Greg Mankiw, June 23, 2006, foursquare in favor of ObamaCare:
Greg Mankiw's Blog: These two ideas--scrapping the subsidy for employer-provided insurance and instituting an individual mandate--make sense to me. The individual mandate turns the traditional liberal idea on its head: Health insurance is not a right but a responsibility…
Greg Mankiw, November 7, 2011, trying to use John Maynard Keynes as a sock puppet opposed to ObamaCare:
Greg Mankiw's Blog: What would Keynes have said about Obamacare? It is impossible to know, of course, but this passage from an open letter Keynes wrote to FDR in 1933 offers some hints…. "Reform may, in some respects, impede and complicate Recovery. For it will upset the confidence of the business world and weaken their existing motives to action…." I know that some people would dismiss this appeal to the "confidence fairy," but clearly Keynes was a big believer in her importance to the short-run business cycle.
Somehow the November 7 piece is missing its final paragraph, the one about how repealing ObamaCare--nationwide RomneyCare--would add to overall uncertainty and further hobble recovery, so the best course forward is the rapid and complete implementation of the ACA is missing.
I wonder why?
And as we must never tire of saving, our problem is not that businesses are scared of future uncertainty and unwilling to extend themselves and invest: businesses are installing equipment and buying software at a faster pace than they were at the peak of the last business cycle. The problem with investment is with housing investment. The problem with consumption is underwater homeowners:
