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

Reposted from Jan. 2018: Social Security and conversation

(Dan here…Social Security is an issue that seems to generate a lot of firm beliefs and passion, as witness recent threads.  It is rare that people refer to actuary material.  On the other sides of the issue are people like Andrew Biggs, who is knowledgeable and smart in his arguments.  I am posting this as […]

Media Continues VSP Story On Social Security

Media Continues VSP Story On Social Security Here we go again.  We have arrived at the time for the release of the annual Social Security Administration (SSA) report.  It got the usual headlines across the media, that the SSA will “run out of money” in 2034. Most of the stories played it all scary, although […]

SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTEES REPORT OUT TODAY… or was it yesterday?

by Dale Coberly SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTEES REPORT OUT TODAYor was it yesterday? Ho Hum.  The 2019 Social Security Trustees Report was released yesterday. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget published its usual half truths (also known as “lies”):. “We are all going to die!” The Reporters and Columnists Who Cover Them ™ reported the […]

Nailed it!

Nailed it! Three weeks ago I wrote No, the Meuller report ***DID NOT*** “find no collusion!” in which I lambasted and parsed Barr’s conclusory snippet of the Mueller report, to wit, that “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” I pointed […]

That One Sentence

That One Sentence On March 25, Matt Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone: On Sunday, Attorney General William Barr sent a letter to Congress, summarizing the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The most telling section, quoted directly from Mueller’s report, read: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or […]

What Mueller Wrote about Obstruction

Josh Marshall explains it very well here. Mueller definitely did not write that he did not find proof without reasonable doubt that the President is a criminal. I want to explain it in a way which is not so good, in fact bad, basically malicious, too petty to be evil. Mueller clearly wrote that he […]

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child

UN Convention on the Rights of the Child After Peter Dorman’s latest post this seems appropriate to follow up.  Very recently I was at a talk where somebody spoke on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.  A theme of the talk was how few Americans know about this UN Convention while […]

Unreading Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance”

William S. Lind’s cultural Marxism conspiracy theory boils down to the claim that in his essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse “called for tolerance for all ideas and viewpoints coming from the left and intolerance of all ideas and viewpoints coming from the right” and that college administrators and professors have put Marcuse’s proposal into practice […]