WASHINGTON — It was nice while it lasted, but it’s over and may not return for many years, if ever. The “it” is the slowdown in national health spending. From 2008 to 2013, health spending grew roughly 4 percent a year, which was less than half the 9 percent average of the three decades before […]
Robert Samuelson
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Minimum wage plan lacks common sense
WASHINGTON — A while back — in January 1997, to be precise — I wrote a column on the euro, which was to be introduced in 1999. I didn’t find much to like. It was a “lunatic idea.” A single currency worked in the United States, “because wages are flexible and workers are mobile.” Europe […]
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Problems arise for Medicare, Medicaid
WASHINGTON — It was 50 years ago that President Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri and, with former President Harry Truman at his side, signed into law the legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid. It was a seminal moment in American political history. For three decades, liberals and conservatives had warred over government health insurance. “Medicare […]
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Hillary’s profit sharing plan too complex
WASHINGTON — Hillary Clinton has just given us an object lesson — presumably unintended — demonstrating why our tax system is such a complex mess. The main reason is this: Politicians of both parties cannot resist the temptation to use the tax code to promote the latest political fad or to please favored constituencies. As […]
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Puerto Rico’s economic problems not comparable to Greece
WASHINGTON — We are told that Puerto Rico is our Greece, and sometimes it seems so. The U.S. territory (its residents have been American citizens since 1917) has a heap of economic problems. Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla recently told The New York Times that its $72 billion debt is “not payable.” To buttress the point, […]
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What next for China after market crash?
WASHINGTON — China’s spectacular stock crash poses three questions. First, what caused it? Next, will it harm the “real” economy of spending and hiring, inside China and beyond? And, finally, how will it affect China’s Communist Party and its economic strategy? If you haven’t paid attention, here are some basics about the crash. The Shanghai […]
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Multinational blame game looms for Europe
WASHINGTON — Suddenly Greece is about a lot more than Greece. The lopsided Greek vote — 61 percent to 39 percent — to reject the last rescue package from the country’s creditors has cast their impasse into a high-stakes drama over the future of Europe. Greece itself is teetering on the edge of economic collapse. […]
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Global debt a cause for anxiety
WASHINGTON — We have the Greeks to thank for an elementary tutorial in what ails the world economy. Greece’s central problem is that it has too much debt and too little economic growth (none actually) to service the debt. The country is caught in an economic cul de sac. It can’t seem to generate growth […]
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Robert Samuelson: The next financial crisis?
WASHINGTON — A central economic question of our time is whether the policies undertaken to recover from the last financial crisis are laying the groundwork for the next. We now have two reports from reputable groups suggesting just that. The first comes from the Bank for International Settlements, which was created in 1930 to handle […]
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It takes a special person to be a teacher
WASHINGTON — I went to work with my wife last week, something I should have done years ago. But as a practiced procrastinator, I never got around to it. I was curious to see how she does what she does. I was also conscious of a paradox. Although nearly four decades of writing newspaper and […]