Robert Waldman —Commentary on Commentary on Sanders’s Single Payer National Health Insurance Proposal

Takes on Ezra Klein.

Angry Bear
Commentary on Commentary on Sanders’s Single Payer National Health Insurance Proposal
Robert Waldman

Michael Wolff — Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism

There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.

The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise. Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.

 Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The former New York Times data wiz-kid, Nate Silver, has left the Times to set up a new site and vertical business under the auspice of ABC and its subsidiary ESPN. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger first at the Atlantic and then at the Daily Beast, may be the grandfather of the auteur school, leaving the Daily Beast a year ago to set up his own subscription site.
In fact, one might as well include here Tina Brown, who used the seemingly attractive economics of the web, along with her personal brand and the backing of Barry Diller, to claim journalistic independence with the Daily Beast – and in the process lost, I am reliably told, an astounding $100m.

And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?

The Raw Story
Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism
Michael Wolff, The Guardian

Bill Mitchell — In a few minutes you do not learn much

Bill responds to the quote attributed to Mark Thoma in the NYT article on MMT, "They're just nuts," by taking Professor Thoma apart.

As I recall, Greg attempted to set up a debate between Bill and Mark Thoma some time ago, to which Bill agreed. Mark Thomas refused to debate, as I remember saying that he would not debate with someone that rejected the money multiplier, i.e., the basis of monetary policy in the minds of monetarists. Looks like subsequent events have settled that, with the Fed having exploded HPM only to see itself still fighting disinflation that threatens to be slip into deflation.

BTW, I learned in the comments at Bill's that Annie Lowrey is the wife of Ezra Klein, for what it's worth — he a political and economic columnist with the Washington Post and she with the New York Times. Talk about a bully pulpit.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
In a few minutes you do not learn much
Bill Mitchell

My comment at Bill's:

The NYT coverage was a huge coup for MMT, even through it was “fair and balanced” in the sense of Faux News. Regardless, its millions of $ worth of free PR.

Of course, those who objected legitimately were right to do so. That provides the opportunity to set the record straight and garner even more free PR. 

So huge net positive for MMT and more evidence that the last mile is closing. Keep up the good work and don’t relax the pressure.

Wonkblog — Wonk of the year: Grover Norquist

The Washington Post | Wonkblog
Wonk of the year: Grover Norquist
Ezra Klein and team

The ironic thing this that Grover Norquist is right — taxes are higher than they need to be, as evidenced by the long unemployment lines.

But he is correct for the wrong reason.

The debate is framed as if taxes were needed to fund government. Which is not the case for a currency sovereign like the US.

The dual purpose of taxation is 1) to withdraw down consolidated nongovernment aggregate net financial assets in order to control inflation at full employment, when effective demand threatens to exceed the capacity of the economy to meet it, and 2) to discourage socially undesirable behaviors.

The issue then become deciding the size of the government relative to the economy based on public purpose. This is a political decision based on balancing personal responsibility and social welfare.

The issue is providing the appropriate amount of funding to generate effective demand resulting in optimal use of national resources, taking externalities into account.

New Deal democrat— A thought for Sunday: PEOPLE WILL DIE

If you make the simple, straightforward, and eminently reasonable assumption that people prefer to live rather than die, then the economic situation which saves lives is always an efficient, Pareto-optimal solution.

You'll never hear that simple fact pointed out no matter how far you go in your academic economic training.

The Bonddad Blog
A thought for Sunday: PEOPLE WILL DIE
New Deal democrat

Stephanie Kelton responds to Dylan Matthews at Ezra's

Stephanie commented:


keltons
2/19/2012 1:58 PM MST


It was very nice to see Dylan Matthews, who is a young journalist and not an economist, recognize the growing influence of MMT. The piece does get a number of things wrong (perhaps inevitably, given the sheer volume of work we have produced over the last 10-15 years). We'll be working to clear things up on our various websites (including:
www.neweconomicperspectives.org and via our Twitter feed @deficitowl).

We hope readers will not jump to erroneous conclusions about MMT. We have gotten a great deal right over the years (the S&P downgrade, the Eurozone debt crisis, QE, US interest rates, inflation, etc.). While Austrians screamed, "Zimbabwe", we explained that QE is nothing but an asset swap and that idle reserves -- whatever their magnitude -- will not "chase" any goods. And while "Keynesians" worried about the impact that large deficits would have on US interest rates, we calmly explained the flaws in the loanable funds framework and insisted that rates would remain low as long as the Fed was committed to low rates (as the Bank of Japan has shown for decades). And while Nobel laureates, like Robert Mundell, were espousing the virtues of a common currency in Europe, we warned that the new design would put bond markets in charge of government policies. At some point, being right should actually count for something.

