There is continued discussion of how fiscal tightening in the first quarter of 2013 (the fiscal cliff in January and Sequestration in March) was followed by decent growth in the second half of 2014. I have already written much more than enough about this, but I have two more thoughts. First 2013 was not just […]

As often, Paul Krugman has an extremely interesting thought. Discussing the sudden end of the Swiss Franc Eur peg he wrote This in turn helps us put the explicit exchange rate target into the right slot: it was about making QE effective through commitment, so that you got the maximum impact on expectations. Actually, the […]

Barack Obama has released the details of a fairly radical proposal to increase tax progressivity which he will make in his state of the union address. The political impact will dwarf that of Chris Van Hollen’s proposal (which I am sad to say, has been quite dwarfish already). I am very enthusiastic about this. Even […]

Well, I should have taken my own advice and not waited until the last minute to submit my own comments on the proposed standards for government accounting of subsidies. But, at long last, they are in. Below please find them in their entirety. Director of Research and Technical Activities Project No. 19-20E Government Accounting Standards […]

Who or what is ‘Social Security Defender’? Well it is basically a G-mail account controlled by me: socsec.defender@gmail.com . Which is kind of pretentious and vainglorious on my part but does allow a platform for some attached products including the blog Social Security Defender and a Google Drive. In which as an experiment I have […]

This is a discussion in a comment thread which I think is worth pulling back. I claimed (as I often do) that interest rates do not have noticeable effects on consumption. Please notice the “noticeable” — it is an appeal to standard econometric analysis of aggregate time series. OK the discussion EMichael January 16, 2015 […]

Table V.B1: Principal Economic Assumptions More numbers!! Comments on process and content more than welcome. Because at AB we are all about the numbers and I just want to give an assist. Update: now linked to better formatted version

Table V.B2: Additional Economic Assumptions Well I am back and working on a new project in anticipation of the release of the 2015 Report this late Spring. The project involves extracting the Tables and Figures from the Social Security Trustees Report, in this case the 2014, and having them individually web accessible as spreadsheeets or […]