Vox’s Mattew Yglesias, an undaunted Obamacare supporter, has listed “7 charts that show what Obamacare critics are getting wrong.” The first is, you guessed it, that chart from the Gallup survey of health insurance, which (wrongly) claims Obamacare reduces the number of uninsured Americans.

Another chart claims that Obamacare is not causing part-time work at the expense of full-time work. Here it is:

Note how Mr. Yglesias’s chart begins in 2010, just when we finally started climbing out of the Great Recession. Trends in employment are caused by many things. Obamacare is only one of them. However, Obamacare did not cause the Great Recession (having been passed in 2010). And its effects are not bad enough to completely crush recovery. However, as comedian and U.S. Senator Al Franken has said, “It takes a lot more work to drive the car out of a ditch than to drive it into a ditch.”

Financial Advisor Doug Short has a great chart showing how part-time-workers and full-time workers flipped as a result of the recession. So, as we come out of it, of course full-time workers will gain.

The question is: What is the effect of Obamacare at the margin, notwithstanding all other effects? To answer this question, University of Chicago’s Casey Mulligan is the go-to source. Obamacare clearly induces many workers of a certain income to lose hours.

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For the pivotal alternative to Obamacare, please see the Independent Institute’s widely acclaimed book: Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis, by John C. Goodman.

“Behave, or I’ll sell you.”

This “threat” was one I heard with some regularity as a child. It was my mother’s way of letting me know that I was driving her up a wall. It was usually followed by something like, “then they’ll pay me to take you back.” (In retrospect, if this was true, my mother missed out on a serious profit opportunity.)

This week marks National Infertility Awareness Week. The idea behind the campaign, as the name suggests, is to raise awareness of the variety of fertility problems that keep many couples from conceiving children naturally.

As a “woman of reproductive age,” this is an issue that has crossed my mind on more than one occasion. Will my soon-to-be husband and I be able to have children? Will it be easy or difficult? We can’t know until the time comes. For several friends and acquaintances, however, they do know, and it’s not the answer they were seeking. They know that, even if the reasons are unclear, they have been unable to successfully conceive or bring a pregnancy to term.

For a number of years, there has been a problem of shortages of certain generic drugs for injection. These are often important cancer drugs. In 2012, I wrote a report that concluded over regulation by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was the primary cause of the shortages.

The President and Congress acted, but their actions did not result in improvement for over a year.

Today, the FDA claims to have improved the situation. However, an article in Health Affairs points out that the number of drug shortages reported by the FDA and the number reported by the University of Utah Drug Information Service (UUDIS), the leading private source of this data, are diverging dramatically:

Presidential candidate Marco Rubio says, “I believe that sexual preference is something that people are born with,” but goes on to say, “I don’t believe same-sex marriage is a constitutional right.”  Let’s consider both of these ideas from a political perspective.

First, whether people choose their sexual orientation or are born with it is irrelevant from a political perspective.  As long as people’s actions are not violating the rights of others, their choices about sexual partners and any other personal matters should be of no concern to the government.  So, I’ll criticize Rubio for making this statement, not because he’s right or wrong, but rather because as a political candidate he should have said that whether people are born with their sexual preferences should have no bearing on politics or government.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as “drones,” have been the subject of heated debate in recent years, especially their role in combat. Without a doubt, the number of air strikes using drones has increased at an astonishing rate. Consider that in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, the U.S. government has launched over 1,500 known  drone strikes since 2008. This visualization of strikes in Pakistan is particularly illustrative:

It is always good news to hear about a patent troll taking one on the chin. According to this article from the BBC, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has invalidated parts of a patent claimed by Personal Audio. The patent at issue claimed all rights on “a system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence,” what we might generally call podcasting. The PTO’s decision can be found here. (Personal Audio was the troll that tangled with Adam Corolla last year and lost via a settlement.)

The latest action was brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Pension Reform Doesn’t Mean Higher Taxes,” Andrew Biggs correctly pointed out that new Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) rules require state and local governments across America to be more transparent about the financial health of their public-pension plans. But, as he noted, the rules do not require governments to change how they fund pensions. The new rules are accounting rules, not funding rules.

Then Mr. Biggs said: “there’s no reason” why a public pension plan should “pay off its unfunded liabilities rapidly.” Actually, there are two good reasons for paying off pension debt sooner rather than later.

Gallup has released the full results of its first-quarter survey of health insurance. It concludes that the proportion of uninsured Americans has collapsed to the lowest level ever: 11.9 percent.

Only the people who have employer-based benefits can be said to be paying for their own health insurance. They decreased 0.9 percentage points in the quarter.

News reports on Tax Day suggest that the European Commission wants to nail Google Inc.’s scalp to the wall as punishment for committing alleged antitrust (competition) law violations. At issue is the way in which the company assigns priorities to the links consumers see when they “google” generic search terms like “booksellers”, “cameras”, and “watches”. The links that rank highest are to the sellers of goods and services who have paid Google for advertising space on its search engine.

More recent stories in the Wall Street Journal suggest that the core of the EU’s lawsuit is based on complaints from Nextag, Bizrate, LeGuide and other companies offering comparison-shopping services saying that they have been “crushed” by Google’s online search engine. Additional charges may be looming on the horizon contending that Google’s Android cell phone operating system likewise unfairly favors Google’s own apps over those available from other sellers.

The quality of economic journalism in the United States is terrible. Day after day, journalists write about the causes and consequences of economic conditions and events without understanding the underlying economics of the situation, and their articles are, as a rule, simply bunk. Here is an example.

I have not examined the actual report whose findings are described in the article, but I am familiar with many studies of the same question that economists have conducted over the years. Moreover, I myself have made many applied econometric studies in a variety of areas, and I know how delicate the findings of such studies are to a variety of details—sample period, sample size, sampling method, data collection details, model specification, estimation methods, and so forth. I know, too, that the best studies—those with the best data, most sensible model specification, and most exhaustive set of controls—have found virtually no difference in the amounts that men and women are paid for doing the same work. The key is “doing the same work,” which is another way of saying “providing equally valuable services to the employer” in the sense of adding equally to the employer’s net income.