I have never gotten a satisfactory answer to this question. I have posed it to very prominant people on both sides of Social Security only to have it dismissed by the privatizer and answered by the SS supporter in a way that went over my head. But it is not crazy talk, between 1997 and […]

I’m going to try a Cactus post and look at the Bush record. On 11 June 2004 Milton Friedman published an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal Editorial page called Freedom’s Friend. In the article he used the number of pages in the Federal Register each year as a measure of government interference in […]

OMB Watch lists some main items needing passing to continue the government, and indicates progress through the Congressional approval maze. This is only a partial list of course, and just a beginning for YOU as a congress critter to analyze. The challenge is to begin to choose how to bring the budget out of the […]

In November of 2004 Dean Baker issued his ‘No Economist/Policy Analyst Left Behind’ challenge. In it he asked people to show that they could produce the 6.5% return on stocks assumed by the Council of Economic Advisors under the actual economic projections of the Intermediate Cost alternative. (Oddly enough for an open and public challenge […]

What is it with normally reasonable republicans that when it comes to the Windfall Profits Tax that makes them become completely unreasonable and accept the republican spin machine bull about it. I keep seeing at various blogs the claim that the 1980s windfall profits tax caused oil production to fall when the facts clearly show […]

Much has been written on the foundering and significance of the Doha rounds of talks, and how the agricultural policies of nations was the stumbling block. However, notice Mode 4. Center for Policy Reseach and Mode 4 India proposed a policy of treating trade services as commodiities, not people, and the US team agreed. Hence […]

Health Beat Blog also has an opinion on how far Big Pharma has gone on producing research and how it is used. When do you say innovation needs to be funded differently in the drug business, and when does advertising become propaganda, and the coercion of the government protecting copyrights and patents need amending. It […]

In the course of the two posts on Backwards Transfers (XXXVI & XXXVII) it became clear that even experts had a somewhat confused concept of the relation of past and future as it comes to Social Security finance. So this post will attempt to add some clarity. Social Security is by design a Pay/Go system […]

The war on the working class* continues unabatedBy Kathy G. Proving once again why the Wall Street Journal should be required reading for all good lefties, today the paper reports on yet another way corporate America has found to screw the wage slaves among us. As the Journal explains, companies are using our pension funds […]