Tag Archives: omb
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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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Understanding the Kennedy health care bill

Over the weekend a draft of Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) health care bill leaked. After playing with Adobe Acrobat, here is the text of the draft Kennedy bill as a text file (173 K), and as a single Acrobat file (3.4 MB). Update: I fixed the broken link to the PDF. Unlike the leaked version, both of […]

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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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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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Understanding the President’s CAFE announcement

(Editorial note: I was doing so well moving to shorter posts. I fail miserably in achieving that goal here. I went the comprehensive route instead. I promise to return to shorter posts in the future. Buckle up – this is a long ride. I hope you find it’s worth it.) (Update: There’s an important correction […]

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Budget: Baby Terminator

Today the Administration released more detail for the President’s budget. The President tried to emphasize his fiscal responsibility by highlighting some of the programs he proposes to terminate or reduce. Budget Director Orszag released the Terminations, Reductions, and Savings volume. This morning the President said, But one of the pillars of this foundation is fiscal […]

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Mixed results on the Chrysler announcement

The President’s Chrysler announcement last Thursday produced mixed results. The agreement among Chrysler, Fiat, UAW, the Administration, and the large banks appears to increase the probability (from almost zero) that Chrysler will survive for the long run, albeit as a part of Fiat. This is clearly a good thing.Is it worth the cost to taxpayers […]

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