Tag: Paul Krugman

Trump’s Tax Cut Con Rolls On

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❝ What will happen if the blue wave in the midterm elections falls short? Clearly, at this point it still might: Democrats will surely receive more votes than Republicans, but thanks to gerrymandering and population geography, the U.S. electoral system gives excess weight to rural, white voters who still have faith in President Trump. What if, thanks to that excess weight, the minority prevails?

❝ First of all, there is every reason to believe that a Republican Congress, freed from the immediate threat of elections, would do what it narrowly failed to do last year, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. This would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance and would in particular hit those with pre-existing conditions…

But the attack on the social safety net probably wouldn’t stop with a rollback of Obama-era expansion: Longstanding programs, very much including Social Security and Medicare, would also be on the chopping block. Who says so? Republicans themselves…the same Republicans now wringing their hands over budget deficits just blew up that same deficit by enacting a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

RTFA, folks. Hope a modicum of sanity if not honesty creeps into the understanding of folks gullible enough to vote a second time for the unindicted co-conspirator-in-chief.

Fixing Obamacare is not good enough

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medicare for all

❝ National health insurance has become a defining issue in the contest for the Democratic nomination. Bernie has put “Medicare for all” squarely back on the table. Hillary calls that pie-in-the-sky: instead, she would build on the Affordable Care Act…As she says, market-based private insurance was originally her idea.

❝ We can all agree that the ACA has benefited many, particularly the poor and the sick.

But Medicare for all has picked up some interesting supporters: for example, Fareed Zakaria, a high-profile TV commentator whose beat is foreign affairs, and Donald Berwick, MD, who, as administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, supervised the roll-out of the ACA.

Moreover, the Kaiser Family Foundation December 2015 Tracking Poll demonstrates majority support among ordinary Americans – 58%; a 2014 survey of physicians and medical students in Maine showed that many doctors also (in Maine at least) would prefer single-payer, especially those practicing primary care.

So it is disappointing that liberal economists whom I respect, such as New York Times columnist and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, conclude that single-payer would be too expensive and too disruptive — that we should improve the ACA instead.

❝ Krugman, of course, is trained to crunch numbers — I can’t. But from the exam room where I sit, his conclusion doesn’t make sense. The principal advantage of single-payer, after all, is that it is less expensive than our market-based system.

That is not just idle speculation: every other developed nation has either some form of single-payer or highly regulated private insurance with price controls — and they all achieve better health outcomes, with genuinely universal coverage, for at least 30% less (as a fraction of the Gross Domestic Product) than we do, even though we still cover something less than the entire population.

❝ Perhaps the economists simply substituted Treasury payments for employers’ contributions to their employees’ health insurance (something the ACA was specifically designed to preserve), and left everything else in place: that would indeed be a huge hit to the federal budget, particularly since employers, representing a large group of mostly healthy employee families, can negotiate better deals with insurers than individuals can.

But that is not how Medicare for all would work. Instead, it would be like Medicare today, improved to make it even less expensive for the Treasury and individual beneficiaries. Since everyone would receive the same, comprehensive benefits, administrative costs would be much lower. The huge transaction costs engendered by the ACA — hundreds of thousands of annual negotiations between insurers, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical benefit managers, and manufacturers — would decline significantly…

❝ Finally — and most controversially — Medicare, which currently sets prices for doctors and hospitals, would extend price controls to other health services, such as prescription drugs and devices, through open procedures with due process and opportunity for comment as mandated by the Constitution. Or Medicare could negotiate prices, as the Department of Veterans Affairs currently does.

I didn’t include the whole article. The core is here. RTFA for details – which further illustrate the benefits of Dr. Poplin’s proposal. I’m pleased she included mention of the negotiations already standard procedure for the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nothing new. Part of normal operations for years resulting in significant cost savings.

Speaking of costs, you should take notice of the history of what’s accepted as standard in the medical-industrial complex vs federal government management of Medicare or, say, Social Security. Administrative costs to civil service managers run in general less than 3% to run those programs. Insurers bag taxpayers 15-25% for the same kind of work.

