Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: A New Year, but same old issues ::posted Thu, 01 Jan 2015 14:00:12 +0000:: ift.tt/1vxblUw rss@dailykos (Greg Dworkin) Remember how much time was wasted arguing about this? Not this year. But Ebola is still an issue in W Africa and we may well see more cases here. In the meantime, its flu season. Worry about flu and get your flu shot. Henry Decker: 5 Republican Campaign Promises (That President Obama Fulfilled) “I can tell you that over a period of four years, by virtue of the policies that we’d put in place, we’d get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, and perhaps a little lower.”—Mitt Romney, May 23, 2012. Mitt Romney’s vow to reduce unemployment to 6 percent by the end of his first term in office was almost universally hailed as bold and ambitious. But under President Obama’s stewardship, the economy improved much quicker than Romney promised: The unemployment rate has dropped steadily since the 2012 election, and dipped to 5.9 percent in September. President Obama has also blown Rick Perry’s vague promise to create 1.25 million jobs out of the water. Nick Hanauer: This is why the middle class can’t get ahead Uwe Reinhardt: M.I.T. economist Jonathan Gruber, whom his colleagues in the profession hold in very high esteem for his prowess in economic analysis, recently appeared before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Gruber was called to explain several caustic remarks he had offered on tortured language and provisions in the Affordable Care Act (the ACA) that allegedly were designed to fool American voters into accepting the ACA. Many of these linguistic contortions, however, were designed not so much to fool voters, but to force the Congressional Budget Office into scoring taxes as something else. But Gruber did call the American public “stupid” enough to be misled by such linguistic tricks and by other measures in the ACA — for example, taxing health insurers knowing full well that insurers would pass the tax on to the insured. More politics and policy below the fold. [Forwarded by the MyLeftBlogosphere news engine. Link to original post below:]
Posted on: Fri, 02 Jan 2015 02:22:26 +0000
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