With the release of Tim Geithner’s new autobiography the old quarrel about whether Social Security does or even can add to “the deficit” has cropped up again. So rather than weigh in let me start from a more neutral spot. CBO produces a document called the Monthly Budget Review and in Nov 2013 it carried […]
Fed Treasury Holdings 5-7-2014 The above link should take you to a PDF showing the Fed’s System Open Market Accounts holdings of Treasury Bonds and Notes which the second link will tell you comprise $2.224 trillion of the total $4.017 trillion of SOMA Holdings, with that total including $1.631 trillion of Fannie and Freddie Mac […]
It is a common trope among Austerians that the U.S. is passing on unsustainable debt to our children and grandchildren. And certainly there are some scary numbers out there, for example “$17.4 trillion!!” A very real number. But maybe it would be useful to render that number down so as to calculate real incidence of […]
It is not difficult to determine a dollar figure for Total U.S. Public Debt. In fact you have to round UP from the Treasury’s Debt to the Penny and Who Holds it web application which tracks that number daily. As of end of business Thursday that total was $17,472,051,696,926.14. Which is a lot of money […]
Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research offers a smackdown of Abby Huntsman’s warnings to millenials on MSNBC. For today I want to highlite several points. Dean Baker offers essentially Dale’s Northwest Plan as a way to deal with any problems of funding. Center for Economic Policy and Research lifted from an […]
Because we won. Or more precisely I won. Because we are not that much closer to the adoption of the Coberly inspired Northwest Plan than before, despite the fact that similar plans poll spectacularly positive. But mostly all the ‘Reform’ plans for an ‘unsustainable’ Social Security system are running scared from the Senator Warren and […]
Man there is a lot of snow! Australia Smaustralia, California Drought! Heck we had record cold in Buffalo. And ice in ATLANTA!!! So anthropogenic climate change is obviously a myth! (And since Clarence Thomas never saw racism in the 60’s South when he was a boy that is an obvious Lie-Beral myth too) Shorter FAUX […]
What does or would it mean to say that Social Security was ‘solvent’? Under the rules that govern the Trustees of Social Security the test for any given year is pretty simple: did or will the year end with all obligations/cost met while still retaining assets equal to the next year’s cost. To determine this […]
Well lets try again (two hours of draft having just disappeared)/ The above figure is II.D6 from the 2011 Social Security Report. The reasons why I didn’t use the 2013 version will become clear later, short version is it doesn’t show ‘The Shape of Solvency’ while the longer version is, well, long. This figure shows […]
There are a couple of easy ways to check out current Federal Public Debt to the dollar or even the penny. One you could check out the National Debt Clock which also is conveniently mirrored (in simplified form) in Times Square. In the top left you will find the number for ‘US National Debt’ at […]