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 […]

And this is an honest question, one that I have been poking around in but maybe don’t have the chops to answer. Lets take three measures of Public Debt: One nominal. Public Debt as of the 16th was $17.899 trillion. And rising. Two as percentage of GDP. And BTW the preferred measure of deficit fetishists […]

This will be short and sweet, consider it a Health Care Open Thread. ‘Repeal and Replace’ is a pipe dream. Because all the good parts of ACA including guaranteed issue, coverage of pre-existing conditions and inclusions of young people on their parents’ policy actually cost money. At least up front. Which has to come from […]

Put that way it sounds silly. I mean isn’t ISIS simply IN various parts of Iraq and Syria and wouldn’t US involvement in something like an all out attack on ISIS mean intervening in any number of civil wars? Well that depends on how smart your lawyers are (and I am only kind of smart […]

The Countdown is ON! (Update 2: It’s out, links work. See you in Comments) (Update for Post Publication) If things go as scheduled the 2014 Report of the Trustees of Social Security will be released to the web at 12:15 Easter or less than two hours from the time this post published. Assuming the same […]

The Office of Management and Budget annually releases the President’s Budget as a baseline proposal for the next Fiscal Year. If the Congress is in whole or in part in the hands of the opposite party this mostly gets filed away somewhere in a drawer entitled “You Wish”. But it does come complete with a […]

The above is an extract from a 2012 National Academy of Social Insurance publication entitled Social Security: What do Americans Want. There is much to see and read in this publication and I urge people to take a look at this longish PDF of 57 pages and many Tables, of which this is just one. […]

2014 Long Term Budget Outlook (pdf 64pp) While we are still waiting on the 2014 Social Security Report we do have today the release of CBO’s annual Budget Outlook which among other parts does include a chapter on Social Security. I plan to extract and post some Tables from it but in the meantime people […]

Stay with me here. Because I am almost serious about this proposal. Or at least it highlights the contradictions (while not Heightening the Contradictions). The Border Crisis: tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border. Social Security ‘Crisis’: per ‘Reformers’ one that is driven by pure demography – too few future workers to […]

I thought it worthwhile to re-post this quote from a time before the Tea Party even thought of being as a reminder that the current struggle between the Republican ‘Establishment’ and the Tea Party has nothing to do with the former being some remnant of the 50s-60s era of mainstream Republicans being the ‘Goo-Goo’ Party. […]