Back in October, I posted that Elon Musk’s claim that he could cut $2 trillion from the federal budget showed he couldn’t do arithmetic. Evidently, Elon has finally acknowledged this, but he tries to make a virtue of necessity: “Elon Musk has walked back his previous claim that he could cut at least $2 trillion […]
America’s Forgotten Generation (of Prosperity) – by Paul Krugman Krugman Wonks Out How and why the postwar boom got memory-holed. So the don’t-know-much-about-history gang are at it again, asserting that the Gilded Age was an era of unique prosperity. I wasn’t planning on another post today, but this really needs addressing in a short note. […]
Homeownership has been an issue in the US. This is mostly because of the rising prices, interest rates, and increasing property taxes, etc. Interest rates can stop you dead in your tracks even with a good income. If you do not put 20% down, they make force you to take out mgt. insurance and you […]
Fury at Private Power Giants as Puerto Rico Suffers New Year’s Eve Blackout, Common Dreams The latest failure of the Puerto Rico privatized power grid on Tuesday plunged much of the island into a blackout on New Year’s Eve, sparking fresh anger toward the system’s for-profit operators and political leaders who sold off the U.S. territory’s public […]
Under Biden, the IRS budget was significantly increased a couple years ago. Part of that increase was to fund the policing of tax returns, especially among the wealthy. According to Charles Rettig, an IRS commissioner appointed by Trump, the United States is losing $1 trillion in unpaid taxes every year. In the past two years, […]
Not too much to say here. They did vote on the WEP and the GPO. They passed it. I get the impression the politicians are going to take advantage of the elderly and not pay more into the SS Fund. A few years back it was easy enough to fix with a tweak of an […]
It is not spending causing the issues as the young Trump boasts. It is the tax cuts which have imbalanced credits to debits causing the deficits. What Republican’s promised would happen, failed to happen. The 2017 tax cuts did not stimulate the economy enough (not at all) to balance out spending to receipts. Since the […]
If current trends and policy continue, the Social Security Trust fund will be exhausted in the early 2030s and payments will drop by about 22%. If Trump has his way and income taxes are lifted on SS payments, the Trust Fund will be exhausted a year or two earlier and payments are projected to drop […]
I have a reflexive skepticism about fads. While AI isn’t exactly a fad, the relentless promotion by the media of an AI future certainly looks faddish to me. That said, there’s no question that AI is making inroads into data analysis. Watson can already read radiological images more accurately than trained radiologists. AI is transforming […]
An American First. It’s the Law in WA: Accrued Holding Gains are Income – by Steve Roth originally posted at Wealth Economics Excluding these massive “economic flows” from income simply doesn’t make any sense, in basic accounting terms. Starting with the 2022 tax year, Washington State implemented a first-in-the-nation (7%) tax on accrued holding gains […]