In a really timely fashion the Office of the Chief Actuary released their Actuarial Note 2008.1 with the above title last month. It is well worth the read for anyone wanting to cut through the conceptual tangle raised in the recent posts on ‘Unfunded Liabilities’ and ‘Backwards transfers’. In addition it provides us with some […]
Hat tip to Movie Guy 2 Banks Will Buy Back $17 Billion in Securities August 6, 2008 Two Wall Street giants agreed on Thursday to buy back more than $17 billion of auction-rate securities that were improperly sold to retail customers, likely paving the way for other banks and brokerage firms to take similar actions. […]
Sent by reader noni mausa From the psych blog Shrink Rap: The Beginning of the Middle of the End of MedicarePosted by Roy at 2:14 PMThursday, August 07, 2008 The Beginning of the End of Medicare was when Congress passed therules which require physician fees to follow a Sustainable Growth Rateor SGR, followed by the […]
The Northwoods memo brings back memories of past planning and behaviors in our world. There were some doozies.
The first thing my uncle (who has lived in the Toronto area since, I believe, the late 1950s) asked was “Why on earth are you going to Quebec instead of Ontario?” Considering the evidence, he may have a point. Comparison of Licence Plate mottos: Quebec Province: Je me souviens (which I would translate to “I […]
I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to this question. I have posed it to very prominant people on both sides of Social Security only to have it dismissed by the privatizer and answered by the SS supporter in a way that went over my head. But it is not crazy talk, between 1997 and […]
I’m going to try a Cactus post and look at the Bush record. On 11 June 2004 Milton Friedman published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Editorial page called Freedom’s Friend. In the article he used the number of pages in the Federal Register each year as a measure of government interference in […]
OMB Watch lists some main items needing passing to continue the government, and indicates progress through the Congressional approval maze. This is only a partial list of course, and just a beginning for YOU as a congress critter to analyze. The challenge is to begin to choose how to bring the budget out of the […]
In November of 2004 Dean Baker issued his ‘No Economist/Policy Analyst Left Behind’ challenge. In it he asked people to show that they could produce the 6.5% return on stocks assumed by the Council of Economic Advisors under the actual economic projections of the Intermediate Cost alternative. (Oddly enough for an open and public challenge […]