stimulus and ModernPolitics. 0 CommentsMcArdle makes a decent case to be cautious about fiscal stimulus here:
Starts to pick up at the 3 min mark.
Oct28th2011
“Here is a fact that you might not have heard from the Occupy Wall Street crowd: The incomes at the top of the income distribution have fallen substantially over the past few years. According to the most recent IRS data, between 2007 and 2009, the 99th percentile income (AGI, not inflation-adjusted) fell from $410,096 to […]
Oct18th2011
For the record, I agree with every single point David Frum makes here against Republicans in general:
On the most urgent economic issue of the day – recovery from the Great Recession – the Republican consensus is seriously wrong.
It is wrong in its call for monetary tightening.
It is wrong to demand immediate debt reduction rather than wait […]
Oct14th2011
This inevitable tradeoff appears again in UC online class offerings:
Lecturers make up nearly half the undergraduate teaching corps. They fear — with good reason — that the classes they teach are the most likely to be moved online. Their union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, has negotiated a deal […]
