Rethinking the Economy

At this weeks’s annual gathering of professional economists, there was a panel on “the political economy of the US debt and deficits.” Aside from Alan Blinder, the panelists – all prominent economists – nattered on about how deficits were destroying the country, we need to cut Social Security and Medicare, etc. At the end of [...]

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One of the reasons why most folks in the US eat lots of dairy, meat, and junk food instead of organic, locally grown fruits and vegetables is because it’s a lot cheaper – the government subsidizes the cost of meat, dairy, and junk food. What if we flipped those subsidies around? Michael Pollan says it [...]

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You’ve probably already seen this one, but just in case: from the LA Times via Krugman:
Ask a Briton to describe “American-style” healthcare, and you’ll hear a catalog of horrors that include grossly expensive and unnecessary medical procedures and a privatized system that favors the rich. For a people accustomed to free healthcare [...]

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Aaron Carroll has a nice, graph-happy post that debunks all of the myths about how rotten Canadian healthcare is. The most interesting debunking: American physicians aren’t all that happy with the US healthcare system.
Given the rhetoric of how much physicians hate reform, you would think doctors were very happy before reform passed. You’d be [...]

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The Guardian’s Elliott Ross has been mucking around in Big Pharma’s never-ending quest to make sure that research is slanted their way. It isn’t pretty.
When doctors are deciding which drug to prescribe a patient, the idea behind evidence-based medicine is that they inform their thinking by consulting scientific literature. To a great extent, this [...]

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Obama may be way too focused on the deficit, but apparantly our Dem Establishment is gearing up to start smacking the Republicans on Medicare. Here’s a great, funny ad by the DCCC:

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Last year, I wrote about how everybody’s favorite idea for painlessly cutting healthcare costs – computerizing medical records – wasn’t really going anywhere. As part of the stimulus package, Obama tried to give those efforts a boost. How’d it go? Not so well, according to Computerworld:
Only 12% of U.S. hospitals had adopted [...]

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It’s time, says Robert Reich, to drop a Top Hat on the corruption spewed by the market:
In the words of lobbyist Lauren Maddox, “The policy process is an extension of the market battlefield.”
The answer is not necessarily found in broader or stricter “ethics rules” barring specific gifts to politicians. Such rules may have [...]

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If you’re feeling blue about our side’s chances of getting its act together, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and several other environmental justice organizations from around the country just released a report you should check out: Environmental Justice and the Green Economy. The report lays out three principles for building a just, sustainable [...]

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When I first took a look at the list of projects in Chicago’s 49th Ward’s Participatory Budgeting experiment, I was a little disappointed. Participatory Budgeting sounds so lofty: We the People choosing directly. And yes, some of the items folks get to vote for are pretty cool, like art projects or community gardens. But most [...]

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