A cost I look forward to seeing brought down to the level of existing entitlements.

Paul Krugman lectures the hawks who persist in crying wolf

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According to a recent report in The Times, there is dissent at the Fed: “An increasingly vocal minority of Federal Reserve officials want the central bank to retreat more quickly” from its easy-money policies, which they warn run the risk of causing inflation. And this debate, we are told, is likely to dominate the big economic symposium currently underway in Jackson Hole, Wyo.

That may well be the case. But there’s something you should know: That “vocal minority” has been warning about soaring inflation more or less nonstop for six years. And the persistence of that obsession seems, to me, to be a more interesting and important story than the fact that the usual suspects are saying the usual things…

The Times article singles out for special mention Charles Plosser of the Philadelphia Fed, who is, indeed, warning about inflation risks. But you should know that he warned about the danger of rising inflation in 2008. He warned about it in 2009. He did the same in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. He was wrong each time, but, undaunted, he’s now doing it again…

The point is that when you see people clinging to a view of the world in the teeth of the evidence, failing to reconsider their beliefs despite repeated prediction failures, you have to suspect that there are ulterior motives involved. So the interesting question is: What is it about crying “Inflation!” that makes it so appealing that people keep doing it despite having been wrong again and again?

Well, when economic myths persist, the explanation usually lies in politics — and, in particular, in class interests. There is not a shred of evidence that cutting tax rates on the wealthy boosts the economy, but there’s no mystery about why leading Republicans like Representative Paul Ryan keep claiming that lower taxes on the rich are the secret to growth. Claims that we face an imminent fiscal crisis, that America will turn into Greece any day now, similarly serve a useful purpose for those seeking to dismantle social programs…

But while easy money may in principle have mixed effects on the fortunes (literally) of the wealthy, in practice demands for tighter money despite high unemployment always come from the right. Eight decades ago, Friedrich Hayek warned against any attempt to mitigate the Great Depression via “the creation of artificial demand”; three years ago, Mr. Ryan all but accused Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman at the time, of seeking to “debase” the dollar. Inflation obsession is as closely associated with conservative politics as demands for lower taxes on capital gains.

It’s less clear why. But faith in the inability of government to do anything positive is a central tenet of the conservative creed. Carving out an exception for monetary policy — “Government is always the problem, not the solution, unless we’re talking about the Fed cutting interest rates to fight unemployment” — may just be too subtle a distinction to draw in an era when Republican politicians draw their economic ideas from Ayn Rand novels.

Which brings me back to the Fed, and the question of when to end easy-money policies…

But the last people you want to ask about appropriate policy are people who have been warning about inflation year after year. Not only have they been consistently wrong, they’ve staked out a position that, whether they know it or not, is essentially political rather than based on analysis. They should be listened to politely — good manners are always a virtue — then ignored.

Freshly-educated, modern economists completely ignore, wholly reject the crap that is economic dogma for Republicans. Whether they are social moderates or the more fascist-minded.

Another organic tie between modernists like Krugman and political progressives is dedication to the needs of the mass of American workers and their families. We are the real source of value created to make a cushy life for the one-percenters. We deserve more than a minimal safety net or education barely-sufficient to moderate an obedient class of producers.

Sweden turns its economy Japanese

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Three years ago Sweden was widely regarded as a role model in how to deal with a global crisis. The nation’s exports were hit hard by slumping world trade but snapped back; its well-regulated banks rode out the financial storm; its strong social insurance programs supported consumer demand; and unlike much of Europe, it still had its own currency, giving it much-needed flexibility. By mid-2010 output was surging, and unemployment was falling fast. Sweden, declared The Washington Post, was “the rock star of the recovery.”

Then the sadomonetarists moved in.

The story so far: In 2010 Sweden’s economy was doing much better than those of most other advanced countries. But unemployment was still high, and inflation was low. Nonetheless, the Riksbank — Sweden’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve — decided to start raising interest rates.

