In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Martin Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s top economist and a Harvard professor, claims the current health care proposals are all about rationing.  I have to disagree. Excerpts from his article are below, along with my critique. "Although administration officials are eager to deny it, rationing health care is central to President Barack Obama's health plan. The Obama strategy is to reduce health costs by rationing the services that we and future generations of patients will receive. "The White House Council of Economic Advisers issued a report in June explaining the Obama Administration's goal of reducing projected health spending by 30% over the next two decades. That reduction would be achieved by eliminating 'high cost, low-value treatments' by 'implementing a set of performance measures that all providers would adopt' and by 'directly targeting individual providers . . . (and other) high-end outliers.'" First and ...

Just because I am safely and securely locked inside the Fabulous Mogambo Bunker (FMB) doesn’t mean that I am unaware of things, especially those things concerning inflation in consumer prices, which is the One Big Thing (OBT) to be feared above all others, even more than that paralyzing fear of someone seeing you doing you-know-what, especially when they see you doing you-know-what with you-know-who and the can of whipped cream, which you never did use, which is the one saving grace about the whole thing.

Anyway, I keep hearing some doofus or another prattling on and on about deflation, and how prices will be going down and how this is a terrible idea, sort of like saying, “Shopping during a sale means you will pay lower prices, and that is bad for you!”

Actually, it is not the falling prices that are bad, but that the falling prices means that

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Worldwide indexes reclaim that losing feeling,  The skinny on those TARP repayments and two curiously conflicting assessments,Four factories for one McMinimum Wage house and plenty more…

“Are things getting worse or are things getting better?” we wondered aloud in yesterday’s edition of the Rude Awakening.

In today’s edition, we provide a few answers – well, not answers, really…just observations from you, the Rude readership. In the column below, we present a few real-world anecdotes from Rude Awakening readers. This narrow sampling of economic observations is hardly scientific, but it may be illuminating nonetheless.

Before we get into these real-world stories, let’s examine a couple of recent stories from Fantasyland - otherwise known as Wall Street. Seven of America’s largest banks repaid their TARP borrowings to the US Treasury yesterday, in the process providing one more occasion for hopeful investors to proclaim the end of the credit crisis.

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In an attempt to address the nation’s ongoing economic challenges, Congress has passed and the president has signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The $787 billion package is remarkable not only in its scale and scope but in the speed of its passage as well.

The bill combines $282 billion in tax relief with more than $500 billion in government spending that ranges from meeting basic human needs to investments in infrastructure and scientific research. The resulting increase in the federal budget deficit is expected to equal about 2.5% of gross domestic product for two years in a row. Congress began work on the legislation even before the inauguration of President Barack Obama, who signed the bill on February 17, 2009.

A slowing economy that shed more than 3.6 million jobs in 2008 helped create the urgency for a stimulus package that would attempt to boost employment and economic

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