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 | Amid slowdown, Brazil turns inward Dec 4th 2012, 00:44 SAO PAULO — When the Brazilian economy began to stall last year, officials in Latin America's largest country started pulling pages from the playbook of another major developing nation: China. They hiked tariffs on dozens of industrial products, limited imports of auto parts, and capped how many automobiles could come into the country from Mexico — an indirect slap at the U.S. companies that assemble many vehicles there. Read full article >>   | | Boehner tries to call a mulligan Dec 3rd 2012, 22:15 House Speaker John Boehner is trying to call a mulligan. In 2011, not long after an election in which Democrats were utterly routed, Erskine Bowles testified before the debt supercommittee. "I tried to think if it was possible for you all to get to the $3.9 trillion deficit reduction," he said. "Given where your positions are today, I think it is. I think you can get this done." Read full article >>   | | Raising Medicare's age: Saves feds $5.7 billion, costs you $11.4 billion Dec 3rd 2012, 21:08 House Speaker John Boehner has made his counter-offer on deficit reduction and, as my colleague Lori Montgomery reports, it floats the idea of raising the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 67. This isn't a new idea: It's come up in a lot of deficit reduction proposals of years past, as economists and legislators stare down a Medicare program eating up a growing chunk of the federal budget. Read full article >>   | | Today in the fiscal cliff': Cliff-diving or bust? Dec 3rd 2012, 20:00 Both sides have dug in their heels on the "fiscal cliff" with little signs of progress. It might be tempting to interpret their bluster as the kind of political theater that inevitably plays out before a deal is reached. But things aren't going much better back stage, either. "Congressional aides for both parties say current back-channel talks are just as unproductive as those taking place in front of the TV cameras," the Wall Street Journal explains. Read full article >>   | | Would killing the dollar bill save money? Don't bet on it. Dec 3rd 2012, 19:51 Now that Washington D.C. is freaking out over the deficit, no budget-cutting proposal is too small or zany to ignore. And that means an old idea is making the rounds again: The U.S. government could shrink its deficit if it got rid of all the dollar bills in circulation and replaced them with shiny new dollar coins. Read full article >>   | | The teetotalers' solution to the austerity crisis Dec 3rd 2012, 18:49 It's basically a given at this point that any austerity crisis deal will involve new sources of revenue, be it in the form of higher rates for top earners, pared back tax expenditures, or a new tax altogether. Speculation around the third option has mainly centered on a carbon tax, but there are other options too. In particular, some are asking if we should make drinks foot the bill. Read full article >>   | | Could competition make Obamacare more expensive? Dec 3rd 2012, 18:05 The Affordable Care Act makes a bet on competition. It wagers that pitting private insurance plans against each other will be a good thing: When health plans compete against each other on the exchanges, it will "drive down premium prices for Americans," according to one HealthCare.gov factsheet. Read full article >>   | | The global economy isn't falling apart. The U.S. might be. Dec 3rd 2012, 15:33 Just a few months ago, the global economy seemed to be stuck in a precarious state. Huge swaths of the world economy were either slowing down or contracting outright, and it wasn't at all clear whether global economic policymakers would have enough gas left in their stimulus tanks to stop things from spiraling into a bad place. Read full article >>   | | Boehner's latest tax offer is $150 billion less than he offered in 2011 Dec 3rd 2012, 14:43 Over the weekend, House Speaker John Boehner (R) attached a number to his revenue offer: $800 billion, he said. And there are "a dozen different ways to get there without raising tax rates." This came during an interview with Fox News, so it's hard to say how precise Boehner was being. But if $800 billion actually is his target, then as New York University tax professor (and former Obama administration economic official) David Kamin notes, he's actually cut his offer since the 2011 negotiations. Read full article >>   | | What will the next fiscal cliff' look like? Dec 3rd 2012, 13:30 Presumably, Congress will soon find a permanent solution to the austerity that will keep the economy growing (or perhaps even speed it up a bit) next year while addressing the longer-term debt problem. That will be the end of this sorry period in American politics, in which Congress continuously set up ever-more draconian consequences to incent its future self to make the hard decisions its current self kept putting off. Read full article >>   | |
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