Economy & Budget

Richard Nixon campaigned on a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam many, many years ago. It is still secret, very secret. Actually, it did not even exist.
 
Paul Ryan has a secret plan to attack the nation’s debt and balance the budget.
 
Just as with Richard Nixon, it doesn’t exist.
 
He puts cutting Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security “on the table,” along with just about everything else except defense. But he wants to cut taxes by extraordinary amounts right off the top: $4.6 trillion by lowering the rates and another $5.4 trillion by extending the Bush tax cuts (that have worked so well!).

Insurance companies will not be driven out of business. They will simply not insure.

Their model has always been passing the costs through and calculating the cost based on the risk.

Mandates on insurance companies can work if we have the stomach for the cost of the mandates, but the higher cost will discourage even more from paying in, which will make the pool even more expensive to stay in.

On the same week that Washington’s political punditry runs wild with analysis on the Supreme Court’s oral arguments on the constitutionality of ObamaCare, and the rest of the country is busily checking their NCAA basketball tournament brackets, the House of Representatives will debate three visions for the fiscal course of our nation.

Incredibly, it is more than likely that this fundamental argument about our nation’s very future will not even make a wave in the public discourse.

The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard sits down with Pundits Bloggers John Feehery and Peter Fenn to discuss the new Republican budget proposal and the GOP presidential primary.

I have often asked myself, and heard it asked by others, why so many wealthy people support liberal causes (this is the flip side of the usual election-year frustration of the liberals with the working classes’ clinging to their guns and religion). In this presidential election, as in 2008, the Democratic Party, who claim with less and less credibility to be the champions of the poor, have far more money to spend than the Republican Party, who are said to be the party of the greedy upper classes; how could this be?

It seems obvious that you should always pay off your debts as soon as possible, but there actually are some situations in which paying off one’s mortgage might not be one’s top priority.

A mortgage, for example, might pay for itself if the rate of inflation exceeds the interest rate. And, indeed, this has always been the case: The store value of money is 2.5 to 3.5 percent; rarely has it gone higher than that. Interest rates are at record lows and, not unrelated, inflation has been high due to the Federal Reserve’s two rounds of quantitative easing.

The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard takes your questions on the 2012 Republican presidential primary and President Obama’s reaction to the rise in gas prices.

Yes, employment numbers are moving up, but there is some other sobering news: Unemployment is still 8.3 percent and will remain above 8 percent until Election Day; at the pace we’re on we won’t get back the jobs lost in the recession till 2020 or so, and we still have a vast number of long-term unemployed and the absolute number of employed people is still below pre-recession levels.

This is not the gaining-strength recovery of 1984 that propelled Reagan to reelection. Is it good enough? Who knows. I think it depends on many unforeseen factors: what become the issues the candidates espouse and real-world events between now and November.

Technology has always played a key role in driving the U.S. economy forward. But over the past decade or so, it is not just the big players — government, Fortune 500 companies and research universities — that are benefiting. Personal computers, broadband Internet and now smartphones have put cutting-edge technology into the hands of small-business owners, nonprofit leaders and entrepreneurs, creating immense opportunities for each person to do what he or she does best.

Many of my anti-capitalist colleagues say that government spending is not crowding out private investment because interest rates are low. Therefore, there is plenty of money to finance private investment.

Unfortunately, in an attempt to protect depositors, and the government guarantee of such deposits, the bank regulators have increased the credit underwriting requirements on banks. Consequently, they are not lending to small and medium-sized businesses.