There was some dissent within the Riksbank over this decision. Lars Svensson, a deputy governor at the time — and a former Princeton colleague of mine — vociferously opposed the rate hikes. Mr. Svensson, one of the world’s leading experts on Japanese-style deflationary traps, warned that raising interest rates in a still-depressed economy put Sweden at risk of a similar outcome. But he found himself isolated, and left the Riksbank in 2013.

Sure enough, Swedish unemployment stopped falling soon after the rate hikes began. Deflation took a little longer, but it eventually arrived. The rock star of the recovery has turned itself into Japan.

So why did the Riksbank make such a terrible mistake? That’s a hard question to answer, because officials changed their story over time. At first the bank’s governor declared that it was all about heading off inflation: “If the interest rate isn’t raised now, we’ll run the risk of too much inflation further ahead … Our most important task is to ensure that we meet our inflation target of 2 percent.” But as inflation slid toward zero, falling ever further below that supposedly crucial target, the Riksbank offered a new rationale: tight money was about curbing a housing bubble, to avert financial instability. That is, as the situation changed, officials invented new rationales for an unchanging policy.

More details in the rest of Paul Krugman’s opinion piece. You will know what it sounds like if you read the WALL STREET JOURNAL, FORBES Magazine or watch FOX Business Channel.

Cripes, add all of that up and we’re talking about as much wasted time and energy as Congress. And Congressional Republicans in all their wisdom would love to have the kind of power to introduce even more regressive powers like their bubba Abe in Japan.

Like increase the national sales tax 60%. No need to tax the wealthy and Zaibatsu corporate barons. Take it from the hides of ordinary working people.

From the mouths of babes – Krugman gets it right, again

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Like many observers, I usually read reports about political goings-on with a sort of weary cynicism. Every once in a while, however, politicians do something so wrong, substantively and morally, that cynicism just won’t cut it; it’s time to get really angry instead. So it is with the ugly, destructive war against food stamps.

The food stamp program — which these days actually uses debit cards, and is officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — tries to provide modest but crucial aid to families in need. And the evidence is crystal clear both that the overwhelming majority of food stamp recipients really need the help, and that the program is highly successful at reducing “food insecurity,” in which families go hungry at least some of the time…

First, as millions of workers lost their jobs through no fault of their own, many families turned to food stamps to help them get by — and while food aid is no substitute for a good job, it did significantly mitigate their misery. Food stamps were especially helpful to children who would otherwise be living in extreme poverty, defined as an income less than half the official poverty line.

But there’s more….Because the economy is not like an individual household — your spending is my income, my spending is your income — the result was a general fall in incomes and plunge in employment. We desperately needed (and still need) public policies to promote higher spending on a temporary basis — and the expansion of food stamps, which helps families living on the edge and let them spend more on other necessities, is just such a policy…

Wait, we’re not done yet. Food stamps greatly reduce food insecurity among low-income children, which, in turn, greatly enhances their chances of doing well in school and growing up to be successful, productive adults. So food stamps are in a very real sense an investment in the nation’s future — an investment that in the long run almost surely reduces the budget deficit, because tomorrow’s adults will also be tomorrow’s taxpayers.

So what do Republicans want to do with this paragon of programs? First, shrink it; then, effectively kill it…

Look, I understand the supposed rationale: We’re becoming a nation of takers, and doing stuff like feeding poor children and giving them adequate health care are just creating a culture of dependency — and that culture of dependency, not runaway bankers, somehow caused our economic crisis.

But I wonder whether even Republicans really believe that story — or at least are confident enough in their diagnosis to justify policies that more or less literally take food from the mouths of hungry children. As I said, there are times when cynicism just doesn’t cut it; this is a time to get really, really angry.

Another one of those times when I wish Paul Krugman was madman enough to run for elected office. Just so I might vote for him.

It’s official: Paul Krugman is right

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For the past five years, a fierce war of words and policies has been fought in America and other economically challenged countries around the world.

On one side were economists and politicians who wanted to increase government spending to offset weakness in the private sector. This “stimulus” spending, economists like Paul Krugman argued, would help reduce unemployment and prop up economic growth until the private sector healed itself and began to spend again.

