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, making it better, and expanding it to serve more people is simple.

Replies:

-Medicare works? It’s going to be bankrupt in 10 years – even worse than Social Security.

-The CBO has already put Social Security as insolvent by 2017 and I’m sure Medicare will follow the same route since more older folk will be using it. That means either looking toward market reforms or cutting benefits.

-Nobody is claiming that Medicare is free or properly financed. Just that it works.

-Many of the doctors I see don’t take Medicare. Here’s a hint: It’s not because it’s awesome.

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:

We’ll continue our survey of economy blogs in the days to come.

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 seriously sick, with the kind of illness that is not only completely debilitating but life-threatening. How does the system work for those who have had their lives turned topsy-turvy in such a way?

Marc from New York City is a 46-year former Director of DVD Production for one of the major music companies. Seven years ago, he noticed a slight limp, which persisted and degenerated into paralysis of his limbs, one by one. Finally diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis in 2003, Marc can now move around only by way of wheelchair. From his blog, Wheelchair Kamikaze, where he documents his experience coping with the disease and posts kneeslappingly funny videos illustrating the triumphs and travails of navigating Manhattan streets on two wheels:

MS has stripped away the many trappings of life that had become central to my self identity. High profile job in a “glamour” industry? Gone with the wind… Sexy little sports car? Couldn’t even get into one these days… Fashionable clothes and fancy shoes? Ha! Putting on my socks is now a painful exercise in acrobatics, and I could just as easily use buttons and shoelaces as I could split the atom. All of those externals that once so dominated my definition of self are now mere memories, and in their place I’ve gradually come to know a different me, a me that resembles one that I knew a long time ago, back when I was a child unencumbered by the accouterments of adulthood.

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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 look at some of the major themes and talking points on both sides soon.

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“:

So maybe this one’s the Great Great Recession.

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 President. Here’s the video. (Photo courtesy Jason Pearce)

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 lifehacker, which aggregates how-to tips from all over the Web, you may be cheating yourself out of some savings. The site—the 8th most popular blog on the Web according to Technorati—is chock full of practical posts that will help you cut costs. Here are some recent items:

• Save on your insurance money by asking
• Make your own mousepad
• Items you can get great deals on in a recession
• Gadget and gear deals of the day
• Get movie theater popcorn at home for pennies on the dollar
• Make your own tonic water
• Get your textbooks for free (or cheap)

And of course, if things really go to hell-in-a-handbasket and the stock market crumbles, banks fail, and apes rule the planet, try A burglar’s advice on hiding money.

And don’t forget to surf on over to some of the blogs from which lifehacker pulls their content:

• Instructables
• Painless Frugality
• Savingadvice.com

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 describes the blogosphere on any topic, it just might be schadenfreude. Who among us, sneering at our keyboards, hasn’t tapped out a jubilant LOL! at the misfortune of a disliked individual?) Stein nemesis Felix Salmon indulges in a celebratory post on his Reuters blog, calling Stein, in a parting shot, the “world’s worst financial columnist.” Over at The Reaction, Capt. Fogg writes:

I have to say I loathe Ben Stein, so I was pleased to hear that The New York Times has fired him for conflict of interest. Dispensing financial advice from the Sunday Business Section while being a spokesman for Freescore.com, which offers free monthly credit reports for only $359, seems reason enough, but of course there was the financial advice itself. Ben gets his prognostications from the same source on Neptune that Jim Cramer does…

At The Big Picture business blog, a post titled “Good riddance Ben Stein” reads:

The commentary he produced at the Times was amongst the most irresponsible, poorly researched, and just goddammed wrong stuff ever to grace the business pages of the Grey Lady.

As I previously whined 18 months ago, “we’ve reached the point where Stein’s commentary has become detached from reality, so ridiculously fabricated, that it can no longer be read. Indeed, its become so absurd that not only have I decided to skip reading him, I am immediately making the public commitment to stop commenting on his Tom Foolery.”

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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 or so posts by economists on their blogs.

While some news outlets portrayed the report in the most positive light, and the stock market reacted with another gain, some economists aren’t so sanguine. From the sourpuss set:

Dr. Nouriel Roubini, from RGE Monitor:

All elements of total labor income–jobs, hours and average hourly wages–are under pressure, which will impact consumption in the coming months. The unemployment rate in late 2009 will be higher than what was assumed for 2010 in the adverse scenario of the banks’ stress tests. This will lead to further delinquencies on loans and securities and lower-than-expected recovery rates. As people with mortgages lose their jobs, they will have severe difficulties servicing their mortgages.

Robert Reich:

Be careful with these figures, though. They don’t include the increasing numbers of people working part-time who’d rather have full-time jobs. Nor do they include a large number who have given up looking for work. They don’t reflect the many millions who have found new jobs that pay less than the old ones they lost. And they don’t include one of the shortest typical workweeks on record, for those who still have full-time jobs. (On this score, though, another indication that things are worsening more slowly — the workweek went up very slightly from 33 hours.) Nor, for that matter, do the numbers reflect the 130,000 people who are coming into the labor force each month ready and willing to work, who can’t find jobs.

If all these people are included, my estimate is that one out of five Americans who would otherwise be working full time are now underemployed. We are still experiencing the biggest decline of any post-World War II economic slump.

And Chad Stone, Chief Economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

Although the pace of job losses has slowed considerably in recent months, private and government payrolls combined have shrunk for 19 straight months, and net job losses since the start of the recession total 6.7 million. (Private sector payrolls have shrunk by 6.9 million jobs over the same period.)Despite some stabilization in the unemployment rate, the percentage of the population with a job continued to trend down, reaching 59.4 percent, its lowest level since April 1984.

The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure — which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking and people working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs — edged down to 16.3 percent in July. The July figure, however, is 7.6 percentage points higher than when the recession began, and levels reached in this recession are the highest on record in data that go back to 1994.

Geez, fellas, someone please pass the cyanide!

True, there were some who did not overlook the silver lining of a lower jobless rate, but it never hurts to diminish expectations. Witness President Obama…

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 Columbia/HCA Health Care CEO and founder of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights, which is organizing opposition to the Democratic health plans now wending their way through Congress. Scott was ousted as CEO in 1997 amid an investigation that ended up costing the company a record $1.7 billion in fines for defrauding Medicare. Suffice it to say, this came up in the interview.

On Yahoo! Buzz, another service in which users vote their fave articles to the top of the heep, three of the top nine stories relate to the recent health care town-hall brawls. They are:

• Health Care Shouting Matches (No. 4)
• Top Democrat denounces health care protests (No. 5)
• White House advises Dems on health care protests (No. 9)

Also on Buzz, stories on the strong jobs report and the extension of Cash for Clunkers make the top 10. (A column about the San Francisco 49ers holds the top spot, so it’s not all about business today.)