Tag Archives: House

The belt-and-suspenders of the Kennedy-Dodd health care bill

There is much debate about whether a health care reform bill should include a government-run health insurance plan, a so-called “public option.” Advocates argue that such a plan can compete fairly with private health insurance, and that this competition would “keep insurers honest.” They also argue that more choices are a good thing. I fall […]

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Ten more things about the official Kennedy-Dodd health care bill

The Senate HELP Committee staff has filed an official copy of their draft legislation with the Senate clerk. A friend and I were discussing today two possible tactical scenarios: The weekend leak forced the majority staff to release their official text as damage control. Under this scenario, filing the official copy is a damage mitigation […]

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Understanding the House Democrats' health care bill

Yesterday I posted and described the draft Kennedy-Dodd health care bill. Today I would like to do the same for an outline produced by House Democrats. Here is a three-page outline of “Key Features of the Tri-Committee Health Reform Draft Proposal in the House of Representatives,” dated yesterday (June 8, 2009). The three committees are: […]

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Dr. Goolsbee gets it wrong on the auto loans

This morning on Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace moderated a discussion about the auto industry. One of his guests was Dr. Austan Goolsbee, who is a Member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. I want to focus on some incorrect and inflammatory statements […]

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Working in the West Wing: Doing a TV news interview on the North Lawn

This is the second in a series of occasional posts about the nitty gritty of working in the West Wing of the White House. I am describing things as they were in the Bush Administration. YMMV in the Obama Administration. Again, it seems a bit silly to write about such trivial details, but given the […]

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Will the stimulus come too late?

I began this blog at the end of March after the stimulus bill had become law. I had been struck by how much the stimulus debate had focused on whether the bill was efficient. (It clearly was not.) There was much less discussion of whether the stimulus would be effective, and of the timing of […]

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Parsing the President’s health care reform letter

The White House has released a letter from the President to the two Senate Chairmen who are working on (different) versions of health care reform: Senator Kennedy (D-MA), Chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, and Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The letter is dated yesterday and […]

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Understanding the GM bankruptcy

Many of you are new to this blog since I wrote extensively about autos six weeks ago. As background, I coordinated the auto loan process for President Bush last fall as the Director of the White House National Economic Council (the position now held by Dr. Lawrence Summers). I wrote a series of posts on […]

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Basic facts on the General Motors bankruptcy

In a few hours I will offer my thoughts and reactions to the General Motors bankruptcy filing and the President’s noon announcement. For now, here is what I have been able to figure out from the White House fact sheet and secondary source reporting through CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. I assume that both […]

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The Smoot-Krugman carbon import tariff

I wrote last Friday about the China/India hole in the American climate strategy: America appears to lack a high-probability strategy for how to get China, India, and Russia to agree to self-impose a significant positive carbon price. The Administration and its Congressional allies are trying to impose a significant carbon price in the U.S. through […]

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