Donald Luskin’s latest – Krugman’s $600 billion bungle – cannot deny that Paul Krugman has caught George Bush and Joseph Lieberman in a blatant misrepresentation of what the Social Security Administration said about the alleged unfunded liabilities. But he defends this claim that the cost of delay is around $600 billion per year: Here’s how […]
When Bush supporters whine the Democrats have no plan, all they are really doing is saying they do not wish to engage in a real discussion. Today the President said this morning that he found Robert Pozen’s plan interesting: Q: Will you say if you’re specifically supportive of an income test for the slowing of […]
Let me follow up on my post from yesterday with one more chart. The problem with the US’s fiscal situation is not the fact that the federal government is running a budget deficit today. The problem is that it will run massive deficits as far as the eye can see into the future, even assuming […]
In the wake of Bush’s appointment of Josh Bolton (Mr. “There is no United Nations… When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow”) to the position of US ambassador to the UN, the latest Bush appointment to an important multinational body seems only fitting: WASHINGTON – President Bush will recommend that Defense Deputy […]
The BEA reported on the US’s current account deficit for 2004. And the winner is… $666 billion, or 5.7% of GDP: The U.S. current-account deficit–the combined balances on trade in goods and services, income, and net unilateral current transfers–increased to $665.9 billion in 2004 from $530.7 billion in 2003. An increase in the deficit on […]
Last week, I plugged a paper on Social Security by a professor at the University of Oregon, Mark Thoma. As it turns out, he also has a blog — take a look. And while I’m plugging economists’ blogs, see also Calculated Risk, which may be a bit to the right of Angry Bear, but is […]
Halliburton: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Military auditors still have “major” unresolved issues with Halliburton, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, a day after Democratic congressmen released an audit questioning $108 million in costs by the contractor. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the audit, which found $108 million in questionable fuel delivery costs in Iraq by Halliburton unit Kellogg […]
I have tried to stay away from the term “garbage” in reference to Dr. Greenspan but today’s (Ides of March) Senate hackery went way too far: At present, the Social Security trustees estimate the unfunded liability over the indefinite future to be $10.4 trillion. The shortfall in Medicare is calculated at several multiples of the […]
As I suggested earlier, Greenspan is spouting more garbage when he claims that his support for the Bush tax cuts was justified given the projections of the budget surplus at the time. Greenspan’s deliberate implication is that the US’s budget deficits are the result of bad budgetary forecasts, not the tax cuts. That is simply […]
I finally read something from Stephen Moore worth quoting: As former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacoca once declared, any CEO who tried this with a private firm’s pension fund would be thrown in jail. Of course, this was Lee Iacoca’s line and Stephen does not really go after his accomplice in their Soc. Sec. scam. But […]