A search on “public option” on Digg reveals the most popular link to be this cartoon from Mike Stanfill’s The Far Left Side: This single panel has generated over 1,000 comments. Here’s an interesting little side discussion on Medicare: Comment: -Medicare works. Lower the eligibility so more people can use it. Taking something that works, [...]

With so much ink and and so many electronic bytes being devoted to the economy by the media, we thought it would be interesting to see what the professionals — economists — have to say about it themselves. Here’s the first group we took a look at: Grasping Reality with Both Hands – U.C. Berkeley [...]

So what’s wrong with health care, anyway? A recent CNN/Opinion Research poll measured 74% of Americans as satisfied with their insurance and 83% satisfied with the quality of care they receive. Pretty decent numbers that are nothing to sneeze at (pardon the thematic pun). But let’s assume most respondents in this poll have never been [...]

Just a quick post on where to get a sampling of some of the heated health care rhetoric being bandied about by the partisan troops in the online trenches. From the left: Daily Kos is hosting hundreds of posts and thousands of comments. From the right, Townhall.com is doing the same. We’ll take a closer [...]

Looking at Wikipedia—the creme de la creme in terms of user-generated content—we saw this in the the entry for  “Late-2000s recession“: “Although the late-2000s recession has at times been referred to as “the Great Recession,” this same phrase has been used to refer to every recession of the several preceding decades.” So maybe this one’s [...]

The New York Times ran a piece on the front page of its business section today on the Elkhart Project, MSNBC’s longitudinal tracking of how one Indiana town is coping with the recession. Last week, before a visit from President Obama, MSNBC solicited questions from the community that reporter Chuck Todd then asked of the [...]

In the Great Recession of 2008-09 (but maybe not ’10?) do-it-yourself activities have become, in some cases, a matter of economic survival. For the types of projects people are tackling themselves, check out this piece on the top “do it yourself” searches, posted on Yahoo!’s Buzz Log. Along those lines, if you still haven’t visited [...]

Lots of user commentary today about the New York Times dropping Ben Stein’s Sunday business column due to his advertising work for FreeScore.com. The blogs are humming, and an extremely unscientific sampling finds a good deal of schadenfreude about the axing. (Though to be fair, if you had to actually pick one quality that most [...]

While scouring economist blogs to try to get a handle on what the dismal scientists make of today’s seemingly positive unemployment report, I noticed that the Economist’s View blog, maintained by Mark Thomas of the University of Oregon Economics Department, had already done that. His Jobs Report Roundup includes the salient points of a dozen [...]

Looks like Web users are quite interested in the health care reform battle that’s heated up during the congressional recess. As of this writing, the 11th-most popular item on all of Digg in the last 24 hours is this Talking Points Memo item recounting CNN anchor Rick Sanchez’s brutal questioning of Rick Scott, a former [...]