Laurence Kotlikoff has a post in Bloomberg opinion section on the current status of the Social Security. This is lifted from Dale Coberly’s note back to him: Your analysis that SS is desperately broke ignores the fact that the projected shortfall can be made up by raising the payroll tax one half of one tenth […]
by Rebecca Wilder Euro Area Imbalances Are a Symptom of the Broader Global Imbalances Every year I travel to Germany to visit my in-laws, which is where I am now. Given the extra time on my hands, I’ve now mulled over a June 2012 NY Times opinion piece by Gunnar Beck. Beck displays an interesting […]
by Linda Beale What’s Romney Got to Hide? (Part III) In the last two posts, I explored a number of fairly simple questions that might be raised about Romney’s activities that would be clarified by seeing multiple returns (hobby versus investment/business losses; business versus passive activity losses; amounts of preferentially taxed income; income reported from […]
by Kenneth Thomas U.S. Trails at Least 15 OECD Countries in Median Wealth Via @exiledonline, I learned today (July 18) that Canadians are richer than Americans. This is rather surprising, since GDP per capita is higher in the U.S than in Canada.: $48,100 vs. $40,300 (at purchasing power parity or PPP), according to the CIA World […]
by Linda Beale What’s Romney Got to Hide? It’s past time for financial and tax transparency As everybody who has followed anything about this election cycle knows, Mitt Romney–likely the wealthiest man to run for president, the only bankster/private equity fund founder (sole shareholder, CEO and manager) to run for president, and probably the only […]
The Washington Post carried a story on a Senate hearing on money laundering, one example being HSBC. The criticism was aimed at the OCC regulators who failed to pursue the issue. Also notice the fuss is over a foreign bank. The U.S. affiliate of global banking giant HSBC was for years a haven for foreign […]
The Incidental Economist addresses election snippets that keep on going, just like in the movies. Read the whole thing: Let’s try to stick to the real world when we talk about Medicaid, by Aaron Carroll: (Note: Paul Krugman cites here. Tyler Cowen responds here. I respond to Cowen’s response here.) Tyler Cowen had a piece […]
Mark Thoma notes the discrepancy between pretty much standard economics and what the popular discussion considers ‘economics’ : Not All Economists are to Blame, But Some Are A defense of some, but not all economists: Why Some Economists Failed I assert that some economists got things mostly right about the recession and what was needed to […]
by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Employer Responses The Urban Institute and the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation published a paper (October 2011) about the potential responses of employers and employees. The paper tends to take an optimistic view on the responses of employers, although warning of possible short term thinking by some employers. Now the […]
Via Alternet, Thomas Ferguson and Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen point us to the FEC deleting information on “dark” political contributions. You need to go to the original to read the important details, especially on c(4) contributions. The point that we rely on agency information to be reasonably accurate cannot be stressed enough. We have […]