This sentence is a bit confusing, "Indeed, one of McCain's early legislative accomplishments was overturning the Medicare Catastrophic Benefit because it was insufficiently and generous and needed to be paid for up front."

The guy whose reputation is taking the biggest hit from this campaign is McCain himself, of course. But Holtz-Eakin is finishing a strong second in this category. He used to be a respected economist, trusted by people on both sides; now he's a cheap political rent-a-hack.

Hope he got paid enough to make it worth his while.

Ha. See my comment on the post below.

I'll just add that you never made similar points on the Wyden plan's "assumptions," but rather touted that it was budget neutral by 2014.

So it works like this:

Senator Wyden proposes a health care plan and calls it revenue neutral based on a ridiculous and unrealistic assumption, Ezra says "Brilliant! This plan looks great!".

John McCain proposes a health care plan and calls it revenue neutral based on a ridiculous and unrealistic assumption, Ezra says "Shenanigans! Liars! Frauds!"

Why should one take anything you say about health policy seriously anymore?

PS A pretty interesting Marist poll on health care today, with some surprising results:

http://www.maristpoll.marist.edu/usapolls/HC081006.HTML

http://www.maristpoll.marist.edu/usapolls/HI081006.htm

While it is unlikely that McCain's plan is budget neutral, you are unfairly ignoring the point that focusing on lowering costs (instead of merely increasing the number of insured) can actually increase the amount of money available for the latter goal.

Medicare, Medicaid, and the rest of the welfare state will be cut to shreds when the pols finally acknowledge that this country is bankrupt.

Social Security too will get hit and hit hard, so seniors better make sure they have a reliable can opener so that they can dine on cat food.

I've always heard the "assume a can opener" line applied to mathematicians, although I suppose it works for economists too.

soon to be retirees are the only ones who think that SS will still exist. gen xyz have all realized that it wont exist by the time they get there.

Those people who put their retirement into 401ks were idiots. You never invest what you cant afford to lose. Unless of course your convinced to by sham investment banks like lehman bros.

Now we just spent 700billion so the latest crop of CEOs can bail without any pain. We
re still going to see the same major recession we were going to see before. But now we, each and every one of us, owes $2000 more to the chinese.

Nice.

Just to update that joke - the physicist says smash it; the chemist says heat and explode it; the economist says assume a can opener; and then the sociologist picks up the can, pulls off the pop top that soup cans have now and eats the soup.

Canned soup is icky.

Herschel

You will soon have the opportunity to acquire a taste for it.

Speaking of poor job and conflicts of interest. The man at Fannie Mae who was creating the bad loan packages was none other then Barney Franks gay lover and live in Fannie boy.

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefitted from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.
So did Frank’s gay lover, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.
Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank’s relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie. …
The two lived together in a Washington home until they broke up in 1998, a few months after Moses ended his seven-year tenure at Fannie Mae, where he was the assistant director of product initiatives. According to National Mortgage News, Moses “helped develop many of Fannie Mae’s affordable housing and home improvement lending programs.”
Critics say such programs led to the mortgage meltdown that prompted last month’s government takeover of Fannie Mae and its financial cousin, Freddie Mac. The giant firms are blamed for spreading bad mortgages throughout the private financial sector.
-----------------------

Why are Barney Franks gay lovers allways in such legal messes?

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Economists' nasty tendency to make assumptions? Nasty? Surely you mean lazy, careless, slipshod, . . . or possibly even forthright, honest, or commendable. . . .

After all, empiricists have to make assumptions -- the world's too complicated to do otherwise. At least economists say so.

I'm almost tempted to take back the nice things I said about you yesterday.

But read Ruth Marcus in today's Washington Post - she writes that most people will see a wonderful reduction in taxes under McCain's plan, without ever wondering where the money is going to come from. For Marcus, the line should be, "Assume we have an extra $1.3 trillion."

http://www.cheap-lotrogold.com