Solve this problem, get everyone into a single pool. This can be done either directly adopting single-payer or indirectly using all-payer.

Word leaked last Friday (April 5) that Chained CPI was going to be part of President Obama’s budget, prompting me to point out a simple truth, “A Bad Idea Is a Bad Idea, No Matter Who Proposes It.” Of course, starting Monday, all the usual suspects and even a few somewhat surprising suspects started pushing the idea as a wonderful thing, maybe even as good as sliced bread.

Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has an important piece that reinforces something I’ve been saying for a long time. Contrary to the opinion of Michael Grunwald that there has been no austerity in Obama’s first term, Bernstein lays out the numbers that actually shows the austerity, in both the short- and long-term, that actually encompasses most of what deficit scolds seek in their grand bargain.

And this is actually a bad idea,.

Oligarchs hate that financial transactions tax, and they have senior administration officials in high places to protect their wealth from any tax, no matter how small.

The White House wants you to believe that the American Jobs Act is loaded up with bipartisan solutions once preferred by Republicans. And to some extent, that’s true. But there are a number of Easter eggs in here, policy ideas that originated with liberal policy groups. The White House may be touting the bipartisan bona fides on the top line. They may have frozen out the liberal policy shops for years. But when the time comes to save their bacon with jobs programs, they come back to the liberal wonks.

The Beltway Consensus is that we can only use government to create jobs if we stay inside three constraints:
1. We can’t tax the rich.
2. Any structural change to the economy must not affect the profitability of any corporate person.
3. Government can only create jobs by giving money to corporate persons in the hope they will hire people.
Can I have a side of ignorance with that stupid?

In a world supposedly governed by 11 dimensional chess, we find unusually straight forward advice directed at the Obama Administration on how to react to the dismal unemployment numbers.

If we fixed things like levees and energy plants, we’d also be more resilient to things like earthquakes and climate change. Mind you, if Republicans found out about that, it’d be enough reason to defund it. So we’ll just keep that part a secret between us.

Bernstein used to be Joe Biden ‘s chief economist, and was involved in most of the economic policymaking of the first Obama term. He’s moved out of government and back to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, where among other things he’s become a dirty hippie blogger.

Jared Bernstein’s new blog reads like the exploding diarrhea of common sense ideas that were quashed within the Obama White House.