From the awesome Sweet Juniper, a beautiful story about a local gem.

An excerpt:

"While I wait with my notebook, Roy opens the door for a man in a wheelchair who needs a key made. An elderly woman needs a new rubber stopper for one leg of her walker (75 cents) and Ted treats her like she's a Hollywood starlet in a Rodeo Drive boutique. She puts down a few more dollars in layaway towards the crock pot they're holding for her behind the counter.

Interesting story that got no play in our famously free press or on the A list, though Hipparchia covered the wonky version of the story. This is the snarky version! From Wednesday of this week:

The nation's medical costs will keep spiraling upward even faster than they are now under Democratic legislation pending in the House, a report from government economic experts [but see below] concluded Wednesday.

The Obama administration immediately challenged the analysis...

Of course, of course.

Thank gawd we've got true progressives in office and a charismatic President who's a combination of Lincoln and FDR! Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis:

You can add House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the group of Democrats or Obama allies (John Podesta, Paul Volcker, Roget Altman) calling for a value-added tax. (I predicted all of this days ago.) Here is Pelosi (via The Hill):

Thank gawd we've got true progressives in office and a charismatic President! Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis:

You can add House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the group of Democrats or Obama allies (John Podesta, Paul Volcker, Roget Altman) calling for a value-added tax. (I predicted all of this days ago.) Here is Pelosi (via The Hill):

Pelosi, appearing on PBS’s “The Charlie Rose Show” asserted that “it’s fair to look at” the VAT as part of an overhaul of the nation’s tax code.

“I would say, Put everything on the table ...

Ha ha. Except single payer, of course, which would save the country $350 billion a year, since we wouldn't be paying the health insurance companies 30 cents on the dollar to deny us care. But whatever.

(In case you don't know, that's French for "Lay back and enjoy it.") Baseline Scenario:

On Friday morning, Diana Farrell – a senior White House official – made a significant statement on NPR’s Morning Edition, with regard to whether our largest banks are too big and should be broken up.

 “Ms. DIANA FARRELL (Deputy Assistant for Economy Policy): We understand Simon Johnson’s views on this, and I guess the response is the following….  

 “Ms. FARRELL: We have created them [our biggest banks], and we’re sort of past that point, and I think that in some sense, the genie’s out of the bottle and what we need to do is to manage them and to oversee them, as opposed to hark back to a time that we’re unlikely to ever come back to or want to come back to.” (full transcript)

Ms. Farrell is Larry Summers’s deputy on the National Economic Council ....

Whaddaya mean, "we"?

Via the terrific Interfluidity, this very important post. First, let's look at "vanilla products," in this case for financial services:

Vanilla products would be very popular, which is why they are so threatening. Financial services are an area where markets not only fail due to informational problems, but where participants are very aware of that failure. Consumers know they are at a disadvantage when transacting with banks, and do not believe that reputational constraints or internal controls offer sufficient guarantee of fair-dealing. Status quo financial services should be a classic "lemons" problem*, a no-trade equilibrium. Unfortunately, those models of no-trade equilibria don't take into account that people sometimes really need the products they cannot intelligently buy, and so tolerate large rent extractions if they must in order to transact.

Lambert here. The 30 cents of every health care dollar that goes to health insurance companies is one such rent. "Progressives" believe that such "large rent extractions" are painless, and that we should not only tolerate them, but subsidize them for people who cannot pay. Single payer advocates believe that the extraction is not painless, but pernicious, and that we should abolish it entirely. Since health care insurance reform is the administration's signature domestic initiative, most of us have had our attention focused there. If the focus had been financial reform, a similar conflict would no doubt have played out, with the Neo-Broders seeking to ameliorate and preserve rent extraction by banksters, while the left would have sought to abolish it, through proposals like making banks into regulated public utilities, and so forth.