(hat tip rjs)

Update: spelling corrected in title. I heard and then went to look see that Caterpillar is working hard to control it’s costs. “Despite earning a record $4.9 billion profit last year and projecting even better results for 2012, the company is insisting on a six-year wage freeze and a pension freeze for most of the […]

I think Thomas Jefferson would have said the more speech, the better.  That’s what the First Amendment is all about. So long as the people know where the speech is coming from. … You are entitled to know where the speech is coming from — you know, information as to who contributed what. — Justice […]

Via Toms Dispatch Tomgram: Noam Chomsky, The Great Charter, Its Fate, and Ours…Posted by Noam Chomsky comes this essay on our long traditions in the battle of the commons and ‘privatization’.   It is an interesting read.   (hat tip Dale)

Via David Zetland’s Aguanomics. I continue to follow David’s thinking on how to plan, price, and ultimately use water in a 21st century manner. He offers interesting notions on the roles of government/pricing (and markets). There is currently big bucks involved and only to grow in importance and critical decisions to be made. Water is […]

Peter Dorman at Econospeak discusses problems with microfoundations, and in a more thorough paper at Association Economique politique explores the Political Econonomic Outlook for Capitalism. Mark Thoma had pointed to this Business/behavioral science can help guide economic-policy view notion of looking at incentives in an empirical way.

The US Trade Representative website posts: The next negotiating round of the Trans-Pacific Partnership will take place in Leesburg, Virginia from September 6-15, 2012. As in the past, USTR will be hosting a Direct Stakeholder Engagement event to provide stakeholders the opportunity to speak directly and one-on-one with negotiators, raise questions, and share their views […]

Social Security arithmetic isn’t hard. Tedious perhaps and with counter-intuitive results but once certain terminological obstacles are swept away not requiring advanced math skills. But oy that terminology! This post proposes to start demolishing those conceptual barriers. Social Security is considered ‘solvent’ when its ‘Trust Fund’ is in ‘actuarial balance’. The Social Security Trust Fund […]

Via New Economic Perspectives is this video from Bill Black: Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

The New York Times points us to private industry under funding for your retirement: AFTER years of poor investment returns, the pension funds of the United States’ largest companies are further behind than they have ever been. The companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 collectively reported that at the end of their most recent […]