Defense Spending as an Economic Stimulus

Recent Articles

• Health Wonk Review: March Madness Edition

  March 18, 2010 in Carnivals

  The latest edition of the Health Wonk Review has a NCAA basketball theme and is posted at the Reform Galaxy Blog.

• Should chronically ill patients be treated in the hospital setting?

  March 18, 2010 in Hospitals

  Over the course of the past decade, there has been a trend to move more and  more treatment of chronically ill individuals outside the hospital and into ambulatory care.  There is good reason for this. …

• Links

  March 17, 2010 in Current Events

  Health tourism in Germany & hospital privatization in Poland. Private insurer’s enrollee turnover makes preventive …

• The High Cost of Growing Older

  March 16, 2010 in HC Statistics

  In America, your health care expenses are taken care of when you get older…right?  We have Medicare after all…shouldn’t that pay for all my healthcare expenses? Not according to a recent article from Yahoo! Finance. …

• Should the government subsidize Green Jobs?

  March 15, 2010 in Economics - General

  The Economist has a debate between Van Jones and Andrew P. Morriss on the value of subsidizing green jobs.  Mr. Jones is the author of the book, “The Green-Collar Economy”and Mr. Morriss is a professor of law at the University of Illinois.  Some highlights: Mr. Jones: The markets for new energy sources are being strangled by government support for old energy sources…Governments spend billions of dollars subsidising Big Oil companies and other polluters. And power grids were designed to service huge, centralised power plants, not to link multiple points of distributed, intermittent renewable sources of energy.  We need deft government action to address these challenges and create the conditions for a multibillion-dollar clean-tech energy boom. Mr. Morriss Public choice theory identified a key insight about government in the 1960s and subsequent work has repeatedly demonstrated its truth. Concentrated, organised interest groups (oil companies, solar power companies, etc get benefits from governments at the expense of diverse, dispersed groups (the general public)… We can spur innovation and investment without the problems Mr Jones’s special-interest approach creates. Professor Jonathan Adler argues in Eyes on a Climate Prize (working paper) that if Congress provided prizes modelled on the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight, it would avoid many problems of political manipulation because prizes impose costs only when they produce results…Prizes “allow the government to establish a goal without being prescriptive as to how that goal should be met or who is in the best position to meet it.”