Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

BW on Soc Sec V: What does Lenin have to do with this?

Cosi made some excellent analysis of the budget implications in the last comment thread, then raised only to drop the issue of motive for privatizers. So I want to try a crack at it here. It is clear to me that most of the people who are pushing privatization are fundamentally opposed to Social Democratic […]

Fragile…

Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.” Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital. As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it […]

BW on Soc Sec IV: A History Lesson

A blast from the past. The first Report I downloaded was the 1997. It didn’t report on Productivity, instead the lead number was Real GDP. So we will run with that. What were the numbers under Intermediate Cost?:1997: 2.5%1998-2006 2.0%2010 1.8%2020 1.3%Hecuva job! A median prediction of a permanent 48% slowdown in growth rate by […]

Swiss Bank UBS settles losses to towns

The Dailey New Transcript reports: Dedham Town administrator William Keegan says a $120,000 settlement Dedham will receive from Swiss bank UBS for an investment that failed will cover the town’s costs in that deal, but no more. Nineteen Massachusetts municipal governments and public agencies will recover more than $35 million from UBS in the settlement […]

Not sure of this cartoon either…

Is he talking CPI substitution and quality of goods, or just the difference in work ethic, or elimination of jobs by technology? Or is this BW explaining the intricacy of modern economic forcasting with Social Security? Or a Vermont economist passing down wisdom?

Oil Price Controls

All the discussion about a holiday from the federal tax on gasoline this summer has brought all kinds of comments out of the woodwork about how government interference in markets, and especially the 1970s oil price controls and windfall profit tax prevented private companies from investing. Such comments seem to start out with some sort […]

BW on Soc Sec III: The Numbers of Intermediate Cost

For today let’s have less meta and more data. The key economic and demographic tables are V.A1 ‘Principal Demographic Assumptions’, V.B1 ‘Principal Economic Assumptions’ and V.B2 ‘Additional Economic Factors’ all of which are available in the 2008 Social Security Report’s List of Tables as are the tables showing numeric outcomes in both inflation adjusted Constant […]

Two Things Someone Else Needs to Discuss

Since I’m trying to cut a 24-page paper down closer to 15 today, I’ll leave the Heavy Lifting to other. But two things probably should be discussed (or at least noted) here: Brad DeLong appears (to me) to confuse perceiving a move from Democratic Republic to Empire—and therefore away from any Competitive Advantage for the […]

Not sure what the cartoon is about…

Is this about devaluation and inflation of the US dollar? Or is it about gas prices and robbers? Or just commodities as the new medium of exchange (slosh is the technical term I believe) of value? As if life is not hard enough to interpret. Update: Just a little bit of rhetorical fluff on my […]