Mankiw on Healthcare Reform
President Obama has said that health care reform should include a public option in the menu of choices available to healthcare consumers. Greg Mankiw asks, what’s the point? Would the public plan have access to taxpayer funds unavailable to private plans? If the answer is yes, then the public plan would not offer honest competition .. read more
Failed Promise of Innovation
Business Week has an article called The Failed Promise of Innovation in the US: “We live in an era of rapid innovation.” I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google (GOOG), Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself. But what .. read more
Repatriating Foreign Profits
Floyd Norris has an article in the NYT today titled, “Tax Break for Profits Went Awry”. The story is about a new study of the Homeland Investment Act, the 2005 law that allowed US multinationals to repatriate foreign profits and pay a lower than normal tax of 5.25% rather than the normal 35%. The study .. read more
Stimulus Spending in Denver
A report from friend of Alhambra Doug Terry in Denver: The govt has definitely gone to work and you see signs of it everywhere. The city is rife with traffic jams as road crews block lanes on major commercial streets and close other roads altogether. Commerce as been delayed and I the tax payer am .. read more
Another Free Lunch
Yesterday, the Council of Economic Advisors released a paper which touts the benefits of health care reform: We estimate that slowing the annual growth rate of health care costs by 1.5 percentage points would increase real gross domestic product (GDP), relative to the no-reform baseline, by over 2 percent in 2020 and nearly 8 percent .. read more
Unintended Consequences…Again
President Obama has proposed changing the rules about how foreign profits of US corporations are taxed. The President’s stated goal was to create US jobs, but Steve Ballmer has a different view (via Bloomberg): June 3 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees .. read more
Bill Gross: Holders of Dollars Should Diversify
Bill Gross is out with his latest commentary and while most of his commentaries are nothing more than talking his own book, this month’s missive actually makes some sense: So the rather conservative U.S. government debt ratio shown in Table 1 will likely be anything but in less than a decade’s time. The immediate question .. read more
More on Green Jobs
From NRO: In his speech at Nellis, President Obama asserted that he wants “everybody to know what we’re doing here in Vegas,” and he pointed to Germany as an example to follow in the solar business. He should have followed his own advice and looked more closely at the German example. After Germany guaranteed solar .. read more
