J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 2097
February 10, 2011
Matthew Yglesias: House Members Discovering That Health Care Status Quo Is Really Bad
MY:
Yglesias » House Members Discovering That Health Care Status Quo Is Really Bad: Marin Cogan reports on the mismatch between House members’ zeal to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and the realities of their experiences with the health insurance market:
“I have a niece who has pre-existing conditions, and I worry about her if she was ever to lose her job,” said Florida Rep. Richard Nugent, one of the freshman lawmakers who declined federal health insurance benefits.
I worry too. But Nugent should note something. He worries about this only in case his niece actually loses her job. If she voluntarily switches to another job, she’s fine. But that’s thanks to a regulation that allows people who maintain continuity of coverage to keep it notwithstanding adverse selection issues. And the only reason Nugent’s niece’s employer offers group health benefits at all is that large insurers receive massive tax subsidies to do so. The health insurance market mostly works for most people most of the time only because it already involves massive government intervention. In an actual free market for health care, everyone would be like an unemployed niece with a pre-existing condition. You’d phone up an insurance company and say “I want to buy insurance that will pay for my health care if I get sick” and the company will quite naturally expect that you’re already sick and refuse to sell it at any non-extortionate price.
Econ 210a: Memo Question for February 16, 2011
Memo question for 210a for next week (to be posted on THURSDAY morning) is:
The scarcity of labor in the United States in the first half of the 19th century is said in the literature to have been responsible for the country's distinctive technological development. Does this argument make sense logically? Does the evidence support it?
Policy Democrats, Political Democrats, Policy Republicans, and Political Republicans Today Are United in One and Only One Thing...
...scorn and contempt for Mitt Romney as the ultimate empty suit.
David Bernstein http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/115412-mitt-rewrites-himself/:
When Mitt Romney's second book, No Apology, came out a year ago, it looked like he was moving away from the far-right demagoguery of his 2008 bid for the presidency, and toward a more moderate centrism for the 2012 election cycle.... A year later... Romney is tacking back — as evidenced by changes made to two sections of the text in the new paperback edition of No Apology.
The first rewrite excises a relatively even-handed assessment of the 2009 economic-stimulus package. In the original, Romney wrote that it "will accelerate the timing of the start of the recovery, but not as much as it could have." The paperback pronounces the stimulus "a failure," and blasts Obama's "economic missteps" with conservative red-meat language — for example: "This is the first time government has declared war on free enterprise."
The other major change comes in a chapter on health care. In the original hardcover, Romney tried to carefully distinguish between the Massachusetts law and the national version that was nearing passage as he wrote. But the Massachusetts model has become Romney's bête noire among conservatives, who loathe the national reform they call "Obamacare." The rewritten paperback swings much harder, proclaiming that "Obamacare will not work and should be repealed," and "Obamacare is an unconstitutional federal incursion into the rights of states."
Other additions in that section blame the Massachusetts legislature for altering his plan, and the current Democratic administration of Governor Deval Patrick for botching the implementation.
Asked about the changes, Eric Fehrnstrom, spokesperson for Romney's Free and Strong America PAC, responded by e-mail: "The book was originally written in the months immediately following President Obama's inauguration. A lot has occurred over the last two years, and these updates reflect those happenings."
That's true. Of course, it's also true of many other topics in No Apology, virtually all of which is reproduced exactly from the hardcover.
"I'm sure he saw what happened to Trey Grayson, Mike Castle, and Sue Lowden last year," says Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling in North Carolina, referring to Republicans who lost US Senate primaries to Tea Party–backed candidates in Kentucky, Delaware, and Nevada. "It's those same voters who nominated Sharron Angle [for US Senate in Nevada] who are going to choose the Republican presidential nominee."
Romney certainly appears to be targeting those voters in the paperback's new introduction, in which he bemoans the "elite" liberals' destruction of everything the Founding Fathers stood for — especially "freedom," a word that appears 25 times in the introduction. "Constitution" shows up 11 times. The Tea Party gets mentioned by name, as does the Glenn Beck–promoted 9/12 movement — even Joe the Plumber gets a shout-out.
