by Bruce Webb Last month we were delivered alarming news from AEI: Slowdown Slashes Social Security Surplus illustrated with the table above in turn derived from this source SSA-Trust Fund Data. And sure enough if you followed the link and inserted Feb 2009 that is exactly what you would see. But what if you put […]

Greenwald on Harman. Read the whole thing. Sample: when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was “both legal and necessary” as well as “essential to U.S. national security,” and it was the “despicable” whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime […]

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rdan Lots has been said about costs and this study. Please notice the cost includes insulating the house as well. Here is a Letter to Nation Republican Congressional Committee regarding cap and trade costs to households. About $340 per household in the MIT study versus about $3000 claimed by the Republicans? And so easily checked…yet […]

rdan Armed Services Committee report of November 20, 2008 was released April 21, 2009. Lots to review.

rdan Special Inspector General Barofsky and his team make particular note of the lack of oversight in TARP, and also worry that hedge funds are even more opaque in other trillion dollar programs. The SIGTARP team did its own survey and received reasonable, but uneven, reporting by banks eventhough Treasury said it would be too […]

rdan 24/7 Wallstreet suggests AIG might pay back much of the money lent to it by Uncle Sam (#11). Is this notion really in the cards for the taxpayer?? AIG (AIG) may be the only large company in America that both the management and federal government want torn apart. If AIG succeeds in selling most […]

rdan(response to cactus, lifted from comments, by juan. Slightly edited for readability)) ‘Favoritism’ seems too kind while also continuing to assume legal-political institutions [‘the state’] to be dominant rather than dominated, which is then to avoid the question of which class or class segment dominates through the mediation of ‘the state’. Willem Buiter put it […]

rdan Consider the Evidence and Crooked Timber April 16-18, 2009 post a series by Lane Kenworthy on income inequality. Our own Robert Waldmann has thoughts of his own as well. How to pay for inequality reduction: follow-upApril 20, 2009 One way to make some progress in reducing income inequality is to significantly increase redistributive transfers […]