On the other side were economists and politicians who wanted to cut spending to reduce deficits and “restore confidence.” Government stimulus, these folks argued, would only increase debt loads, which were already alarmingly high. If governments did not cut spending, countries would soon cross a deadly debt-to-GDP threshold, after which economic growth would be permanently impaired. The countries would also be beset by hyper-inflation, as bond investors suddenly freaked out and demanded higher interest rates. Once government spending was cut, this theory went, deficits would shrink and “confidence” would return…

Those in favor of economic stimulus won a brief victory in the depths of the financial crisis, with countries like the U.S. implementing stimulus packages. But the so-called “Austerians” fought back. And in the past several years, government policies in Europe and the U.S. have been shaped by the belief that governments had to cut spending or risk collapsing under the weight of staggering debts.

Over the course of this debate, evidence has gradually piled up that, however well-intentioned they might be, the “Austerians” were wrong. Japan, for example, has continued to increase its debt-to-GDP ratio well beyond the supposed collapse threshold, and its interest rates have remained stubbornly low. More notably, in Europe, countries that embraced (or were forced to adopt) austerity, like the U.K. and Greece, have endured multiple recessions (and, in the case of Greece, a depression)…So the empirical evidence increasingly favored the Nobel-prize winning Paul Krugman and the other economists and politicians arguing that governments could continue to spend aggressively until economic health was restored.

And then, last week, a startling discovery obliterated one of the key premises upon which the whole austerity movement was based.

An academic paper that found that a ratio of 90%-debt-to-GDP was a threshold above which countries experienced slow or no economic growth was found to contain an arithmetic calculation error.

Once the error was corrected, the “90% debt-to-GDP threshold” instantly disappeared. Higher government debt levels still correlated with slower economic growth, but the relationship was not nearly as pronounced. And there was no dangerous point-of-no-return that countries had to avoid exceeding at all costs.

The discovery of this simple math error eliminated one of the key “facts” upon which the austerity movement was based…

The argument is over. Paul Krugman has won. The only question now is whether the folks who have been arguing that we have no choice but to cut government spending while the economy is still weak will be big enough to admit that.

Between Congressional Republicans blind to the failure of their ideology and their candyass Blue Dog Democrat counterparts there still is a struggle to enforce austerity upon our limping economy. The so-called sequester is an example of their success at reducing the number of employed in our country.

Most Congress-critters are as ignorant as the average American and don’t know that something similar happened as Keynesian reforms were having a comparable success during the Great Depression. Politicians and pundits forced austere reversals to the reforms in place in the mid-1930’s and started the whole country on the way back down to the depths of economic despair. Only the dramatic need to prepare for the war against Fascism around the world reversed the start of a second depression.

But, stupidity seems to still be part of the job description for conservative politicians. We’ll get to see who prevails over the next few years. Not that any pundits will be joining folks at the unemployment office. There’s always a job for reactionary ideologues in corporate America.

From the department of things that are just too perfect

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So says Paul Krugman…

Limited time this morning, so light blogging. But I can’t resist posting this. Jonathan Chait finds James K. Glassman, co-author of “Dow 36,000″ — a 1999 book that argued, based on some creative double-counting and other innovations, that 36,000 was the right value of the Dow at the time of publication — claiming that this week’s Dow high vindicates his ideas. But that’s not what’s so perfect.

No, what caught my eye was where Glassman went on the strength of his bold prediction. And the answer is, he’s the Founding Executive Director of the George W. Bush Institute.

All is well with the world.

Har!

Mooching off Medicaid – Republican style

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Looks and sounds like Florida’s governor Rick Scott with hair

Conservatives like to say that their position is all about economic freedom, and hence making government’s role in general, and government spending in particular, as small as possible. And no doubt there are individual conservatives who really have such idealistic motives.

When it comes to conservatives with actual power, however, there’s an alternative, more cynical view of their motivations — namely, that it’s all about comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, about giving more to those who already have a lot. And if you want a strong piece of evidence in favor of that cynical view, look at the current state of play over Medicaid…

…In the end most states will probably go along with the expansion [of Medicaid] because of the huge financial incentives: the federal government will pay the full cost of the expansion for the first three years, and the additional spending will benefit hospitals and doctors as well as patients. Still, some of the states grudgingly allowing the federal government to help their neediest citizens are placing a condition on this aid, insisting that it must be run through private insurance companies. And that tells you a lot about what conservative politicians really want.

