Medicare Miracle?

More Krugman on good health care news...Medicare is, perhaps not a "miracle," but in very good shape compared to the dire predictions of crank "deficit scolds" (who routinely used the worst Medicare predictions moving forward primarily to deflect from the the issue of health care cost inflation to attack any and all government spending - except of course defense):

So, what do you think about those Medicare numbers? What, you haven’t heard about them? Well, they haven’t been front-page news. But something remarkable has been happening on the health-spending front, and it should (but probably won’t) transform a lot of our political debate. 

The story so far: We’ve all seen projections of giant federal deficits over the next few decades, and there’s a whole industry devoted to issuing dire warnings about the budget and demanding cuts in Socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid. Policy wonks have long known, however, that there’s no such program, and that health care, rather than retirement, was driving those scary projections. Why? Because, historically, health spending has grown much faster than G.D.P., and it was assumed that this trend would continue. 

But a funny thing has happened: Health spending has slowed sharply, and it’s already well below projections made just a few years ago. The falloff has been especially pronounced in Medicare, which is spending $1,000 less per beneficiary than the Congressional Budget Office projected just four years ago. 

This is a really big deal, in at least three ways.

Inflation hysteria - hilarious

 CNBC nutcase Rick Santelli loses it!

The knives come out for Piketty...and they are pretty dull

Kathleen Geier outlines "What Piketty’s Conservative Critics Get Wrong" @ The Baffler:

With his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty has lobbed a truth bomb that has blown up several decades’ worth of received opinion about the way the economy works in capitalist societies. He makes a powerful, meticulously-argued, data-driven case that inequality is a feature of capitalist economies, not a bug. Let to its own devices, wealth tends to become highly concentrated. The only events likely to prevent our society from plunging into a dystopian spiral of inequity are, on the one hand, certain rarely occurring catastrophes, such as war or depression; or, on the other, dramatic government intervention in the economy, in the form of steep taxes on the wealthy.

You can see why conservatives are going to be enraged by this book.

A conservative backlash to Piketty was inevitable; the only surprise is that it’s taken so long to develop. But in the last week or so, responses from the right have finally begun to roll in. Send in the clowns!

The Crime of 2010

Professor Krugman blogs this indictment of the Beltway, Business and Media Elites @ NYT. Millions of lives have been ruined by the cruelty of the Deficit Hawks, the willful ignorance or appalling timidity of insider DC elites - including many top Democrats - and the flaming idiocy of the TeaBaggers, who converged to force the country into an austerity discourse when the economy quite clearly needed a robust injection of federal spending:

(W)hat we’re learning from a number of sources: it’s really hard to get employers to look at people who have been out of work for an extended period, so any sustained increase in long-term unemployment tends to become permanent.

The best way to avoid this outcome, then, is to avoid prolonged periods of high unemployment.

So let me make the obvious point, just in case anyone missed it: the “pivot” of

From the Annals of Deadly Expert Advice

2010 — when all the Very Serious People decided that the danger from debt trumped any and all concern for job creation — was an utter disaster, economic and human. It was even a disaster in fiscal terms, because a permanently depressed economy will cost far more in revenue than was saved by slashing the deficit by a few percent of GDP in the short term.

Now, you might think that this post should be titled The Mistake of 2010 — but that would only be appropriate if it were truly an honest error. It wasn’t. Some of the austerians were self-consciously exploiting deficit panic to promote a conservative agenda; some were slipping into deficit-scolding rather than dealing with our actual problems because it felt comfortable; some were just going along for the ride, saying what everyone else was saying. Hardly anyone in the deficit-scold camp engaged in hard thinking and careful assessment of the evidence.

Uh, oh! "Brooks Worst Column Ever!"

Robert Kuttner, piling on @ American Prospect, lowers the bar in considering today's Brooks offering a milestone of sorts:

Well, this is getting to be a habit. Alert readers may recall that a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Tom Friedman’s worst column ever, plugging efforts by a billionaire hedge fund friend to persuade college students that their enemy was Social Security. 

Now, Friedman’s colleague David Brooks has written an even worse column. It’s really hard to determine Brooks’ worst column ever, since he seems to turn out one every week.

Brooks’ latest piece, in Friday’s Times, begins inauspiciously, “Suddenly, the whole world is talking about income inequality.” (Where has Brooks been, Jupiter?)