Impact of Sequester by State

Econobrowser (see here) has a neat graphic (via Wells Fargo via Pew Center) about the impact of sequester on the States.

Here it comes again

After the State of the Union speech, the response given by Mr. Rubio contained the following passage:

This idea – that our problems were caused by a government that was too small – it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.

Now, Mr. Rubio is, by all appearances, a serious and thoughtful person.  But here he is propagating one of the most consistent myths of the Great Recession: that the government caused it.  As Mark Thoma (see here) and Paul Krugman (see here) have shown, this myth has been refuted about as completely as can be done.  But here it is again.  And in a response to a State of the Union address, no less.  You don't think so?  See this summary (here) by Mike Konczal.

This myth is the poster child for a zombie argument.

Uninsured by age

There is an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today that contains the following graph (see here).

From the article:  The scramble to promote enrollment comes as the law faces considerable opposition from many Republican governors who have declined to create state exchanges or expand their states' Medicaid programs under the law, citing the possible cost.

Mississippi is now one of the states.  So how will the state expand insurance coverage?

Are we entering a "low return" era?

The researchers at Credit Suisse Research Institute (see here) have some sobering data for us:

High five for Crooked Timber

 What we seeing now, is not a shift in the Overton window, but a challenge to this whole approach to determining what views should be taken seriously, a challenge that started with the appropriation by the left of the “reality-based” label pinned on us in Karl Rove’s famous interview with Ron Suskind, and has continued (though very imperfectly) with the rise of fact-checkers. The new approach is based on the shocking idea that objective truth, rather than political acceptability, should be the criterion against which factual claims are tested.

If this view is right, then the most important single development was probably Nate Silver’s successful prediction of the 2012 election. Silver was up against both the pseudo-science of the Republican “unskewers” and the faith of centrist pundits (historically exemplified by Broder) that their deep connection with the American psyche was worth more than any number of least-squares regressions. Given the centrality of horse-race journalism to the pundit class, their defeat by relatively straightforward statistical analysis of opinion polls was a huge blow.

Read more here.

Nice video explanation of Debt Ceiling

David Wessel over at the Wall Street Journal (see here) has a nice 3 minute video on the Debt Ceiling.