by Bruce Webb (A contest with no prizes, AB doesn’t have fundraisers or sell t-shirts and is lucky if ad money keeps the servers on. And this is just a solo effort by me anyway.) ‘Catfood Commission’ or alternately ‘Cat Food Commission’ apparently started as a lefty-blogger in-joke but has since caught on in a […]
by Bruce Webb Because I don’t get it. The U.S. government operates on a Fiscal Year basis meaning that next year starts on Sept 30th. Which means, far as I know that government operations, including implementation of HCR, are funded right through the next Sept 30th (because I don’t think there are important Appropriations bills […]
by Bruce Webb Want to make the move from wanking to wonking on Social Security finance and policy? Consider the following list. First read an Annual Report, you don’t need to understand every number but you do need some grounding in the terms and concepts. 2010 Trustees Report Then fill out your knowledge with this […]
by Bruce Webb A curious feature of the battle over Social Security is that it is almost always a battle of adjectives and adverbs and not numbers, In particular almost everyone agrees that ‘Nothing’ is not a plan, People are not always clear on the consequences of ‘Nothing’ whether that be ‘massive’ benefit cuts or […]
by Bruce Webb Regular readers of Angry Bear will be familiar with bond trader turned blogger Bruce Krasting and his, can we say non-standard conclusions about Social Security solvency. Well he is at it again today under the provocative title of SSTF – Steve Goss’s Bombshell – What Could it Mean?. SSTF means Social Security […]
For years we have been regaled with scary, scary numbers about how Medicare’s projected unfunded liability was in the TENS OF TRILLIONS. And sure enough if you consulted the Medicare Report and examined the actuarial projections for Medicare Part A you would find that number. But a funny thing happened with the 2010 Report and […]
by Bruce Webb When I first started paying serious attention to Social Security reporting back in 1997 I was struck by its curious mix of precision and fluidity and how that mix moved from the latter to the former as you went from the data tables to the top line numbers and then on to […]
This is the title of a post of a diary at another site, one of no particular interest on its own because it just puts people on the wrong road. A straight out analysis of the economic numbers underlying Social Security ‘crisis’ shows pretty clearly that there is no ‘there’ there. To the extent that […]
by Bruce Webb Dean asks: 1) How much higher are real wages projected to be in 2040 than today? In other words, how much richer do we expect the average worker to be 30 years from now? 2) How did the 2010 Trustees Report change the projections for 2040 wages compared with the 2009 report? […]
by Bruce Webb I am not going to harp on the sexism or ageism in Simpson’s ‘310 million tits’ comment generally, if you happen to have just gotten back on the Inter-Spatial Shuttle from Alpha Centauri this evening and don’t catch the reference a Google search on that turns up 125,000 hits, and I daresay […]