Lets play a game. The ultimate point of the game is to understand certain aspects of Social Security but to keep complications from creeping in too early (wait for later parts) we are going to start with simple game play on a board far, far away. In fact on distant yet oddly Earth-like Planet Elsinore. […]

Via the ?Real News:  Privitization of the Royal Mail Service Interview of John Weeks,( a professor emeritus of the University of London and author of the forthcoming book The Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy). Brings to mind this process: Grim outlook of US post office buildings: Currently, […]

Lifted from comments from Edward Lambert’s International flows Part 4 comes a reminder from Angry Bear Steve Roth: This is all part of the universal “saving/saving” confusion.  See Nick’s post “Why ‘Saving’ Should be Abolished” http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2012/01/why-saving-should-be-banned.html Key point, I think, been meaning to write a (another) post on this: “The economy” cannot “save” money. For […]

Dean Baker was polite in responding to another story from the Washington Post in the campaign to discredit the program: That’s what the headline of the front page Washington Post story might have read if the purpose was to inform readers. Instead the lengthy piece (which covers the whole back page) told readers that Social […]

I posted in the morning a graph of unit labor costs compared to inflation and labor share (% change over year). There was a key insight. If someone was to stop and think, the insight is actually important. Sometimes important ideas get lost in a post. So this post is to make sure it is […]

Inflation is low and has been declining for years. I want to present a model to explain a dynamic between inflation and unit labor costs. First let’s look at a chart of the two of them over the years. (semi-annual data, % change from year ago) They move together with more noise in the unit […]

Maggie Mahar at The Health Beat Blog writes bout the exchanges. Paul Krugman: “There are two remarkable things about this kind of doomsaying. One is that the doomsayers haven’t rethought their premises despite being wrong again and again — perhaps because the news media continue to treat them with immense respect.” If you Google “Obamacare,” […]

Previously, I had written on Fair Market Value and its use by the CBO’s Douglas Elmendorf to rate the risk of Student Loans as advocated by both The New America Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. A rebuttal answer to a partisan CBO, the right-leaning New America Foundation, and the conservative Heritage Foundation on the usage […]

Back in 2009 I put up a post with the title Joe Biden? The Map Office is Calling! after Joe had apparently given a green light to Israel to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. In it I pointed to a study by Toukan and Cordesman Study on a Possible Israeli Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Development Facilities […]