Another black man shot and killed in North St. Louis County probably isn’t going to help matters:

An armed man was shot and killed by police in Berkeley, Mo. on Tuesday night, police said. The shot man was black, according to media reports.

The shooting happened a few miles from Ferguson, where a white police officer fatally shot Michael Brown in August, sparking months of civil unrest.

St. Louis County police spokesman Sgt. Brian Schellman said a police officer saw two males at the side of a gas station while conducting a routine business check at about 11:15 p.m. He approached them and one of the men pulled a handgun and pointed it at the officer, Schellman said in a statement.

“Fearing for his life, the Berkeley Officer fired several shots, striking the subject, fatally wounding him. The second subject fled the scene,” Schellman said.

While I don’t believe, as Dan Gainor apparently does, that the protests are a measure of a “war on police”, I think it’s beyond doubt that some of the protestors are indeed engaged in such a war.

And when public figures speak out in support of the protestors trying to pick and choose among which protestors you’re supporting is fruitless. As I said yesterday, violent criminals move among the protestors as fish swim in the sea.

Megan McArdle chimes in on Vermont’s shelving its plans for a single-payer healthcare system within the state:

While I was away last week, Vermont decided to scuttle its single-payer health-care plans. I predicted as much six months ago, for one simple reason: A single-payer system would cost too much. When faced with the choice of imposing double-digit payroll taxes or dropping his cherished single-payer plan, the governor of Vermont blinked.

The entire post is worth reading. However, this is the key point:

So even if we could have had a much cheaper health-care system if we moved to single payer in 1970, that doesn’t mean that we can get the same happy results by doing so now. Today we’d be building a single-payer system with the price schedule of our current health-care workers. Which means it would cost an absolutely breathtaking amount of taxpayer money, as Vermont just found out.

That is what I have meant when I’ve said that our basis is too high for a single-payer system to be practical. It was better a decade ago than it is now and better twenty years ago than it was a decade ago.

I’m also not as sanguine as Ms. McArdle is about the growth in healthcare spending. For me the question isn’t how fast healthcare spending is rising here or even the absolute amount of healthcare spending but that healthcare costs are rising faster than prices in the rest of the economy, faster than revenues, and, especially, faster than incomes. That implies a continuing treadmill of tax rate increases would be required to pay for healthcare spending and it should be obvious that’s politically impossible. Clearly, there will be reckoning and, as usual, its burden will fall most heavily on those least able to pay.

Then what is the solution to our healthcare spending problem? One of the great ironies of the healthcare policy debate is that systems other than our present are treated as foreign and things with which we have no experience. The truth is quite different.

Here in the United States we run the largest fully-socialized national healthcare service in the world, larger than Britain National Health Service, the Veteran’s Administration system. We also run the world’s largest single-payer system, larger than France’s, in Medicare.

We could replace our existing system with a fully-socialized system but, as Ms. McArdle ably notes, that has met with incredible resistance in the U. S. We could gradually ratchet down healthcare spending based on a pre-determined formula, something the Congress committed itself to do more than a decade ago and has steadfastly refused to do (the “doc fixes”). Or we could change the rules that govern how healthcare services are provided and how we compensate providers for them.

Given the political realities some combination of the latter two are probably necessary. The only question remaining is the margin by which we’ll be too late in applying them.

The big story of the day continues to be the murder of two New York City Policy officers. Some say that Ismaaiyl Brinsley, the man who pulled the trigger, is the only person to blame in the murders. Others say the mayor, the New York city council, or the media have their own share of the blame. They all have their points.

It’s wrong to claim that the mayor or the city council or the media intended that police officers be murdered. But it’s also wrong to claim that once you’ve sided with the mob you can pick and choose the members of the mob you’re agreeing with. To re-purpose Mao’s apothegm on guerrillas, criminals move among the protesters as fish swim in the sea. New York Mayor de Blasio has apparently realized that:

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio urged those protesting the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to suspend activity until after the funerals of two police officers executed in the line of duty over the weekend.

