I spend a good deal of time talking about ‘Nothing’ as a plan for Social Security. You can make an excellent numeric case for ‘Nothing’ in the short run VIII: Calculating the Cost of Inactivity and you can make a reasonable economic case for ‘Nothing’ in the long run II: The Shape of Low Cost. […]

Poblan Unico jamás será vencido Extremely regular readers of AngryBear will have noticed that I became a guest contributor a while ago. Then I vanished. The reason is that I have become obsessed with Presidential Polling and don’t have much original to say about it. A dialog from last night between me and my 11 […]

Lessons from Italy and Australia by One Salient Oversight Statements:———————–1. Together, the amount of money the Italian government spends on debtservicing (interest plus paying back principal) is €263,663 million. Now let’s put that number in perspective. €263,663 million represents a whopping 41.2% of the Italian government’sspending in 2007. According to the same document, Italy’s GDP […]

by rdan Lifted from comments cactus style, by k harris. A public infrastructure spending binge is likely to require lots of petroleum products. This is not a deadly criticism, but is is an issue that could produce a lot of “leakage”. We could offset that, either concurrently or subsequently. Spending a ton of money modernizing […]

The NYT has a long article that MG and spencer mention is worth a careful look…perhaps a post or two. The quote I pulled from the article is the immediate political concern as well as the message that economic arguments need a modern cast to them given our “reality” of stagnant overall income for most […]

Mother Jones has an interactive map on the numbers of military troops over the world from 1950 to 2007. It is of course a map of growth to date.

Lifted from Econbrowser by Menzie Chinn Drilling Offshore to Affect World Oil Prices… and Other Tales from the Iraq-Pakistan Border Various individuals have argued for drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) as a means to affect the price of oil. This is true despite this recent assessment by the Department of Energy’s Energy Information […]

Updated Long-Term Projections for Social Security Andrew Biggs in Treatment of uncertainty in new CBO Social Security projections directs our attention to the new release from the Congressional Budget Office. I don’t tend to focus on CBO projections precisely because they are more optimistic than the Trustees’, I don’t want to open the door to […]