The Angry Bear

The Democratic Debate in Des Moines: progressive candidates on means testing versus universality Dana Chasin at 2020 Vision does a good job of encapsulating key issuesthat surface in the Democratic debates. Let’s get this out first:  most listeners will admit that the debates seem both too long and too short, as mentioned on Stephen Henderson’s Detroit Today program this Wednesday 1/15 morning.  They are too short, because candidates are interrupted at...

Part 2 discusses why we must have the government issue payments to hospitals, clinics, etc. and also set the budgets for hospitals and this is how they are paid rather than billing multiple insurers and also patients. There is also only one payer. The later part is what I have been pounding on repeatedly. Forget prices and work with cost data. It is then we have a much clearer picture of the costs of healthcare and we can begin to control prices. Rep...

EMichael: I don’t understand why people have such a hard time believing that there is no such thing as an “independent” voter. Sure, a lot of people register as an independent, but that certainly does not mean they vote for one party or the other depending on the candidates and/or circumstances. Plenty of studies have shown that independent voters are even more loyal to one party or the other than party registered voters. In other words, when they vote,...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The short term forecast has been volatile recently – and was again this week. As usual, clicking over and reading rewards me a little bit for the effort I put in

The standard rule that reporters cover both sides of a debate and find some source to contest lies rather than doing it in their own name (and the name of the newspaper) has not survived Mitch McConnell’s office. In the New York Times, Nicholas Fandos notes that “A senior Republican aide in the Senate” lied on a very simple fact which is in the public record. The aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail internal strategy, argued that in...

Tyler Cowen today flags a paper by Currie, Kleven, and Zwiers on changing practices in economics, and highlights the following: Panel A illustrates a virtually linear rise in the fraction of papers, in both the NBER and top-five series, which make explicit reference to identification. This fraction has risen from around 4 percent to 50 percent of papers. This caught my eye, because Matt Yglesias at Vox recently highlighted a study claiming to show large...

For MLK Day: unemployment by race In observance of Martin Luther King’s birthday, almost all US markets are closed and there is no economic data. So on this day let’s see the extent to which economic opportunity in several neutral metrics has improved since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s. Here in unemployment for African Americans (blue) vs. whites (red) since the former began to be measured in 1972 (white unemployment had been...

NPR’s Planet Money went to the 2020 American Economic Association conference in San Diego where they asked economists, “what is the most useful idea in economics?” David Autor appears near the end of the episode (minute 16:00) to talk about the lump-of-labor fallacy. Almost exactly 87 years earlier, on January 18, 1933, Arthur Dahlberg appeared before a Senate subcommittee to give testimony on the thirty-hour work week bill. The lump-of-labor fallacy...

There is no better way to honor Dr. King than to read his Letter From a Birmingham Jail.  It is full of moral insight, deeply moving, and an astonishing piece of political advocacy.  Here are the opening paragraphs: While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that...