Rick Santorum and Lindsey Graham plan to join James DeMint to propose that we place the Social Security surpluses into personal retirement accounts. Steve Soto provides a very nice discussion of this “new approach”. All I can add is the observation that we have seen this tired old proposal many times.
AB reader Homer Simpson recently suggested we check out We Need a Bigger Budget Deficit by William Vickrey (1914-1996). Vickrey’s writings included Agenda for Progressive Taxation (his dissertation) and Public Economics (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Vickrey and James Mirlees were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1996 for their contributions to the theory […]
Joel Kurtzman begins his case for a strong dollar with: Since 1971, the dollar has had no real-world backing other than the level of confidence the rest of the world puts in the United States and in its future. As I thought he might be about to make a case for a return to the […]
Is the title of the latest from Jack Kemp: The historical record couldn’t be clearer. The Kennedy tax-rate reductions that triggered the prosperity of the 1960s and produced a windfall of government revenues indeed ended up helping balance the budget in 1964-65. Federal revenues doubled in the 1980s as a result of the Reagan tax-rate […]
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes was labeled one of the ten most harmful books over the past two centuries by this group of folks who likely never read the book. Yet, its core thesis that an economy can fall below full employment has certainly received a lot of […]
A week before the Bush v. Gore election, Stephen Moore and Art Laffer wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that endorsed George W. Bush. I didn’t mind the endorsement as much as the mendacity of this op-ed as it tried to convince the reader that the 1981 tax cut increased economic growth. The truth is […]
The Euro has weakened substantially against the dollar over the last few months. Probably the two main reasons are the weak economies of many European Union countries and the recent failure of the EU Constitution. Still, the Euro is significantly stronger than a few years ago. Click on graphs for larger images. Although there are […]
Has Ron Scherer of the Christian Science Monitor been reading Angrybear? An increasing part of production costs in America comes from the price of promises … Now, even with the economy far from a recession, the cost of these promises is becoming a drag. On Tuesday, the size of the drag became more apparent for […]
The Heritage Foundation lists Tim Kane as its expert on labor economics. Fox News shows once again that “fair and balanced” reporting means Bush cheerleading: Leave aside the fact that jobs are only one of the measures of economic performance. The rapid growth rate in GDP, stable inflation, a housing boom, and world-beating productivity growth […]
The latest addition to the “Topics” archive in the left panel is a collection of our posts on the housing market and the possibility (likelihood?) that we’re currently in a bubble, or perhaps a set of regional bubbles. Most, though not all, of the posts are by our valued Monday contributor from Calculated Risk. AB