Over at Plain Blog, an anonymous wing nut made this off-topic comment. Now, yes, Bill Clinton and his 2000 federal spending level of 18% of GDP doesn’t put him on the fringe, which makes it surprising that you lefties are celebrating him, even as you hysterically condemn anybody who resists the Left’s current massive spending […]

Joe Gagnon has a nice blog which allows comments only by e-mail.  He has a proposal in two parts Next week the Fed should promise to hold the prime mortgage rate below 3 percent for at least 12 months. It can do this by unlimited purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities. By giving people a fixed […]

(Dan here…Lifted from Robert’s thoughts) Robert writes: Omigod Sept 4 2012 really is opposites day.  Ezra Klein made an incorrect claim of fact about health care financing.  He wrote: But I’m not going to make that argument. I’m on-record saying that trust-fund accounting is by and large a ridiculous way to look at the federal […]

From Tax Prof blog: Tax Court Rejects Geithner/Turbo Tax Defense Bartlett v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2012-254 (Sept. 4, 2012): Petitioner admits that her income was misreported and that her taxable income was underreported. She maintains that she reported all of her income and that the mistakes made were “honest mistakes” resulting from her lack of […]

by Dale Coberly (Dan here…Dale Coberly replies to this article (Is it Becoming Too Late to Fix Social Security’s Finances?) by Charles Blahous). Blahous, You do not seem to grasp how small “4% of the tax base” is,  or how very reasonable it would be to pay that 4% for a longer, richer retirement, out […]

I am generally skeptical about the importance of further QE in the USA, but I am definitely not skeptical about the effectiveness of the the leaked European Central Bank plan to purchase unlimited amounts of European Government debt.  The reason is that there are government bonds over here which terrify investors.  That means that the […]

by Maggie Mahar    (The author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much (Harper/Collins 2006), Mahar also served as the co-writer of the documentary, Money-Driven Medicine (2009), directed by Andrew Fredericks and produced by Alex Gibney.Before she began writing about health care, Mahar was a financial journalist and wrote for Barron’s, […]

Okay, more jargon. But important jargon because the policy proposals are starting from different baselines themselves defined by this jargon. So while some of the following is basic, it is equally a rhetorical (in the classical definition) baseline. Under current Social Security law future benefits are set by a formula. For a given individual this […]

by Linda Beale Romney and Private Equity’s Questionable Schemes for Paying Very Little Tax Presumably any American who wants to be informed is aware that GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney‘s claim to business acumen resides in his experience at a private equity firm that made much of its money by ramping up debt at purchased […]