Tschäff responds to Dylan Matthews on MMT

Read it at This Episode of Life — Ideas Worth Saving and Sharing

A friendly response to Ezra Klein's "You know the deficit hawks. Now meet the deficit owls."

by Tschäff

(Recommended by Scott Fullwiler via Twitter)

Note: Ezra Klein did not write that piece. It was by Dylan Matthews, posted at Ezra WaPo blog.

Romney v. Obama

Nate Silver all but calls it for Romney.

Read it at The New York Times — FiveThirtyEight
National Polls Suggest Romney Is Overwhelming Favorite for G.O.P. Nomination
By Nate Silver

Now the question is who Wall Street will choose as its champion?

UPDATE:

Whoever Wins in November Will Be an Economic Genius

by Keven Drum at Mother Jones

Eventually the American economy will recover no matter how badly we screw things up. Ezra Klein explains what this could mean:

"Because a recovery is likely within five years, whichever party wins the White House in 2012 is likely to get the credit, and so too will its policy agenda. You can see how this will work. If Romney wins the presidency and the economy begins to rebound, Republicans will argue, and America’s experience will seem to show, that they were right all along: The stimulus was useless and the regulatory uncertainty the Obama administration created with its health-care plan and its talk of cap-and-trade and all the rest kept businesses from investing."

The nightmare scenario would be four more years of Reaganonomics heavily influenced by the Tea Party base toward fiscal austerity, privatization, and Rothbardian Libertarianism.

Medicare vs. private insurance in one graph — Ezra Klein

Read it at The Washington Post

Medicare vs. private insurance in one graph
by Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein — Competition hasn’t worked in health care

Republicans and Democrats have the same problem with the Congressional Budget Office: it refuses to score competition between health-care plans as a surefire way to lower the cost of health care.

This annoyed Democrats during the health-care reform debate, as it meant the Affordable Care Act didn’t get any credit for the competition it would foster on its exchanges. It’s annoying Republicans now, as it means their Medicare-reform plans need to impose blunt spending caps if the CBO to certify them as deficit reducing.

But the CBO is in the right here: No matter how much sense competition makes in theory, no matter how obvious it is that it will drive down the price of health care, the fact is that it keeps failing when we put it into practice.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

Competition hasn’t worked in health care

by Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein Gets It!!! Well, Almost.

The government is not a household, and shouldn’t be run like one

"It’s increasingly well understood — at least among the tiny slice of Americans who read wonkish economic blogs — that thinking about the government as a very big household that happens to employ an army is a bad thing."

Well and good, but what Ezra either doesn't get yet, or doesn't say if he does, is that the federal government is the opposite of households, firms and US states because it is the currency issuer and the others are all currency users. So close and yet so far.

Ezra quotes Karl Smith of Modeled Behavior here to the effect that government is different from household because it is easier for government to raise revenue (due to the power to levy taxes).

Now, to the government. The exact opposite is true. It is much easier for the government to raise revenue than to cut spending. Moreover, most of the movement in the deficit is tied to movements in revenue, not movements in spending.

This is the same mistake that Mark Thoma recently made here.

It's a mistake because a monetarily sovereign government that is the provider of a nonconvertible floating rate currency (like the US) funds itself directly, using currency issuance rather than taxation or borrowing. Government expenditure (spending and transfers) comes from the Treasury crediting bank accounts with the Fed supplying the reserves to clear. Neither taxes nor borrowing are operationally necessary under the present global monetary system, although Congress has imposed political requirements that make it seems so.

The issuance of Treasury securities in offset of the deficit is a reserve drain for interest rate maintenance, since deficits create excess reserves in the interbank settlement system that would drive the overnight rate toward zero. Draining the excess reserves allows the central bank to hit its target rate by controlling the quantity of reserves. But the same operation can be performed more efficiently by paying a support rate on excess reserves equal to or greater than the target rate, as the Fed does now, allowing it to take as many Treasuries onto its books as it desires without affecting the overnight interbank rate rate.