I wrote in February of 2012 about welfare: Welfare, I’m not hurting from it and neither are you. I noted the following: but it looks to me like what we spend on welfare is not much more than what the government is spending on just doing the government thingy, unless of course people can’t get […]
I was watching C span Washington Journal this morning. Rep Marsha Blackburn was the guest. I got to listen to her explanation of how the Social Security funds flow and just had to post the clip. Copied from the transcript of the clip: THEIRS MONEY THAT GOES TO MEDICARE AND SOCIAL SECURITY AND I THINK […]
by Daniel Becker (This is a long post. The time for sound bite debate to the demise of learned discussion is over for we are flirting with danger.) Via a post at Financial Armageddon I learnt of a paper looking at the relationship of austerity implementation and social unrest. It is recent, dated August 2011. […]
Bruce has made this point repeatedly. Dr. Black puts it in more direct language: [I]nevitably the Social Security Trustees will, perfectly justifiably, tweak a few assumptions about future economic activity so that there will be a DOOM scenario, an EVERYTHING’S AWESOME scenario, and a “uh oh maybe in about 40 years we will have a […]
UPDATE: Jason Linkins at one of the non-Breast-Enhanced sites of the Huffington Post did a burlesque of which I can only dream on the same piece. Via Chris Hayes’s Twitter feed (and he got it from David Sirota), the following is from “No more ‘me first’ mentality on entitlements“: While it does not happen often, […]
by Bruce Webb And I could add honest definitions and honest framing to that. In Dec 2005 three former staffers to Bill Clinton, John McCain and GW Bush respectively released the Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick Non-Partisan Social Security Reform Plan (9 pg PDF) or LMS. The authors proposed a package of changes to Social Security comprised of a […]
lifted from Bruce’s e-mail Hi Bruce, I really enjoyed your recent post to OpenLeft about the war on Social Security. I wrote a related piece deconstructing Obama’s latest picks to the Debt Commission: Alternet: Obama Packs Debt Commission with Social Security Looters? Any feedback about the article or thoughts on the matter would be greatly […]
by Bruce Webb Well some things are coming clear about the Presidents Deficit Commission. One its Chairmen have made it clear that its business starts and stops with Entitlements, the concerns some Republicans had that this would be Obama’s way of boosting taxes on the General Fund side or slashing military spending have been shown […]
by Bruce Webb I don’t visit the web-site EconomistMom much because Diane has hinted a while back that I was being rude, and like a good party guest does, took the hint and left. But my eye was caught by the caption and the very nice illustration to this post Yes Deficit Hawks Can Have […]
Now that I know we’re just members of the “Peanut Gallery,”* let this random links post work as a placeholder for longer posts as we prepare for the “holiday”: Shorter Mark Thoma at Marketwatch: If you can’t build a better model, best to reappoint a man who doesn’t think he has to do half of […]