Hale Passage

Aaron Carroll at the Incidental Economist:

As the rhetoric heats up before the election, I’d like to give you a quick reminder* of why we needed (and still need) health care reform:

That thick red line is the United States.  For the record, we’re beating Mexico, Turkey, and Chile.  But every other OECD country – every single other one listed there – has figured this out.  I’ve been spending a lot of time recently talking about the cost and quality of the health care system, but let’s not forget access.  We’re terrible.  There are so many countries bunched near 100% that you can’t see them all; picking out the very few that aren’t is easy.

Say what you will about the PPACA, but it was designed primarily to get at this issue.  It’s not perfect, and it won’t get us to 100% insured, but it will get us closer.  Our goal at this point should be to keep pushing to get us up with everyone else, not to return us to this.

I’ve got to get into the habit of reading Johnston more regularly — he is a goldmine of real data.  In this article, he asks a simple question:

What percentage of wealth in America is owned by the poorest 40 percent [that’s 120 million of us]? Wealth, or net worth, means all property of value, from cash to art to stocks and bonds to homes, minus debts.

Write down your answer before going to the article — and prepare to be shocked.

In another excellent article on tax.com, David Cay Johnston reports on new wage data released by the Social Security Administration.

Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold…

…Since 1980, however, the bottom 90 percent of Americans have seen their incomes go nowhere, while on the highest steps of the income ladder, the further up you are, the greater your gains.

Add in today’s decreased number of jobs, and all these data add up to policies that can be described with one word: failed.

Baby-sitting the economy. – By Paul Krugman – Slate Magazine.

Krugman says this story changed his life.  It certainly changed the way I look at inflation.  Follow the “quite obvious” link at the end and you will find out why inflation is necessary — especially in a liquidity trap.

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In? – NYTimes.com.

Good column by Frank Rich, with some useful links.

“One More Time with Gusto: Tax Cuts Do Not Pay for Themselves”

(from the Economist’s View)

Some Republican Senate candidates have suggested that extending the Bush tax cuts … will actually be good for the country’s bottom line, as the economic growth that results will more than offset the trillions of dollars in lost revenue. “By extending tax cuts you pay down the deficit, you grow the economy by giving people more money,” said Colorado Republican Ken Buck.

But, of course, the Bush tax cuts did not even come close to paying for themselves. The Bush tax cuts cost us around $1.7 trillion in revenue from 2001 through 2008, in part because of weak output and job growth following the cuts …

The disappointing part is that the press still lets them get away with this…

If the press won’t call them on this obvious falsehood, how can we trust them on anything? …

The Incidental Economist is looking at our health care system in depth.  In two ten-part series, the author (who is actually a physician) looks into what’s behind results that have been well reported — that we are first in cost and last in life expectancy.  The first series,  about costs, is complete; the second, about quality, is at the half-way point.  Stay tuned…

I missed this back when it was originally published — and I didn’t have this blog.  From the  New York Times”

Mary C. Daly, vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank  of San Francisco presents this detailed, but discouraging assessment of what we can look forward to if no further stimulus is applied.  The original is here: FRBSF Research: FedViews.

A good summary is here.

Why Have Deficits Exploded? – NYTimes.com.

Not because of a surge in government spending, but because revenues have collapsed.