The mayor’s call comes amid heightened tensions between city hall and the police department, with the city at the center of a heated debate involving law enforcement, race relations, and the justice system.

It has been known for two millennia that republican government requires a balancing of interests. That’s hard to do and it means that sometimes as mayor or legislator you can’t follow your instincts. If you absolutely, positively must engage in street protests and theatrics (as members of the New York city council did), it’s probably time you reconsidered that career in government. Acting on what you believe may gratifying but, frankly, it’s what Ismaaiyl Brinsley did. Whether what you believe is true and right is important.

If there were ever a case that someone was criminally insane, Ismaaiyl Brinsley is that case. He was a violent, crazy, career criminal with a score of arrests, many for violent crimes, a suicide attempt, and was institutionalized for some time. The question that we shouldn’t lose track of is why are we allowing criminally insane people to wander loose?

The media definitely bears its share of the blame. They’ve been keeping the ball up in the air for months without determining if there’s a there there. Do we really have an epidemic of murders of young black men by police officers? No one apparently knows because the data are just not available.

Is violent crime really decreasing as we’re told it is? Here in Chicago we know that the city has been fudging the crime statistics for years. There are two ways to reduce crime. Either you can engage in hard, dangerous, routine police work and determined prosecutions or you can just change the numbers. Chicago has elected to do the latter. They may have done the former as well but we’ll never know.

If we extrapolate that to the national level we simply don’t know the truth of the things being argued about. We can’t tell whether violent crime is going up, down, or staying the same because we can’t trust the veracity of the numbers that are being cited. There’s the real story but, sadly, today’s reporters just aren’t up to it.

I’m taking nominations for weasel of the week. At this point my frontrunner is the guy who killed the two police officers in New York. I suspect that some of my fellow Watchers will nominate Bill De Blasio but I think that’s overheated. I don’t think that De Blasio is a bad man, just a bad mayor. For that, blame the voters of New York.

I suspect that John Cochran’e Wall Street Journal op-ed critiquing Keynesianism won’t go unanswered:

Keynesians told us that once interest rates got stuck at or near zero, economies would fall into a deflationary spiral. Deflation would lower demand, causing more deflation, and so on.

It never happened. Zero interest rates and low inflation turn out to be quite a stable state, even in Japan. Yes, Japan is growing more slowly than one might wish, but with 3.5% unemployment and no deflationary spiral, it’s hard to blame slow growth on lack of “demand.”

Our first big stimulus fell flat, leaving Keynesians to argue that the recession would have been worse otherwise. George Washington’s doctors probably argued that if they hadn’t bled him, he would have died faster.

While I agree with Dr. Cochrane that Keynesian economists are too slow to acknowledge the failures of their preferred policy, particularly in Japan where it’s hard to see how they could have spent more, I think some of his criticisms are overblown.

As I’ve mentioned before I took my economics courses when Keynes was king. Keynesianism was not just the dominant strain of economic thought, it was very nearly the only strain of economic thought. I don’t think I heard the word “incentive” once in three years of economics courses. I think that Keynes was correct, even tautological, in theory. It’s obvious to us now that you can compensate for a shortfall in aggregate demand by filling up the hole with government spending spent in deficit. However, it has proven extremely difficult to implement Keynesian policies in practice for political reasons. The timing and structure can never be made exactly right.

My gripe is more against fine-tuning in general.

Let’s wait for the riposte as a prominent Keynesian or two weighs in in defense of Keynesianism (or at least a policy they’re calling “Keynesianism”).

I’d meant to post on this when the news came out but events overtook me. From time to time I’ve posted on Vermont’s plan to inaugurate a single-payer system within the state. Vermont has now shelved that plan:

Vermont under Shumlin became the most visible trailblaze [ed.: for a single-payer system]. Until Wednesday, when the governor admitted what critics had said all along: He couldn’t pay for it.

“It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.”

That supports the growing intuition I’ve had about a single-payer system. For decades I supported such a system for the United States (after I’d lived and worked in Europe and gained a better understanding of how their systems worked). But then a little over a decade ago I began to lose faith in the practicality of such a system for the United States.

