• Since Social Security started it has always brought in more money than was spent. It contributes a surplus to the total federal budget. That’s true today and will continue for quite some time.• The extra revenue needed to make SS solid far beyond the foreseeable future (75 years) is tiny: 0.6% of GDP.• A […]
by Rebecca Wilder The ECB is Plugging Holes Today the ECB released its monthly data on monetary developments in the Euro area (EA), as measured by M3 and its components. The market usually focuses on the marketable assets portion of M3, M3-M2, as a representation of funding access – here’s an FT Alphaville post highlighting […]
In case you are not aware, Bill Moyers is back and he doing his best work to date concentrating on our the changing of the rules regarding the economy. This episode where he interviews John Reed, former Citi Bank CEO and current MIT chair is most telling as it relates to the issue of why […]
Past Angry Bear posts started in 2007, but here are four later posts 2008 and 2009: Brain injury awareness Pattern of misconduct PTSD and our military response What are we going to do now is your choice GAO report 12-154 addresses the notion that this sort of thing is being taken care of. There are […]
A while back I pointed to (and demonstrated with not very pretty pictures) Randall Wray’s rather stunning observation: every depression in American history was preceded by a large decline in nominal federal debt. And I puzzled about why this wasn’t true of our latest little…event: We saw a decline leading up to 2000, but […]
In this post, earlier today, I forgot to link to this article over at Naked Capitalism. The salient point is, that specifically for investors, spending is related exclusively to income, never to wealth. It goes on to posit that QE and monetary policy are killing demand. As Steve would say, “Go read it.”
Noam Chomsky writes on the anniversary of Howard Zinn’s death: Howard’s remarkable life and work are summarised best in his own words. His primary concern, he explained, was “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of “those great moments” that enter the historical record – a record that will be […]
I haven’t posted on Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu’s stuff, and I should have, long ago. Nick, along with Bill Gates Senior, was one of the big proponents of the Washington State high-earner income tax initiative a while back (which failed utterly, I’m sad to say). As was I, in my little way. I think […]
Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAffee have a new Kindle instant book out, Race Against the Machine, that very nicely describes the issues related to technological unemployment. It’s well-written, content-packed, cogently argued, usefully hyperlinked, and well worth the $3.99 they’re asking.But I think there’s one crucial topic they don’t address, highlighted by the following.They deliver a […]