By Dale Coberly HOW MUCH INTEREST DOES SOCIAL SECURITY PAY? A reader asked what interest does Social Security pay on your “investment”? I think it is important to realize that this is not the important question about Social Security. Social Security is an insurance program and it doesn’t make any more sense to talk about […]
Lifted from comments by Fred C. Dobbs at Economist View: Supersize My Wage http://nyti.ms/1cOvtvS NYT Magazine – December 17, 2013 – ANNIE LOWREY About 20 years ago, in the midst of a recession, New Jersey decided to boost its minimum wage to $5.05 an hour from $4.25. Its neighbor to the west, Pennsylvania, chose not […]
Via Economist View comes Mark Thoma’s statement My latest column: Of Course the Safety Net Redistributes Income…That’s Why It Works: Many conservatives have attacked social insurance programs such as Social Security and Obamacare because they redistribute income from the rich to the poor, the young to the old, or from makers to takers. But there […]
I have been waiting for the Fed to reverse its loose monetary policy. I am in total favor of it. A move to $75 billion per month is a well balanced decision. They waited too long and they are way behind the curve but tapering has finally started. Good to see it.
In light of some of the comments to my post yesterday arguing that that the real reason that healthcare insurance companies are now madly encouraging Obamacare enrollment is fear of a pro-public-option or pro-single-payer political juggernaut, I want to make clear that by single-payer I do not mean Medicare-for-all. Single-payer would be, in essence, “the […]
An article came out in the WSJ web site called Lenders Look to Fed Tapering to Lift Business Borrowing. One would think that tapering would discourage borrowing. Yet, we are in a situation where long-term low interest rates suppress borrowing. Here is the key line from the article referring to tapering… “Such a move would […]
The post is too good to excerpt so just go read it. To edit ruthlessly 1. The business cycle is not symmetric. [skip] 2. As much as the NBER methodology emphasizes the notion of recessions (which, by the way, is asymmetric in nature), most academic research is produced around models where small and frequent shocks […]
From the Economic Populist: The Latest Never Ending Adventures in Corporatism Via the TPP – Wikileaks has published more secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement documents, revealing more and more how the United States represents large corporations and not the citizens of the nation. The Huffington Post published a large front page story is on the Trans-Pacific […]
I’ve expected this for some time, and here it is: The Wall Street Journal reports that insurance companies are set to unleash hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising to entice potential customers on to the exchanges created by Obamacare. As the Journal puts it: Insurers … are capitalizing on an unprecedented opportunity in a […]
The future of monetary policy is troubling. I present a video to explain. (Part 4 of a series on the journey of the Fed rate from 1978 to the present.) Since the 1960’s, the Fed rate has consistently reacted to the natural level of real GDP (in terms of labor and capital utilization). Effective demand […]