This is a re-posting of a Bruce Webb post from January, 2010. A reminder of a well crafted plan to date: Seven Steps to Social Security cuts via Debt Commission For those of you who didn’t go the short version of my comment is that the strategy to get major slashes to Social Security and […]
This story has rapidly made the rounds in the blogosphere, and it is indeed a big deal. One of the most significant economics papers underlying the argument for why high government debt (especially over 90% of gross domestic product) is bad for growth was published in 2010 by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, “Growth in […]
I posted all I can say publicly at Skippy. And even that wouldn’t work at a family blog like this one. The rest are jokes that I am told–undoubtedly correctly, but lapsed traders are difficult to retrain*–are “too soon.” The Phantom Scribbler came out of her retirement (first post in more than eleven months), though, […]
Am I misunderstanding (certainly a possibility), or do the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan write an entire article based on a really obviously ridiculous conflation of two separate concepts: what tax law is, and what tax law should be? The article, titled “Mitt Romney was right (on taxes),” chastises the public for hypocrisy […]
by Sandwichman (re-posted with author’s permission): In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke affirmed, “I do not question but that human knowledge, under the present circumstances of our beings and constitutions, may be carried much farther than it hitherto has been, if men would sincerely, and with freedom of mind, employ all that industry […]
With all the chaff that’s been flying around (recently, and for years now) about saving and investment, dissaving, and lending/borrowing, I felt the need to go back to the numbers and see how they’ve played out over the decades in what we tend to call the “real” economy — domestic households and nonfinancial business. Click […]
Lifted from comments comes a beginning thought on the term ‘sustainability’ for programs…Sustainability Rusty asks: Is there an accepted definition for “sustainability?”I tend to think of it in an environmental context, but apparently it is used more broadly. Your thoughts? Bruce Webb’s quick reply: STR, well in Social Security lingo ‘sustainable’ is mostly used in […]
It’s official: President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security by replacing the program’s current inflation adjustment with the stingier “chained” Consumer Price Index. As I’ve discussed before, this risks undoing all the progress made against senior poverty since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. 25% of seniors were poor according to official poverty […]
by Linda Beale Obama caves yet again: offering Social Security cuts to appease the right… Obama’s budget isn’t even released yet and he’s already caving to the “let’s make the rich richer and forget the rest” crowd. That crowd that claims that we need a capital gains preference so the rich can gather all that […]
The headline numbers in the employment report were very weak as payroll employment rose by only 88,000 and the household survey reported a -206,000 drop in employment while the labor force fell by -496,000. The futures markets are reacting very badly. But the workweek expanded and aggregrate hours worked increased 0.3% as compared to 0.5% […]