In my previous diary , I laid out the background relevant to the President's economic agenda.  To summarize

(a)    US consumers like to save 5 to 10% of their disposable personal income.  This number is grounded in the American psyche.
(b)    In the runup to the financial crisis, Americans were lulled by the moneys they were borrowing against rising home values into decreasing their savings rate down to 0.
(c)    Therefore, when the MEW ATM was turned off, US consumers decided to up their savings rate back into the 5-10% range.
(d)    A savings shock of this magnitude has not been felt before (aside from WWII), and it is hard to predict the effect of this savings shock on personal consumption expenditures (PCE).  The rule of thumb around historical data calls for a small decline, but there is considerable scatter in the data affected by various factors (such as confidence in the leadership etc.)
So that brings us to the present.  

There's more...

There has been a lot of (justifiable) angst over the economy, and the recession.  Some have called for the firing of Tim Geithner, and/or Ben Bernanke and/or Larry Summers in order to correct the course.  The justifications are as follows:
(a)    Geithner bungled up the AIG rescue, by unnecessarily giving away 100 cents on the dollar; instead of forcing AIG's counterparties to take a haircut.
(b)    Ben Bernanke (and Alan Greenspan before him) grossly underestimated the magnitude of the downturn, even when every available indicator was smoking out the ears.
(c)    Larry Summers...well, he is just Larry Summers.  And furthermore, Larry Summers went out of the way to mock and ridicule Raghuram Rajan, the most notable Cassandra of the current economic downturn. back in 2005
There are other reasons of course (most notably in my mind ~ would you trust your $13T economy to a man who would shave $42k from his taxes ), but the bottomline is that between the three of them, not one of them got it right.  So why are they running the show ?

Beats me!  

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Lately, I'm beginning to wonder if we're ever truly going to have universal health insurance .  Now I'm well aware that even folks without coverage will get medical care, thankfully hospitals for the most part are obligated to treat people.  Yet, whether you have insurance or not, the whole sytem is a disaster.  One of the solutions, first coming from the libertarians followed by the conservatives and strangely enough some on the left, is the concept of a consumer-driven health insurance system. Basically, you treat your medical care as you (to borrow the examples I've heard) would buying car insurance or even (I dare say) buying a set of plates.  Here's the problem, if you pick the wrong dinnette set you won't die.

There's more...