Here comes the backdoor approach to ending the tax subsidy for employer paid health insurance. From Politico.com: White House officials are embracing a plan to tax “gold-plated, Cadillac”insurancepolicies, giving momentum to an idea that is receiving bipartisan consideration on Capitol Hill. “A premium charge on top of the most expensive packages is one of the […]
Archive for July 25th, 2009
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Whom Should We Trust?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 25th, 2009
Greg Mankiw boils the seemingly endless debate about health care and other policy decisions down to a neat question. Whom do your trust? In a post on healthcare, Paul Krugman makes this observation: You could rely on a health maintenance organization to make the hard choices and do the cost management, and to some extent we […]
China’s Real Estate Boom And Fiscal Stimulus
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 25th, 2009
I let myself get a little behind on my China reading this week but just caught up with two excellent posts by Michael Pettis. After casting about trying to understand a bit what was going on in that country and where it might be headed I found his blog and now use it as the […]
Another Body Blow For Democrats Health Care Proposal
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 25th, 2009
The Congressional Budget Office gave the Democrat’s health care initiative another kick in the teeth late Friday. The CBO said that the plan announced late this week to give an outside panel the authority to make cuts to government financed health care would probably not save any meaningful amount of money. From Politico.com: A key […]
Are We Different From The U.K.?
Posted by Tom Lindmark on July 25th, 2009
Reading Liam Halligan’s article today on the economic plight of Britain kind of felt like walking through a graveyard. You get this creepy feeling and hope it’s only superstition not something more substantive. He recounted the surprising news that came out earlier this week of the country’s 0.8% decline in output when most were forecasting […]
