Former Bush economic adviser Greg Mankiw whips up an analogy to explain why he's leery of even a deficit-neutral health care reform:

"Verum Serum" has a post accusing yours truly of hypocrisy. I'm going to go through the argument because it reveals a common vein of misinformation that tends to circulate on among conservatives.

On Friday, I pointed out that the American public thinks upper-income earners pay too little in taxes. Why is this hypocritical? Verum Serum explains:

The administration's proposal to charge large banks, which enjoy an implicit too-big-too-fail guarantee, is fairly straightforward market economics. Greg Mankiw concedes as much. Then, on the other side, you've got Marco Rubio, conservative dreamboat:

Greg Mankiw, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under George W. Bush, explains that President Obama's large bank tax is pretty straightforward economics:

One thing we have learned over the past couple years is that Washington is not going to let large financial institutions fail.  The bailouts of the past will surely lead people to expect bailouts in the future.  Bailouts are a specific type of subsidy--a contingent subsidy, but a subsidy nonetheless.

A while ago, I criticized a new paper on the supremacy of the U.S. healthcare system that was being touted by Gary Becker and Greg Mankiw. The paper, by Samuel Preston and Jessica Ho at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that mortality trends for prostate and breast cancer were much better in the U.S. than in other advanced countries. My main beef was that Preston and Ho's research design was too blunt to really pick up on why this was the case. But I see that an updated NBER version of the paper has more details on what could be behind the better U.S. outcomes.

On prostate cancer:

Declines in prostate cancer mortality have been attributed to both PSA screening and improvements in treatment ... An individual-level population model that used counterfactuals to simulate US mortality and incidence of advanced-stage prostate cancer concluded that two-thirds of the decline in mortality between 1990 and 1999, and 80% of the decline in distant-stage incidence, was attributable to expanded PSA testing (Etzioni et al. 2008).

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration and Special Correspondent for The Treatment.    

Greg Mankiw writes that the gas tax is not an issue that divides liberals and conservatives, but rather one that divides political consultants and policy wonks. I would put comparative effectiveness research (CER) in the same category.