Just how bad is the current plague of economic fallacy?
Consider the front page of the New York Times (July 15, 2009): SEACHANGE IS SET IN A HEALTH PLAN — House Democratic leaders took a big step toward guaranteeing health insurance for most Americans on Tuesday as they unveiled a bill that detailed how they would expand coverage, slow the growth of Medicare, raise taxes on high-income people and penalize employers who do not provide health benefits to their workers. A BLEAKER PATH FOR WORKERS TO SLOG — In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so. It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. It’s sometimes said that economics is a difficult subject because it requires high-level, abstract thinking, and tracing of cause and effect through several logical steps. And yet, really, how hard can it be to see the contradiction in the above? Here is
