New White House Estimate Lifts Drug Benefit Cost to $720 Billion WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 – The Bush administration offered a new estimate of the cost of the Medicare drug benefit on Tuesday, saying it would cost $720 billion in the next 10 years. That is much more than the $400 billion Congress assumed when it […]
He writes over at their Social Security blog “Club for Growth Rejects Investing Soc. Sec. Funds in Stocks” Because that statement is completely false, whoever wrote it clearly has lazy fact-checking skills. Well, he got my title right but he forgot to read the first sentence of my post. Notice I challenged readers to see […]
David Hogberg has made some rather outrageous claims on this alleged Social Security crisis but Yes, Virgina, It’s a Crisis is interesting: One might think that a system whose surplus will begin declining in 2009, that will begin taking in less in taxes than it pays out in benefits in 2018, and will cost taxpayers […]
A proposal from David Brooks is labeled back door privatization by Noam Scheiber. Brooks writes: We could start by indexing Social Security benefits to prices, not wages, so the system wouldn’t go broke. Then we could give everybody under a certain age KidSave accounts. Scheiber responds: So, if I’m understanding this correctly, we’d create private […]
Club for Growth’s Social Security blog is a useful tool for keeping up on the latest from the rightwing hacks. Case in point is the post “The Trust Fund Hoax”, which links to a couple of attempts to defend 2018 “just IOUs” yahoo-ism (and Max Sawicky is welcomed to jump in at any point as […]
Well, they don’t want the government to do this according to the latest from Andrew Roth and the Cato crowd: In today’s Washington Post, columnist William Raspberry suggests “… the president ask the Social Security Administration to sell those bonds now in its trust fund and invest the proceeds in the stock market.” The increased […]
The brand-new White House budget proposal for 2006 contains some interesting details. One of them is this: the White House is not requesting, or planning for, any reform of the AMT system in this budget. As such, it may represent a backhanded way of effectively repealing the Bush tax cuts. And yes, I’m actually taking […]
The White House has just released their budget proposal for FY2006. Bush is a tough-guy with this budget, as he himself said earlier today: It’s a budget that is a lean budget. People on both sides of the aisle have called upon the administration to submit a budget that helps meet our obligations of — […]
For the household survey types, the key number from the recent Employment Situation Summary should be the 62.4% employment-to-population rate which was unchanged. As the author of this post, I was wondering if Lawrence Kudlow might be elated that the only reason the unemployment rate fell to 5.2% was that the labor force participation rate […]
It seems their political masters wanted the CEA to say the Social Security Trust Fund will soon be bankrupt so they write: A Small Business Analogy: Consider a small business that has $750,000 in annual revenue and $1 million in annual costs, for a $250,000 annual loss. Obviously, that business would be able to stay […]