Miscellaneous 156

1) According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, if Medicare were able to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies over drug prices, that one act alone could potentially save the tax-payers some $30 billion dollars. If you combined that with the $30 billion that I had brought up in a previous post pertaining to tweaking the cap on mortgage interest, that's a total of $60 billion, some $600 billion over ten years. This isn't rocket-science, people, and even the idiots in Washington (Boehner, Pelosi, McConnell, Reid, etc.) should have been able to pick off this low-hanging fruit, I think.............2) If Krugman really wanted to make a point about Boehner AND if he was being intellectually honest about it, he would have compared the fellow not to Herbert Hoover (who, as we all know now, wasn't a laissez faire capitalist by any stretch; the beneficent hand, etc.) but to Harding and Coolidge. But since Krugman is NOT an honest man and he used the name of Hoover a) because it has certain negative cache to it and b) because the economies under both Harding and Coolidge were exceedingly strong, you got what you usually get from this Krugman fellow, a majorly sneaky Pete.............3) Note to MSNBC and "The Nation's", Chris Hayes. This notion of yours that FED chairman, Ben Bernanke, was intentionally tanking the economy by not engaging it ENOUGH, and that his doing this was to somehow get Governor Romney elected, IS ABSURD! a) Mr. Bernanke has essentially TRIPLED the money supply over the past four years (creating out of thin air more paper currency than all of the previous FED chairmen COMBINED!!) and b) Mr. Romney had made it patently clear that he would in no way reappoint Mr. Bernanke. Why, pray tell, would this Bernanke try and lift a finger (or, as you would say, NOT lift a finger) to help a candidate who was clearly going to throw him under the bus? You are totally insane, dude.