In his remarks to the House Democratic Caucus yesterday, President Obama put the upcoming health insurance reform effort into a larger context with some powerful thoughts about how he got invovled in politics and what moments like now mean for the country.

Here are some particularly poignant thoughts from the end:

Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics.  I didn’t think of myself as a potential politician when I get out of college.  I went to work in neighborhoods, working with Catholic churches in poor neighborhoods in Chicago, trying to figure out how people could get a little bit of help.  And I was skeptical about politics and politicians, just like a lot of Americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now.  Because my working assumption was when push comes to shove, all too often folks in elected office, they’re looking for themselves and not looking out

Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, talks with Bloomberg’s Susan Li and Paul Gordon from Beijing about the US calls for a stronger yuan. China is conducting stress tests to gauge the effect of yuan appreciation on companies, a sign the government may be preparing for policy change even as it rebuffs foreign criticism of its 20-month dollar peg.

Criticizing Paul Krugman’s comments that the US should consider a 25% surcharge on Chinese goods, Roach said: “They don’t want to look in the mirror. America doesn’t have a China problem. It really has a savings problem. America has the biggest shortfall of national savings of any leading country in modern history. And when you don’t have savings you have to run current account deficits to import surplus savings from abroad and run massive trade deficits to attract the capital. Last year America ran trade deficits with over 90

Still on the road to moksha…

Prices are rising in India – pushed up by the high cost of food. Thanks partly to a disastrous government policy of encouraging the over-use of chemical fertilizer, food prices are shooting up. In a poor country, food is a bigger part of the family budget than in a rich country. India’s CPI is rising at about 11%.

Flash from the TIMES of India:

A man brought his wife to Mumbai from Augangabad. He then took her to the house of someone she didn’t know and told her to wait there for him to come back. But he didn’t return. The wife asked the owner of the house what was going on. She was informed that she had been sold to the man for 40,000 rupees (a bit less than $1,000). Her family back in Augangabad came to her rescue. They bought her back.

A thousand dollars seems

We have come to Bombay to get a good look at India – at least the part of it you can see from a 10th floor room at the Taj Mahal Hotel. Which isn’t much. The air is too dense. Still, we can make out the figures of whole families eating and sleeping on the pavement near the dock.

We have never seen families sleeping on the pavement on Regent Street…nor on 5th Avenue. New York and London are great success stories. Turning the pages here, on the other hand, we read a failure story. It is the story of a people who haven’t got much. The world turned against them, relatively, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. But if the world turns long enough, it comes back to where it began. To make a long story short, we’re betting on rotation.

The secret of material success is simple enough. In

The reconciliation proposal under fiery debate in Congress would shave $138 billion off the federal deficit over the next 10 years, according to a preliminary estimate by the Congressional Budget Office.

But the nonpartisan forecast is “more art than science,” the Washington Post reports. Two scenarios could push those forecasts way off kilter: If the CBO under- or over-estimated the savings that could result from a heavier reliance on evidence-based medicine, or if future lawmakers make substantial changes to some of the provision’s Medicare-related cost-saving measures, according to the newspaper.

Democrats are still rounding up enough votes to pass the $940 billion health bill in time for an expected vote Sunday. In a final push for its success, President Obama addressed students in Northern Virginia today, calling the legislation “enormously important for America’s future,” and likening the vote to the historic votes that launched Social Security and the Civil Rights Act of

Click here to see the video.

This morning, speaking before thousands at the Patriot Center in Virginia, the President was perhaps even more passionate about finishing the job on health reform than any time in this year-long debate.  It’s probably best to let him speak for himself, so read the full transcript for yourself or a few excerpts below:

Setting the stage:

THE PRESIDENT:  A few miles from here, Congress is in the final stages of a fateful debate about the future of health insurance in America.  (Applause.)  It’s a debate that’s raged not just for the past year but for the past century.  One thing when you’re in the White House, you’ve got a lot of history books around you.  (Laughter.)  And so I’ve been reading up on the history here.  Teddy Roosevelt, Republican, was the first to advocate that everybody get

The reconciliation proposal under fiery debate in Congress would shave $138 billion off the federal deficit over the next 10 years, according to a preliminary estimate by the Congressional Budget Office.

But the nonpartisan forecast is “more art than science,” the Washington Post reports. Two scenarios could push those forecasts way off kilter: If the CBO under- or over-estimated the savings that could result from a heavier reliance on evidence-based medicine, or if future lawmakers make substantial changes to some of the provision’s Medicare-related cost-saving measures, according to the newspaper.

Democrats are still rounding up enough votes to pass the $940 billion health bill in time for an expected vote Sunday. In a final push for its success, President Obama addressed students in Northern Virginia today, calling the legislation “enormously important for America’s future,” and likening the vote to the historic votes that launched Social Security and the Civil Rights Act of

The last thing a Keynesian do-gooder wants to see for his pump primed “recovery” is a lot of households saving money.

It’s the antithesis of the desired effects… the goal is to encourage consumption not thrift.

Yet, since early 2008 to early 2009 we experienced a burst of thriftiness the like of which had not been seen in America in at least 30 years.

It seems the epic financial catastrophe brought some sense to the manic American consumer and served to reinstate a streak of prudence that was once an honored tradition.

But to a Keynesian a penny saved is not a penny earned… it’s simply a penny that is not stimulating economic growth, multiplying and being put to work inducing investment.

In a sense, saved income is a malinvestment in the Keynesian mind.

So, as is typical for their sort, Keynesians figure they

You can’t blame the National Resident Matching Program for trying to make lemons out of lemonade, but Thursday’s Match Day results weren’t as much of a win for primary-care physicians as the NRMP would like you to have believed. Sure, more U.S. medical students participating in this year’s matching program picked internal medicine residencies than in 2009, but only 3.4 percent more, according to the American College of Physicians, not nearly enough to put a dent in the primary-care shortage dilemma facing the U.S.

More than 2,700 students chose to focus on internal medicine in 2010. However, that number was closer to 4,000 25 years ago. Furthermore, roughly 20 to 25 percent of those students who actually chose to go into internal medicine ultimately will end up in a subspecialty of internal medicine, like cardiology, the ACP said.

“Because it takes a minimum of three years of residency after four years of medical

Even as data suggested the economy is improving at a slow but gradual pace, investors were reluctant to buy stocks as potential policy changes and fresh signs of trouble in Greece kept sentiments jittery.  However, the Dow average rose for an eighth straight day, its longest winning run since August 2009.

Boeing (NYSE:BA) advanced 2.1% and was Dow average’s leading gainer. A Bernstein analyst noted Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner program “appears to be making substantial progress."  Shares in 3M (NYSE:MMM) rose 1.8% and DuPont (NYSE:DD) gained 1.6% as reports showed a rise in Philadelphia manufacturing.   Financials, however, turned lower, with Bank of America (NYSE:BA) dropping 1.1% and JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) falling 0.3%.  Regions Financial (NYSE:RF) fell 2.6%.  A Citigroup (NYSE:C) report saying financials are highly -priced after gains of over 150% since March 9, 2009 market lows and could retreat at current levels also hurt financials.  Moreover, rumors circulated the