Sandwichman at Econospeak offers a look at a piece of history: “Of Property” and the Mercantilist Fallacy “Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his […]
It’s official: President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security by replacing the program’s current inflation adjustment with the stingier “chained” Consumer Price Index. As I’ve discussed before, this risks undoing all the progress made against senior poverty since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. 25% of seniors were poor according to official poverty […]
Greg Mankiw suggests a part of the new budget proposed by President Obama affects 401k and IRA accounts. Some comment in general retirement accounts from AB starts here. Apparently, President Obama’s budget is going to include some kind of penalty for people who have accumulated more than $3 million in retirement accounts. The details are not […]
Steve Randy Waldman and Scott Sumner (plus many others, linked from Steve’s post) wade in on notions of saving and investment. (I’m endlessly amazed that the best econothinkers on the web — add Nick Rowe, Andy Harless, David Beckworth, Josh Mason, and many others to the list — constantly feel the need to think, re-think, […]
Ex Macroeconomist Noah Smith argues that it is a good thing that there are professional macroeconomists. He has two arguments 1) So does this mean that macro research is useless for policymaking? No! Not at all!! Because here’s an interesting thing about policymaking: No matter who advises the policymakers, policy is going to get made. […]
Erica Payne sent out a request for writeups from Patriotic Millionaires members, and I provided this. I hate not to re-use perfectly good copy… I live (quite well) off financial investments — no need to work any more — and my taxes every year are ridiculously, embarrassingly low. Meanwhile tens, hundreds of millions of hard […]
Matthew Yglesias riffs off my recent post, “Saving” ≠ “Saving Resources,” and there’s been quite a bit of commentary there, plus on Asymptosis and Angry Bear (plus a bit of twitter talk that I can’t figure out how to link to easily and usefully). There are a dozen things I want to discuss on the […]
What you don’t know can hurt you. I think that’s a clear lesson of some so-called trade agreements the United States has signed over the last 20 years, and illustrated further by the few that have been defeated, most notably the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from1995 […]
The headline numbers in the employment report were very weak as payroll employment rose by only 88,000 and the household survey reported a -206,000 drop in employment while the labor force fell by -496,000. The futures markets are reacting very badly. But the workweek expanded and aggregrate hours worked increased 0.3% as compared to 0.5% […]
We’ve all talked and read about the idea and practice of offshore accounting to reduce taxation. Here is an article produced by a show called Backlight. Backlight appears to be a news journal show in the idea of Frontline by a Dutch public broadcasting organization known as VPRO. This episode is titled: The Tax FreeTour. […]