After 10 days scurrying around the Shanghai, China area; I am now sitting in Bangkok, Thailand and reading more of the news. Such is the life of a Global Purchasing Manager dealing with automotive and industrial. I have been reading and watching the typical media reporting about the PPACA while drinking my green tea. Greg […]

Lifted from reader rjs newletter: Wage Statistics Show The Rich Get Richer Again in 2012 Harsher cuts are on their way “Mommy, take us home and we will never ask for food again NYC Food Bank Head: 40% Of Veterans Need Food Assistance  Too Much Of Too Little Synopsis below the fold:

The Grey Matter Blog does a nice little bar chart on insurance profitability; “Socialist” Obamacare a boon to insurance companies” since the passage of the PPACA in 2010. I gotta say this is nothing like what I would have expected to happen; but, I have to acknowledge my other blogger-foil’s told-you-so remarks to me repeatedly. […]

Today, the House of Representatives will take up GOP Rep. Fred Upton’s proposal to ”fix” Obamacare by undermining it, and the vote is being widely cast on a referendum on whether Dems will continue distancing themselves from the law. Meanwhile Senate Dems are also still considering fixes of their own that could undermine it, though […]

Columbia U. Conference Shows Incentives Pervasive but Controls Work  Day one of the Columbia International Investment Conference in New York has concluded, and the takeaways are very clear. The topic is investment incentives, prompted by Louise Story’s “United States of Subsides” series last December. Story moderated panel 1, which covered the pervasiveness of subsidies. How […]

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk points us to some apparent better news State and local government austerity is over I think most of the recession related state and local government layoffs are over, and it appears state and local government employment has bottomed.  Of course Federal government layoffs are ongoing, but it appears state and local […]

Via Business Insider: While campaigning for President in 2008, candidate Barack Obama promised to not alter the way that cost of living adjustments were calculated for Social Security, a policy that is now a key feature of his 2014 White House budget. Addressing the AARP in September 2008, then-Senator Obama drew a major contrast between his […]

What the —! Well it occured to me, and not for the first time, that a lot of people really don’t understand my Social Security project and particularly what even some of my friends and allies think is a narrow focus on the nuts, bolts and numbers of Social Security financial reporting. It seems to […]

Lets play a game. The ultimate point of the game is to understand certain aspects of Social Security but to keep complications from creeping in too early (wait for later parts) we are going to start with simple game play on a board far, far away. In fact on distant yet oddly Earth-like Planet Elsinore. […]

Previously, I had written on Fair Market Value and its use by the CBO’s Douglas Elmendorf to rate the risk of Student Loans as advocated by both The New America Foundation and the Heritage Foundation. A rebuttal answer to a partisan CBO, the right-leaning New America Foundation, and the conservative Heritage Foundation on the usage […]