…in real time…. January 30[, 2009] speech… [called for] market dynamics, free choice, and personal responsibility, a phrase typically used to refer to the individual mandate…. [On] February 27, Romney said: ‘We need to advance a conservative plan… based on free choice, personal responsibility, and private medicine… like what I proposed in Massachusetts… the plan is a good model.’… In May, Romney wrote an op-ed… largely based off his Massachusetts plan, including an individual mandate…. On June 1… Romney thanked Heritage for helping craft health care reform in Massachusetts…. On June 14 Romney… said the President could learn from RomneyCare, saying: ‘I understand the President considers his plan in respects following the model of Massachusetts. Let’s learn from our experience.’… [On] June 24 Romney said… of the President reviving the exchanges put in place in RomneyCare, ‘we put together an exchange, and the president’s copying that idea. I’m glad to hear that.’…

[On] June 29… Romney touted both his plan and the Wyden-Bennet…. Both plans include a individual mandate. On July 30, Romney… [said] the President could learn a thing or two from… Massachusetts, including using the individual mandate…. On July 31, Romney… spoke specifically about ending the practice of free riding….

On September 19 Romney… spoke positively about his health care reform bill in Massachusetts… didn’t talk about the individual mandate or keeping reforms at the state level…. ‘We can get everyone insured, without breaking the bank and without a government option—there is no government insurance in my Massachusetts reform. The right answer for health care is not more government, it’s less government.’… In December, Romney defended his plan from attacks from Tim Pawlenty…. Romney said ‘What’s primarily wrong with the president’s plan is that he wants to get the federal government into the health insurance business. It’s going to require massive subsidies, a trillion dollars of costs down the road. That is not the right way to go. Instead, let states solve this problem…’ On January 8, 2010 Romney… mentioned his support for a federalist approach…. On February 18 Romney remarked at CPAC that health care reform should be accomplished at the state level….

After health care reform was signed into law on March 23, Romney seemed to briefly re-embrace the [individual] mandate…. In an April 4th interview… Romney… commented the ‘best features’ of the President’s plan were those similar to RomneyCare, including the ‘individual responsibility for getting insurance’…. Kavon Nikrad, frustrated by his failure to get an answer from Romney’s staff on the question of what ‘repeal’ actually meant, cornered Romney at a book signing in mid-April…. “asked Gov. Romney if… ‘the ‘worst aspects’ of Obamacare… include the repeal of the individual mandate and pre-existing exclusion?’ The Governor’s answer: ‘No.’… Romney went on to explain that he does not wish to repeal these aspects”….

Eric Fehrnstrom emailed Ben Smith… ‘Mitt Romney has been very clear in all his public statements that he is opposed to a national individual mandate. He believes those decisions should be left to the states,’ and then later emailed that the mandate ‘should be repealed.’ That email seemed to represent a final decision to stop the political bleading and cauterize the wound. For the last 23 months, Romney has been consistent: He has embraced repeal of the mandated, and stopped making references to the similarities between his plan and President Obama…

…And there’s a lot wrong with mainstream economic analysis. But how closely are these two assertions related? Not as much as you might think. So I’m very much in accord with Simon Wren-Lewis on the remarkable unhelpfulness of recent heterodox assaults… a lot… misidentifies the problem… gives aid and comfort to the wrong people…. Standard macroeconomics does NOT justify the attacks on fiscal stimulus and the embrace of austerity. On these issues, people like Simon and myself have been following well-established models and analyses, while the austerians have been making up new stuff and/or rediscovering old fallacies…. Formal modeling and quantitative analysis doesn’t justify the austerian position; on the contrary, austerians had to throw out the models and abandon statistical principles to justify their claims….

People who should know better claim… whether fiscal stimulus can work involve[s]… Ricardian equivalence…. But that’s all wrong. Claims that a temporary rise in government spending crowds out an equal amount of private spending were based either on crude confusions between accounting identities and causation, or on a complete misunderstanding of… Ricardian equivalence…. Expansionary austerity… is really hard to get out of any formal model, and by and large the advocates of that position didn’t… try… invoked the confidence fairy pretty much on faith…. Claims that the US and the UK were at risk of an attack by bond vigilantes were similarly hard to justify…. It’s very hard to come up with a way such an attack can either happen or do much damage to a country that borrows in its own currency. As I’ve written many times, I reproach myself for having worried about such things back in 2003, when my own models refused to tell that story…. Last but not least, all that 90 percent threshold of doom stuff was based on no model… just an alleged statistical regularity… [which] probably reflected a lot of reverse causation. So if you go around claiming that model-oriented, quantitative economics gave rise to austerity mania, you’re getting the story all wrong… [and] covering up for the austerians’ intellectual sins…

