Videos below the fold. I caught Edward Kleinbard the other morning on Cspan. He is a professor of law and business at USC and a fellow at the Century Foundation. His book: We are better than this: How Government Should Spend our Money. If you google his name, articles will come up from October 2014. […]
According to exit polls the leftist party Syriza clearly won the Greek elections Two exit polls show Syriza with a 12.5 percentage point lead over nearest party, New Demoracy. update a bit more: One poll suggested Syriza took 35.5% of the votes, and the other suggested it took 39.5%, well ahead of the ruling New […]
A month late, I learn from brilliant economist Simon Wren-Lewis about the 3.5 year late revelation of the utter contempt that then European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet had for Democracy. I hand the microphone over to brilliant economist Paul DeGrauwe The ECB’s letter to the Spanish government is not the only one the ECB […]
Who or what is ‘Social Security Defender’? Well it is basically a G-mail account controlled by me: socsec.defender@gmail.com . Which is kind of pretentious and vainglorious on my part but does allow a platform for some attached products including the blog Social Security Defender and a Google Drive. In which as an experiment I have […]
Table V.B2: Additional Economic Assumptions Well I am back and working on a new project in anticipation of the release of the 2015 Report this late Spring. The project involves extracting the Tables and Figures from the Social Security Trustees Report, in this case the 2014, and having them individually web accessible as spreadsheeets or […]
PGL at Econospeak points us to declining expenditures for education: …Bill McBride has been leading the discussion on state fiscal austerity including this from a few months ago: the public sector has declined significantly since Mr. Obama took office (down 657,000 jobs). These job losses have mostly been at the state and local level, but more recently at […]
Yves Smith points us to additional 114th Congress changes: How the Republican Campaign to Gut Dodd Frank is a Huge Gimmie to Banks and Private Equity Funds The Republicans have been quick and shameless in using their control of both houses to try to crank up the financial services pork machine into overtime operation. The […]
Via CBS news Mark Thoma addresses some coming issues in Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Tax Committee in Do tax cuts pay for themselves? Now that Republicans have taken control of the House and Senate, they are pushing to change how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Tax Committee (JTC) evaluate tax […]
Via Washington Post‘s Phillip Bump comes some interesting graphs on the gender, race, and religious composition of our new Congress: The 114th Congress, which gets to “work” on Tuesday, is one of the most diverse in American history…
Dan here…Several liberal friends reacted viscerally to the beheadings by ISIS, an appropriate response of anger and horror. It is the simplicity of viewpoint and the conclusions drawn that bother me. by Linda Beale from 2010… Torture, it’s the economy stupid