The subtitle has also changed, from "The case for American greatness" to the more campaign-sloganish "Believe in America." Whether Tea Party voters can believe in the ever-shifting Romney is still a question.
Seriously. Take any group of people snarling and spitting at each other over the politics/policy divide or the Democrat/Republican divide, and you can make immediate and total Harmonic Convergence by merely raising the topic of Mitt Romney. Group hugs. Mortal enemies passing the fried chicken. The singing of "Kumbaya."
Policy Democrats are, of course, contemptuous of Romney for his craven abandonment of policy sanity.
The dwindled ranks of reality-based policy Republicans are humiliated by Romney's rejection of them and their policies.
Wingnut policy Republicans are anticipatorily contemptuous of Romney's forthcoming post-prinary tack left, at which time they too will be thrown over the side.
Political Democrats are, of course, contemptuous of Romney on general principles as they are of all Republicans.
Political Republicans ate scornful of the amateurish way in which Romney has repudiated his entire past: a Road-to-Damascus conversion has to be accompanied by Road-to-Damascus-style effects:
And Saul yet breathing out threatnings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the high Priest, and desired of him letters to Damascus, to the Synagogues, that if he found any of this way, whether they were men or women, he might bring them bound unto Jerusalem. And as he iourneyed he came near Damascus, and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?... And the men which iourneyed with him, stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man. And Saul arose from the earth, and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus. And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat, nor drink."
IAS 107: Intermediate Macro: Spring 2011: J. Bradford DeLong: Screencasts to Date
February 8, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Introduction to Depression Economics. Income-Expenditure Model:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUVC-Rm0kQQ
February 3, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Growth Economics:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rta7Jc4KGQ
February 1, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Convergence and Divergence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ug63Qrk5bDc
January 27, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Economic Growth since 1800:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXJ3J95kaA
January 25, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Introduction to Economic Growth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sHWKdwAaR0
January 20, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Measuring the Macroeconomy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5M9VrSI-ZE
January 18, 2011 Lecture by J. Bradford DeLong for U.C. Berkeley course IAS 107: Intermediate Macroeconomics. Introduction:
http://delong.typepad.com/files/lecture-1-ias-107-spring-2011.m4a
IAS 107: Section Readings on the Financial Crisis
Readings for MacLean and Nocera, All the Devils Are Here...
For sections between Th Feb 10 @ 12:30 and Th Feb 17 @ 11:00:
Skim chapters 1-5 on “securitization”: how it was that people thought that taking a whole bunch of mortgages, mashing them together, and selling the results as bonds made sense...
For sections between Th Feb 17 @ 12:30 and Th Feb 24 @ 11:00:
Read chapters 6-8 on “policy”: why the American government decided at the end of the 1990s to back off of financial regulation, and let the financial sector “experiment”...
For sections between Th Feb 24 @ 12:30 and Th Mar 3 @ 11:00:
Read chapters 9-15 on the bubble in subprime mortgages: how mortgage companies, banks, and investors concluded that diversified investments in even risky mortgages carried very little risk indeed...
For sections between Th Mar 3@ 12:30 and Th Mar 10 @ 11:00:
Read chapters 16-19 on how the smart guys go short: how the more clever of the investment banks began to figure out ways to profit from the forthcoming housing crash, but how the bulk of investment and commercial bankers were not so clever...
For sections in the last week before spring break:
Read chapters 20-Epilogue on the slow-motion panic that was the impulse that generated our current economic downturn...
Why Friends Don't Let Friends Even Think of Supporting the Republican Party: Inflation Threat Edition
David Leonhardt:
Inflation, in One Picture: On Capitol Hill, members of Congress are grilling Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, about his attempts to lift economic growth by reducing long-term interest rates — the Fed’s so-called Q.E.2 program, or quantitative easing. Some members of Congress think Mr. Bernanke is fighting the wrong battle. They want him to take steps to stamp out inflation, which they believe is dangerously high or soon will be. Here is core inflation — economists’ preferred measure of inflation, because it’s more predictive than headline inflation.... Does it look dangerously high? Or might the slow pace of economic growth and the high level of unemployment be larger problems?
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