…Ben Walsh argues that the boom in oil jobs… is over…. Shane Ferro reports that one million Americans are at risk of losing access to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program…. The United States has the highest GDP per capita, but as Matt Bruenig shows, incomes at the bottom are higher in other developed countries…. What explains the decline in the labor share of income? Dylan Matthews looks into the competing hypotheses…. Cardiff Garcia lays out his observations from the annual Allied Social Sciences Associations meeting…. Ben Casselman and Andrew Flowers… noticed that economists seem to be more engaged with policy.

…the standard measure of these things, half the size of the container you see on an 18 wheeler trucking rig…. You can get 30 cubic metres of packing peanuts into one and not have to worry very much about the weight. But 30 cubic metres of gold or lead placed on the back of a truck will have the axles exploding into metal shards pretty much instantaneously…. Less than half the density of water and it’s volume that is important. More than that and it’s the weight…. The larger picture about shipping and containerisation [is that] it’s almost certainly true that this one technology is vying with the mobile phone as being the most important influence upon our lifestyles since WWII. Certainly vastly more important than anything that has come out of Congress or the House of Commons in that time. If you want to know quite how much difference then I recommend The Box (although I think he manages to underplay the economic impact)….And both the Vox and BBC pieces are interesting as well. Even if MSC Oscar cannot in fact carry 900 million cans of dog food.

…surprising combination of solid job gains and decelerating wage growth…. Overall, the story is one of ongoing improvement in labor markets…. Wage growth, however, nosedived…. If June rolls around with no inflation and no greater wage growth, the Fed will find it challenging to begin normalization…. The wage numbers present a dilemma for the Fed. Simply put, no wage growth means the Fed can’t be particularly confident that inflation will trend toward target…. The Fed is still looking at June, but they need some more help from the data. Of course, June is still a long way off…”

…is not going to get [Republicans] any closer to repealing Obamacare…. If they actually succeeded in getting this bill passed… they… further entrench the 2010 health-care bill…. A weaker employer mandate will push more people onto the exchanges. Many of those people would be receiving subsidies. The more people who receive subsidies, the harder repeal of the whole law will be…. It’s hard to see why Republicans want to push more people into that part of the system, and hasten the sclerosis that makes programs so hard to kill or change once they have accumulated a lot of users. We haven’t even discussed the extra cost of providing subsidies to millions more people. Republicans seem to like taking votes against Obamacare so much that they’ll vote for anything that undoes what Democrats put in place–even if that thing costs a bunch of money, and takes them further from their stated goal of repealing the whole bill. They need a better hobby…

…telling me that US growth disproves the idea that austerity is bad for you at the Zero Lower Bound (ZLB). Jeffrey Sachs just joins a long list…. With recent US experience, there is no case against Keynesian analysis to answer. This suggests to me two things. First, lots of people are desperate to show that critics of austerity at the ZLB are wrong, and are prepared to make nonsense arguments to that end. This may be particularly true if you very publicly proclaimed the need for austerity in 2010…. Second, it is a sad day when anyone thinks that 2.3% growth is ‘brisk’ when we are recovering from a deep recession and interest rates have remained at the ZLB. It is so very dangerous when these diminished expectations become internalised by the elite…

…that [Europe’s power-brokers] share? It is the magic economy dust formula of ‘structural reforms’. It is the idea that if national governments just sprinkle enough structural reforms into the economy to enhance market competition they will, eventually, generate the conditions for employment growth. This is captured perfectly in a recent analysis by Marco Buti, the Director General (DG) of the Economic and Finance Commission. He outlines a trilemma for the Eurozone: we cannot have the welfare state in a fixed monetary union that requires reducing fiscal deficits to 3 per cent of GDP. This is true. In order to keep the welfare state, he proposes a consistent policy ‘trinity’: banking union, symmetric adjustment (i.e. inflation in the core) and deep structural reforms. These, we are told, will generate the conditions for economic growth. In turn, with full employment, the welfare state is secure. This is the core idea behind the policy response to the Eurozone crisis and it is worth stating clearly if its merits can be tested against rational argument and empirical evidence…