Your Friendly Neighborhood Economist

Almost 95,000 residents of Rep. John Faso's district will lose coverage under Trumpcare. Over forty thousand of them will lose the coverage they got in the exchange or from employer-sponsored plans. The bulk of the rest will lose coverage under the Medicaid expansion. Perhaps this is why Rep. Faso is afraid to face his constituents outside of a tightly-controlled environment.

How big a mystery is this, really? If you look at the graphic in the post, productivity growth is slowest following deep recessions, which suggests that slow investment (a trend confirmed by Irwin in the post) is at least a part of the explanation. The slow investment (and slow productivity growth) also has to do with capacity utilization: the recovery is just catching up to where the economy was before the crash in terms of employment. We're adding work hours but still using more or less the same physical capital as before the Great Recession.

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The third part of Community Power #5, with Hayley Carlock and Daniel P. Duthie will be airing tomorrow night at 6:15. Don't miss it!

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amazing

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via Your Friendly Neighborhood Economist

What Krugman doesn’t say is WHY Republicans hate the idea of the government providing an effective universal safety net such as medicare: it reduces the power of corporations to discipline their workforce. If seniors have well-funded Social Security and Medicare, they won’t need to work into their retirement years, reducing the ranks of the unemployed and the pressure on the employed to do whatever it takes to keep that job.

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