The employment report was better than expected as Sandy apparently did not have the widely expected negative impact. But the data essentially shows that the recent trend of weak employment continued as payrolls expanded some 146,000 and the household survey showed a -122,00 drop. Private payrolls expanded some 147,00 as government employment fell about 1,000. […]
What would Social Security look like if it met all current law requirements for ‘solvency’? Well unfortunately we have to start with the most eye-glazing opening ever deployed: ‘first lets define our terms’. To which I would add ‘within an artificial economic model’. Because real life is messy, particularly right now, and that introduces unnecessary […]
David Warsh, a journalistist covering economics issues, takes a look at Warren Buffet’s op ed at Economic Principals. The fiscal cliff negotiation is no better than a skirmish in what promises to be an epic ten-year struggle to achieve a new fiscal compact. For evidence of that, consider Warren Buffett’s entry into the debate last […]
‘It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice,’ Coase writes in HBR, ‘ignoring the influences of society, history, culture, and politics on the working of the economy.’ (By ‘choice,’ he means ever more complex versions of price and demand curves.) U Chicago, my daughter’s college, sends me interesting emails […]
Having hopefully gotten some attention with THAT post title, let me start dispelling some misconceptions and myths about the Social Security Trust Funds, some innocent and some disseminated with malice aforethought. A common narrative among the left is that the Social Security Trust Funds were established after the Greenspan Commission in 1983 to one) pre-fund […]
by Barkley Rosser from Econospeak “The young will pay more and get less.” More Nonsense from Robert Samuelson Our old friend, Dean Baker at Beat the Press, does a good job of taking apart yet another screed by the execrable Robert J. Samuelson, faux economist for WaPo, whining about why nobody is jumping on board […]
by Linda Beale Republican “fiscal cliff” proposal House republican leaders have sent a letter to President Obama with their “fiscal cliff” proposal, which the Republicans cast as a “fair middle ground” and a “balanced framework for averting the fiscal cliff.” Id. Republicans object that the administrative proposal has is unbalanced, because it has “four times […]
by David Zetland Water, human rights and government failure I wrote a paper on a human right to water several years ago,* in which I made the point (using data!) that laws supporting a human right to water are unlikely to work in countries where the rule of law is weak.** But what about places […]
Following up on my last post, I actually think that there are two possible explanations for the “Fed Credibility” argument’s wide deployment, both hinted at in Simon’s response to my comment: I think the credibility argument is really about the underlying motives of the policymakers, rather than their abilities. However I also think that argument […]
For once a short post, inspired by Simon Wren’s suggestion that the Fed should allow (encourage) a temporary rise in wage inflation. (The merits of such a policy being obvious to many of us given the current virtues of some extra inflation, and past decades’ wage trends.) I’ve never understood the credibility danger of the […]