Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Mitch Daniels: Liberal

Indiana’s governor is Mitch Daniels. Indiana has a budget deficit. So Fox News reports that Governor Daniels said: I ask the most fortunate among us, those citizens earning over $100,000 per year, for one year, to pay an additional 1 percent on the income they receive. The Club for Growth is not happy.

Luskin’s Thesis: Putting Things into Perspective

Not to beat a “dead horse”, but AB is right about Luskin’s thesis, which by his own subtitle was “the truth about Social Security even eludes the supposed truth-seekers”. Luskin dares to say others were misleading the public and then he goes on to lie to them. OK, he corrected his lie and now his […]

Tech Support

Lately, when I view this blog (other blogs look fine) using my preferred browser, Firefox, some characters aren’t recognized: If anyone knows why this is happening and how to fix it, I’d appreciate the tip. AB UPDATE: Thanks, it’s fixed! As many commenters suspected, the problem was with the character encoding.

Luskin Update

By way of updating the earlier post pointing out the unacknowledged edits that Luskin and/or NRO made to Luskin’s article, I see that at some time between when I wrote the Before and After post (late Tuesday night) and noon Wednesday, an acknowledgement of sorts was added to the NRO site (original column here; revised […]

Bush’s Social Security Propaganda / Inconsistencies: Calling Max Sawicky

Their Powerpoint slide on this issue can be found here in what Max calls “A Pack of Lies”. Look at pages 4 and 5 and then read why Duncan Black says this is “Dumb as Rocks”. My question to Max comes from pages 18, 19, and 44. The GOP has as one of its principles […]

Senator Allard Criticized for Relying on Cato’s Social Security Research

This post might be seen as a 3-part math workout with the warmup being the news that the Club for Rich People (aka Growth) has their own Social Security webpage. Featured is a graph from Don Luskin of the first derivative of the Social Security reserves (well almost as Luskin’s graph omits the interest income […]

New Budget Forecasts

The latest installment of the CBO’s Budget Outlook for the US government was released yesterday. The headline figure being reported is an estimate of a 2005 budget deficit of $368bn, not including funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. But the more troubling part of the report is the prospect for little improvement in the budget any […]

Before And After

Not surprisingly, the latest widely mocked Luskin piece has now been edited by the honest folks hacks over at National Review. Let’s take a look: Before After FactCheck.org also cited concerns about public perceptions of the $11 trillion deficit number in the 2003 report of the Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods — a group […]

Donald Luskin Proposes A Massive Increase in the Payroll Tax

Via Jesse Taylor and many other wise bloggers comes a roar of laughter at the latest from Donald Luskin: Doing this may have toned down that big, bad $10.4 trillion number by setting it against a big, good $295.5 trillion number. But this is misleading, too, in its own way. If payrolls are $295.5 trillion […]