Tag Archives: Obamacare

Will Financial Markets Crash Before October 17, or After?

Share Button

October 4 is the first Friday of the month, the day when the Bureau of Labor Statistics routinely reports the jobs numbers for the preceding month.   Is the havoc created by our current political deadlock over fiscal policy showing up as job losses?   We have no way of knowing.  On October 1 the BLS closed for business, like many other “non-essential” parts of the government.  There will be no more employment numbers until the shutdown ends.

Last week, Wall Street economic analysts responded to the usual surveys as to what they thought the upcoming employment numbers would be.   (These surveys are what the media refers to each month when they tell you that employment rose or fell “more than economists expected.”)    The median forecast in last week’s  Bloomberg survey, for example, was a prediction that the BLS would report that “Payrolls increased by 175,000,” the biggest gain in four months.   But there was no word on how many of the respondents recognized that there would in fact probably be no number at all on October 4, because the Labor Department would have been closed by the government shutdown. read more

Share Button

Sinners, Red States, Blue States

Share Button

Mitt Romney, presidential candidate, said in now-infamous comments that 47% of the American electorate is dependent on the federal government, that he will never be able to teach them to take personal responsibility for their lives, and that they are certain to vote for Barack Obama in November.   He continues a tradition in his party that goes back at least three decades:  building political campaigns around the proposition that folks in the heartland exhibit the American virtues of self sufficiency and personal responsibility and the implication that other, more urban, regions display decadent social values and dependency on government. read more

Share Button

Look Who Opposes Obamacare, by Fat Margins

Share Button

     The Supreme Court today upheld the Affordable Care Act of 2010, otherwise known as Obamacare.  Judging from the polls, American public opinion appears to be very sharply divided over the legislation.  Some view it as socialism, others as the first success in a half-century of efforts to achieve a sensible national policy on health care.

       What explains the wide divergence of views?   An economists’ approach – cynical or naïve depending on how you look at it – would be to assume that citizens vote according to their own personal interests.   Getting the uninsured onto paid insurance through the individual mandate is very much in some people’s interest, but not necessarily as strongly in others’ interests.  Let’s take a look. read more

Share Button