What Ezra Said

Mitt Romney: We have all been distressed by the policies that this administration has put in place over the last two years. We have seen the most anti-investment, antigrowth, antijob strategy in America since Jimmy Carter. The result has been it’s harder and harder for people to find work.
Ezra Klein: By any measure, this is absurd. Taxes are at a 50-year low. The Dow has staged a roaring recovery. Business profits are near record levels. And the economy has gone from losing 780,000 jobs a month to gaining about 160,000 jobs a month. That is to say, it’s getting easier and easier for people to find work, even if it’s not nearly easy enough.

Enemies List

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

[…]

…the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

Look, what I really want to know is: did Juan Cole knowingly or unkowingly ever text a picture of his wang to someone. Serious People must know. Why can’t we get serious answers to serious questions? If not: keep walking.

Enemies List

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York will step down from office amid intense pressure from congressional Democrats following his admission of risque online chats and photo swaps with multiple women and lying about it.

ABC News reports, you decide. What’s remarkable here is the “intense pressure from congressional Democrats” bit. A member of the GOP caucus could strangle somebody to death on the floor of the House and you’d have little more than an annoyed shrug on the part of either leadership. But let a Democrat sext somebody not-his-wife: hell to pay (though, presumably the same faux pearl clutching outrage would have been mustered if he were still single).
Meanwhile, Tom Coburn orchestrated illegal payoffs to Ensign’s cuckolded friend and, well, I’m sure he was working in the best interests of his Personal Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let’s just leave it there. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.

Krugman Asked

Paul Krugman: David Altig points out that given the recent decline in gasoline prices, we’re likely to see a negative headline inflation number by June. What will the inflationistas say?
Lemkin: They will say that this is definitive proof that further austerity measures must be implemented immediately, the deeper and harsher the better, and preferably coming through brutal cuts to Medicare and the social safety net. Likewise, deep cuts to the tax rates of the top 1% are indicated. What other response is even possible?

How to square the circle: Assuming Medicare for all tomorrow and that you can find a way to return the dollars in-between the red and blue lines to the people paying it: the American worker with employee provided health insurance. Right now, that’s all invisible income, spirited away into the employer-shared costs of providing coverage. It’s the underlying reason that real wages have been stagnant for most of my lifetime. Turn that into real wages and the broader economy would explode. There would suddenly spring into existence a middle class with (gasp) actual purchasing power. Who knew?!?

Naturally, the plutocrats would, at least initially, turn that space into more profits for themselves. Sooner or later, though, it seems likely that constraints on quality workers would gradually bring the money over into regular salary as companies competed to find highly trained folks. You’d still have to solve the manufacturing issue and/or something to do with all that idle but essentially untrained labor force out there…but it would be a start.
At any rate, a few more than the 17 Americans vaguely cognizant of this cost gap need to be made painfully and continually aware of it. Every day, every hour, every time a microphone is switched on with a Democrat behind it. Complete with this graph. That Medicare, far from being “expensive,” saves money in dramatic fashion. And that, since they, the average hardworking healthcare consumer, cannot buy into that massive bargaining pool or something very much like it, they are being robbed. Every. Single. Day. With malice aforethought. And that they have precisely one party, the GOP, and Joe Lieberman to thank for it.

But that would be shrill. And Weiner lied to his fellow Democrat. That’s what’s important here.

Source: The New York Times

If a bondholder misses a payment for a day or two or three or four — what is more important is you are putting the government in a materially better position to better pay its bills going forward.

Paul Ryan being serious and courageous and, yet again, showing just how absolutely determined the GOP is at all levels, extreme far right or merely far right, to have a default on the debt of the United States. Why, we’ll barely notice it’s even happened.
It’s the only way they see getting the White House in 2012. It’s been the plan all along. They assume Obama will get the “egg on his face” and they’re probably right. Once in control it’s goodbye filibuster (assuming the Democrats lose the Senate), goodbye social safety net, and hello freedom is just as free as what of it you can afford to buy. After that, when the money’s gone: kindly go die in the streets.
But hey, taxes will be pretty low. On the already rich, anyway.

The hard truth about health care

Everyone knows — or should know — that the United States spends much more than any other country on health care. But the Kaiser Family Foundation broke that spending down into two parts: the government’s share and the private sector’s share (both measured as a percentage of total gross domestic product), then compared the results to figures from 12 other countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And here’s the shocker: Our government spends more on health care than the governments of Japan, Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Canada or Switzerland.

Think about that for a minute. Canada has a single-payer health-care system. The government is the only insurer of any note. The United Kingdom has a socialized system, in which the government is not only the sole insurer of note but also employs most of the doctors and nurses and runs most of the hospitals. And yet, measured as a share of the economy, our government health-care system is the largest of the bunch.

And it’s worse than that: Atop our giant government health-care sector, we have an even more giant private health-care sector. Altogether, we’re spending about 16 percent of the GDP on health care. No other country even tops 12 percent. Which means we’ve got the worst of both worlds: huge government and high costs.

It’s also important to note that, even with this high spending, we’re getting worse outcomes than all the Western countries spending 5-7x less than we do. And, of course, if we had the costs of any of these countries we’d be facing surpluses today instead of deficits. But we’re told the only road forward for our country is to slash Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of the social safety net and give the money to the richest 1%. Saying anything else isn’t Serious.

The hard truth about health care