I have a horse race to watch so this will be short and in the form of a intellectual challenge. In any year that Social Security is in surplus, as it is now and is projected to be until 2017, cutting benefits actually increases total federal debt and so worsens the overall financial outlook going […]
Rock the Vote clues young voters in: President Bush has nominated von Spakovsky — a champion of voter suppression — to serve on the Federal Election Commission. Because of his work promoting photo ID requirements for voters, hundreds of thousands of students, low income people and seniors may be turned away from the polls in […]
May 2008 // Washington, DC – Today, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and VoteVets.org released an e-mail obtained from a Veterans Affairs (VA) employee directing VA staff to refrain from diagnosing soldiers and veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).On March 20, 2008 a VA hospital’s PTSD program coordinator sent an e-mail […]
Lifted from comments cactus style: Reader juan suggests: Econmagic Charts Bloomberg News IT’S NOT EASY TO SIZE UP THE influence of the index funds. But based on their known cash commitments in certain commodities, and the commodity indexes their prospectuses say they track, it is possible to estimate the size of their commitments in all […]
Andrew Samwick posts “one of the most depressing graphs [he has] ever seen.” Recall the simplest formula Tom used: Savings = Personal Income – Personal Taxes – Personal Consumption Expenditures [PCE]
The industrial production report this morning was muddied by the auto parts strike. Overallmanufacturing output fell 0.8%, but excluding auto and auto parts manufacturing output fell0.4%. Because the auto output is being distorted, and will generate a snapback of output when the strike ends, manufacturing output will not be giving clear signals for months. To […]
The following is a reworked version of a piece originally put up immediately after the release of the 2006 Report in response to what seemed a very worrisome development. After a long series of years of continual improvement in Social Security long term outlook, suddenly progress stalled and actually reversed, the payroll gap went from […]
The report in yahoo news presents an odd twist in relation to government regulation and testing. For me it brings to focus the less than idealogical intent of our current administration. The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a […]
History: How the US Grew the Military Industrial Complex. The size of the US national security (war) machine is not related to threats to the nation nor any reasonable or efficient response to those wildly inflated threats. Threats are overstated and the solution to the fake insecurity is always the most expensive and profitable, neither […]
Yes. This has been another version of Simple Answers to Simple Questions. Although, as some wag once noted, once is history, twice is parody, but the third time is a trend.