My intuition is that there’s a relationship among healthcare costs, national production, income, growth, and demographics outside of which a single-payer system is just impractical, both for reasons of affordability and political support. IMO while we might have been able to create a workable single-payer system in the United States 20 years ago, healthcare is just too darned expensive here now, economic and income growth are just too slow, we’re too old, etc. to create a workable system now. That’s why I argued so vehemently five years ago for healthcare reform that reduced costs: that would have expanded the range of possible solutions. Instead, Democrats decided to expand the number of insured persons without meaningful reductions in healthcare costs.

Vermont is a relatively progressive, prosperous, and homogeneous state. It also has one of the oldest median ages which, paradoxically, should make it easier to implement a state single-payer system—a higher proportion of the population is eligible for Medicare. If Vermont can’t implement a state single-payer system, which state can?

There’s an article over at Forbes on one company’s manufacturing military jet aircraft using off-the-shelf components:

So when Rhode Island-based Textron and its partner AirLand Enterprises unveiled an off-the-shelf strike and reconnaissance jet late last year, no one was certain the idea would fly. The Scorpion—a low-cost, two-seat, twin-engine, subsonic jet built largely from commercially available parts—is designed for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR for short) as well as light strike missions. It’s not quite a fighter jet and it’s certainly not an ISR drone, but it packs the pared-down capabilities of both. Designed and developed in secret over just two years, the Scorpion defies the general expectations of what a military jet should be—expensive, super-capable, and years in the making. The $20 million Scorpion is inexpensive to buy and operate and just capable enough to be effective.

Most countries in the world don’t face threats from high tech enemies. The threats they face are distinctively closer to home. And jets have a certain cachet that turboprop aircraft just don’t have. The market for the Scorpion may be surprising high.

People talk about the technology revolution but they generally don’t recognize where the real revolution has been. It’s been in building things from standardized, and, importantly, off-the-shelf components. Those are the reasons you can afford to buy a personal computer or a smartphone and they’ve now come to military aircraft.

Writing at The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg considers how we would know if liberalizing our relations with Cuba is successful or not?

Here is my modest Plaza de Armas test: If, in two years, the booksellers on the plaza are selling books about something other than Che, and if they’re making actual money selling more of what they want to sell, then the argument that engagement leads to openness will look credible. I’m not expecting anything close to perfect freedom—I’d be surprised, in two years, to find Marco Rubio’s memoir for sale on the plaza—but I’ll go looking for some proof that change is actually happening. Internet connectivity, the release of political prisoners, the establishment of non-government newspapers—these are bigger tests. But the plaza test will be telling nonetheless.

Here’s my yardstick. If Cuban-Americans start travelling to Cuba in significant numbers to visit family members there, bringing with them consumer goods and stories of their lives in the United States, and those Cuban families start taking notice, the policy of liberalization will have been a success. IMO that’s the greatest danger to the present Cuban regime and we should keep our eyes open for pushback from the regime on it.

I suspect that the editors of the Washington Post don’t appreciate the irony of the caption on their editorial, “Obamacare deserves some credit”. It will need it since that’s how it will be paid for: on credit.

Returning to the meat of the editorial there is no doubt that the PPACA is responsible for the reduction in the number of people without healthcare insurance:

The percentage of Americans without insurance dropped by 5.3 points in the last year, the Urban Institute found this month , because of the ACA’s Medicaid expansion and health-care exchanges. The mellowing of health-care cost inflation, on the other hand, seems to have predated the ACA. Though some cost-containment measures might begin to bite in coming years, the law was more a coverage expansion policy than a cost-control policy.

As to whether it’s also a contributing factor to improvements in hospital care or the slower rate of increase of healthcare costs, it’s just too early to tell. We don’t have nearly enough data to draw those conclusions.

The great challenge in the years to come will be to determine whether more people with insurance translates into more and better care or whether more and better care translates into better health. That’s what the Oregon study called into question: the relationship between insurance and health. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?