Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Why the Filibuster Doesn’t Matter (so much)

by Bruce Webb A great deal of ink and untold pixels have been expended ‘explaining’ why a real majority in the Senate requires enough votes to shut down a filibuster, i.e. sixty. And in that vein people are eagerly following the races in Alaska, Georgia and WisconsinMinnesota hoping all three will break the Democrats way […]

$150k and she couldn’t even find a ‘Vote Elephant’ scarf?

by Bruce Webb From Newsweek’s The Stumper (h/t slinkerwink’s diary at dKos) Okay nobody expected Sarah Palin to be the sharpest political crayon in the box, but surely someone on the McCain/Palin team has looked at a political cartoon over the last hundred plus years plus and understands the whole donkey/elephant deal. This ain’t advanced […]

Social Security Checkup: Monthly Trust Fund Reports

Near the end of each month the Treasury Dept releases Trust Fund Reports giving balances to the penny for the previous month. By comparing these balances to the projection in the Annual Reports we can get a rough idea of how Social Security is doing year to date. This year’s Report was released on October […]

Social Security Actuaries score the Warshawsky Plan

By Bruce Andrew Biggs directs our attention to a new detailed PRA plan by Mark Warshawsky, a member of the Social Security Advisory Board: Notes on SS Reform: Actuaries Score New Reform Proposal The post does not link to the plan itself but instead to a detailed scoring of it by the Office of the […]

R.I.P. Social Security Crisis: "We hardly knew ya"

Time for this adopted Angry Bear to go into hibernation for the winter. Events out of Alaska and now out of Wall Street make it extremely unlikely that Social Security itself will return to the center of the policy table anytime soon. Rather than rallying to crush one of the remaining cornerstone’s of the New […]

Intergenerational Equity, Unfunded Liability and Selfish Boomers

The newest buzzphrase in the Social Security world is ‘Intergenerational Equity’. It is indeed the theme of the new movie IOUSA (to whose webpage I link) which itself is pretty much a documentary of the Concord Coaltion’s Fiscal Wake Up Tour. (The fact that Concord was founded by Pete Peterson and rights to distribute the […]

Unfunded Liability Bookended

In the last installment of this Social Security series we kind of dug into some of the details of unfunded liability, what it was and what it wasn’t and most importantly where the incidence occured: in the past or in the future. Backwards Transfer is Back. In the course of that I think it became […]

Backwards Transfer is Back: Social Security’s Unfunded Liability

Awhile back we had a series of posts about the causality of Social Security’s ‘unfunded liability’ in response to a comment by Jim Glass over at Andrew Bigg’s. The first post was XXXVI: $17 Trillion Backwards Transfer. Andrew answered back with Responding to Angry Bear: Where does the $17 trillion deficit come from? to which […]

Social Security 2027: A date for action?

I spend a good deal of time talking about ‘Nothing’ as a plan for Social Security. You can make an excellent numeric case for ‘Nothing’ in the short run VIII: Calculating the Cost of Inactivity and you can make a reasonable economic case for ‘Nothing’ in the long run II: The Shape of Low Cost. […]

CBO: Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security

Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security Andrew Biggs in Treatment of uncertainty in new CBO Social Security projections directs our attention to the new release from the Congressional Budget Office. I don’t tend to focus on CBO projections precisely because they are more optimistic than the Trustees’, I don’t want to open the door to […]