by Dale Coberly For some time now the Social Security Trustees have been reporting in the “media” using scare tactics like this: “Social Security Going Broke Sooner Than We Thought! Faces [fill in the blank] Trillion Dollar Deficit!” And I have tried to explain that what those numbers mean is that we need to raise […]
Via Demos comes this note on Our enormous retirment subsidies to the rich: …it behooves us to collectively recall just how much money the federal government is already devoting to subsidizing private retirement accounts. Those in policy circles tend to be aware of this stuff, but it largely escapes the glare of everyone else. Each […]
Lifted from commnents in open thread in resonse to Tom Coburn’s comments on SSDI, by ilsm: Going after SSDI scalawags. The congress just added 4 more F-35 to the 2015 buy than Obama asked for. The F-35 is currently grounded because the engines tend to blow up and catch fire when […]
Reduction in face to face services Summary–Don’t worry, people! We not going to take away all your local SSA offices. Perish the thought! We’re just going to “consolidate” some to provide “better service.” Any thought given to asking for more money to keep current system and improve it? Naw, wouldn’t want to raise anyone in […]
Paul Krugman has two sentences on the money in this article on Kansas, ALEC, and failed economics: The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people. … But the effect won’t last long, because faith in tax-cut magic isn’t about […]
I haven’t read the opinions, concurrence, or dissents in either Hobby Lobby or Harris v. Quinn, so these comments are based on news summaries and quick commentaries by others. But the biggest surprise in Hobby Lobby, I think, is the express approval, in the opinion and in Kennedy’s concurrence, of HHS’s on-the-fly setup devised in […]
Yves Smith linked this morning on her Naked Capital blog to my post from yesterday called “The Secretive Democracy Alliance’s Secret Is Out: Some of its members are elitist, racist and self-serving,” and added a comment about it: Helpful, but does not follow the logic to the obvious conclusion. Why is the Dem apparatus harping […]
Clarification appended below. —- [David] Brock, a former “right-wing hit-man”-turned-top-big-money-Democratic-operative, is part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to convince donors it’s OK to attack the Koch brothers for spending millions of dollars while doing the exact same thing for the left. “You’re not in this room today trying to figure out how to rig the game […]
by New Deal democrat at Bonddad blog Re-posted with author’s permission. Greg Mankiw: as duteous to the vices of plutocracy as badness would require There is a drastic moral difference between those who write garbage analysis because they are mistaken, and those who write garbage analysis that is loathesome. Greg Mankiw embarrasses Harvard with an […]
Simon-Wren Lewis at Mainly Macro is on target with the term ‘privatization’ as a way to ‘save’ money and add ‘efficiency’. Of course no slogan making the claim can begin with ‘it depends…’: Privatisation and government debt Possibly the worst argument for privatizing part of the public sector is a supposed ‘need’ to reduce public […]