This item confirms that the Northwest Plan for Social Security would work rather well for Congress, Social Security, and beneficiaries. Beltway conventional wisdom thought otherwise. My own reaction was of puzzlement by the Beltway conventional wisdom. Fiscal Times reports: We’ve already seen evidence that consumers have largely shrugged off this year’s expiration of the payroll tax […]

Cross-posted from Middle Class Political Economist. Your read it here first: Real wages fell 0.2% in 2012, down from $295.49 (1982-84 dollars) to $294.83 per week, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. Thus, a 1.9% increase in nominal wages was  more than wiped out by inflation, marking the 40th consecutive year that […]

Breaking: 1st update- #prop8 unlikely to be upheld; either struck down or #scotus won’t decide case. More in 30 mins. This is the more important of the two gay-marriage cases.  Tomorrow’s argument will be on the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), but almost no one (best as I can tell), thinks […]

Via The Big Picture and Ritholz comes Nervousness in over banked Europe Go no further than the following two charts to understand why markets freaked out over Dijsselbloem’s comments.    Europe is way overbanked and vulnerable to financial sector shocks.Even in the so-called “safe haven” Switzerland the banking system is outsized relative to the country’s GDP.  […]

David Zetland writes a well written nine page look at the limits of economics in at least the media and political level, and a look at the limits of what economic models have to offer most people. This will be a series of posts highlighting major points over time. The paper must be downloaded to […]

We generally start this evening with the birth of Moses (Exodus 2:2-3; “And the woman conceived , and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months. 3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and […]

Lifted from Robert Waldmann’sStochastic Thoughts: 32. Note that the US constitution grants the same due process rights to citizens and non citizens. This time I pick on Steve Benen who wrote “The drones themselves are a fairly new tool, but the use of technology is tangential to the underlying point about the use of force, […]

Just watch this.  It is 1 minute long. Could it be anymore surreal? HOW MANY TIMES DO WE HAVE TO DO THIS? HOW MANY FREAKIN’ TIMES DO WE HAVE TO LEARN THE LESSON? Obviously, the lesson has not been relearned since at least sometime before 1992.  If it had been relearned, we would not be […]

by Mike Kimel Accountability Watching the slow motion train wreck that is the European economy right now, and the Argentine economy just about always, I started to wonder – should political leaders be personally liable for their failures? Obviously, there is no way that someone whose ineptitude puts a creates a crash that causes severe […]