Don’t tell me about free markets. This is all about spending taxpayer money, and the question is whether that money should be spent directly to help people or run through a set of private middlemen.

And despite some feeble claims to the contrary, privatizing Medicaid will end up requiring more, not less, government spending, because there’s overwhelming evidence that Medicaid is much cheaper than private insurance. Partly this reflects lower administrative costs, because Medicaid neither advertises nor spends money trying to avoid covering people. But a lot of it reflects the government’s bargaining power, its ability to prevent price gouging by hospitals, drug companies and other parts of the medical-industrial complex…

But why would you insist on privatizing a health program that is already public, and that does a much better job than the private sector of controlling costs? The answer is pretty obvious: the flip side of higher taxpayer costs is higher medical-industry profits.

So ignore all the talk about too much government spending and too much aid to moochers who don’t deserve it. As long as the spending ends up lining the right pockets, and the undeserving beneficiaries of public largess are politically connected corporations, conservatives with actual power seem to like Big Government just fine.

RTFA. There are a few more Krugman illustrations and examples at hand to clarify any questions you may have. Serious economists have no problem differentiating between the level of informed self-interest for useful entrepreneurship – and unlimited greed, lust for money and power generally surrounded by a stinking cloud of lies about creating wealth for all.

The more crooked your economics, the bigger the lies have to be to provide cover for political flunkies, ideological puppets.

The Ignoranus Caucus in Congress

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Last week Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, gave what his office told us would be a major policy speech. And we should be grateful for the heads-up about the speech’s majorness. Otherwise, a read of the speech might have suggested that he was offering nothing more than a meager, warmed-over selection of stale ideas.

To be sure, Mr. Cantor tried to sound interested in serious policy discussion. But he didn’t succeed — and that was no accident. For these days his party dislikes the whole idea of applying critical thinking and evidence to policy questions. And no, that’s not a caricature: Last year the Texas G.O.P. explicitly condemned efforts to teach “critical thinking skills,” because, it said, such efforts “have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.”

And such is the influence of what we might call the ignorance caucus that even when giving a speech intended to demonstrate his openness to new ideas, Mr. Cantor felt obliged to give that caucus a shout-out, calling for a complete end to federal funding of social science research. Because it’s surely a waste of money seeking to understand the society we’re trying to change.

Want other examples of the ignorance caucus at work? Start with health care, an area in which Mr. Cantor tried not to sound anti-intellectual; he lavished praise on medical research just before attacking federal support for social science. How much money are we talking about? Well, the entire National Science Foundation budget for social and economic sciences amounts to a whopping 0.01 percent of the budget deficit…

The desire to perpetuate ignorance on matters medical is nothing compared with the desire to kill climate research, where Mr. Cantor’s colleagues — particularly, as it happens, in his home state of Virginia — have engaged in furious witch hunts against scientists who find evidence they don’t like…Republicans in the State Legislature have specifically prohibited the use of the words “sea-level rise…”

O.K., at this point the conventions of punditry call for saying something to demonstrate my evenhandedness, something along the lines of “Democrats do it too.” But while Democrats, being human, often read evidence selectively and choose to believe things that make them comfortable, there really isn’t anything equivalent to Republicans’ active hostility to collecting evidence in the first place.

The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.

In her parting shot on leaving the State Department, Hillary Clinton said of her Republican critics, “They just will not live in an evidence-based world.” She was referring specifically to the Benghazi controversy, but her point applies much more generally. And for all the talk of reforming and reinventing the G.O.P., the ignorance caucus retains a firm grip on the party’s heart and mind.

Paul Krugman is too polite to use a word more commonly found on the Web – “ignoranus”. It more thoroughly describes Republican philosophy and practice. Ignorance pursued as an end unto itself – which only provides satisfaction to dimwits whose mental processes are confined to the southern end of the alimentary canal.