Let me follow up on my post from yesterday with one more chart. The problem with the US’s fiscal situation is not the fact that the federal government is running a budget deficit today. The problem is that it will run massive deficits as far as the eye can see into the future, even assuming […]

In the wake of Bush’s appointment of Josh Bolton (Mr. “There is no United Nations… When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow”) to the position of US ambassador to the UN, the latest Bush appointment to an important multinational body seems only fitting: WASHINGTON – President Bush will recommend that Defense Deputy […]

The BEA reported on the US’s current account deficit for 2004. And the winner is… $666 billion, or 5.7% of GDP: The U.S. current-account deficit–the combined balances on trade in goods and services, income, and net unilateral current transfers–increased to $665.9 billion in 2004 from $530.7 billion in 2003. An increase in the deficit on […]

Last week, I plugged a paper on Social Security by a professor at the University of Oregon, Mark Thoma. As it turns out, he also has a blog — take a look. And while I’m plugging economists’ blogs, see also Calculated Risk, which may be a bit to the right of Angry Bear, but is […]

Halliburton: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Military auditors still have “major” unresolved issues with Halliburton, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, a day after Democratic congressmen released an audit questioning $108 million in costs by the contractor. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the audit, which found $108 million in questionable fuel delivery costs in Iraq by Halliburton unit Kellogg […]

I have tried to stay away from the term “garbage” in reference to Dr. Greenspan but today’s (Ides of March) Senate hackery went way too far: At present, the Social Security trustees estimate the unfunded liability over the indefinite future to be $10.4 trillion. The shortfall in Medicare is calculated at several multiples of the […]

As I suggested earlier, Greenspan is spouting more garbage when he claims that his support for the Bush tax cuts was justified given the projections of the budget surplus at the time. Greenspan’s deliberate implication is that the US’s budget deficits are the result of bad budgetary forecasts, not the tax cuts. That is simply […]

I finally read something from Stephen Moore worth quoting: As former Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacoca once declared, any CEO who tried this with a private firm’s pension fund would be thrown in jail. Of course, this was Lee Iacoca’s line and Stephen does not really go after his accomplice in their Soc. Sec. scam. But […]

No, Mr. Chairman. We were not all wrong: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) sparred today at a congressional hearing over whether Greenspan deserves some blame for helping to create the federal budget deficits that he regularly deplores. Greenspan said today, “we were all wrong,” in early 2001 when government […]

David Malpass opens his NRO oped by noting Alan Greenspan’s “warnings on the deficit situation”, but then writes: In a good turn of events, however, the recently passed House and Senate budget resolutions include reconciliation instructions requesting tax-cut legislation in 2005 … Indeed, a joint House and Senate budget that includes tax-cut funding would be […]