The Trickle-Down Stimulus

Their paper found no such thing!

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/did-stimulus-really-destroy-million.html

"If you follow the left-wing economist blogs, you will see that there could not have been any crowding out of the private sector, because interest rates are not high. That is what happens when you think of the economy as a set of equations drawn from textbooks, rather than thinking in terms of patterns of sustainable specialization and trade."

Amen.

Leggos...not Play Dough. And never a good answer to rebut it.

It is pretty hard to see how cutting Medicaid spending would increase healthcare jobs. The public private distinction is almost nonexistent when it comes to health and education.

Well, Lord, off the top of my head I can imagine that without medicaid cost shifting, more people could afford out of pocket medical care and the demand for health care providers could rise.

And, no, medicaid patients can't pay out of pocket. Once they are accepted as medicaid patients, doctors can no longer legally take cash from them.

But cutting Medicaid increases cost shifting by either cutting reimbursement rates or increasing charitable care, so cutting Medicaid would cut healthcare.

There are other ways to cut medicaid - reducing the number of people it covers, for instance. In fact, I think it should be completely overhauled as it's pretty crappy coverage for the poor and hurts rather than helps them in many cases, but that's a long story.

Charitable care doesn't necessarily increase because Medicaid is cut. Besides, does charitable care raise or shifts costs? I didn't think doctors who went abroad to perform surgery charged their patients more to pay for these charitable endeavors.

I'll concede that cutting medicaid could "cut health care" (although, I'm not certain what you mean by that), but not necessarily so. It all depends on those devilish details.