History: How the US Grew the Military Industrial Complex. The size of the US national security (war) machine is not related to threats to the nation nor any reasonable or efficient response to those wildly inflated threats. Threats are overstated and the solution to the fake insecurity is always the most expensive and profitable, neither […]

Yes. This has been another version of Simple Answers to Simple Questions. Although, as some wag once noted, once is history, twice is parody, but the third time is a trend.

Tom Dispatch has an opinion piece on something we have not really considered. The US military has a huge appetite for oil and products. We have not quantified this on the blog. The Bush Administration I suppose has not asked for a volume discount for oil or services, but it made me curious… Every day, […]

The Trustees Report intermediate projection for Medicare costs in 2085 is about 11% of payroll. This is on a bigger payroll than Social Security because currently the Medicare tax is not capped. (If I were a rich person and looking at that uncapped Medicare tax, I’d be lobbying for a cap and a slightly larger […]

Mark Duggan and Fiona Scott Morton published a paper at NBER with this general conclusion: Using data on product-specific prices and quantities sold in each year in the U.S., our findings indicate that Part D substantially lowered the average price and increased the total utilization of prescription drugs by Medicare recipients. Our results further suggest […]

In the last post and particularly in comments there was some discussion of Present Value more fancifully described as Infinite Future Horizon in relation to Social Security solvency. Which raised the question: Why should current workers care about the interests of retirees in year 2041 or indeed 2086? as opposed to say the interests of […]

Here at Sustainability Institute, we develop computer simulation models to investigate such issues. Over the past couple of years we’ve worked with economists and farm leaders to model the corn economy. The insights are sobering. For the past several decades, despite changes in Congress, different presidents, and new farm bills, net income from farm sales […]

Public Agenda, is calling for submissions for another of their blog carnivals, this time on Medicare. If you want to submit an entry, we can put it up here at Angry Bear today.

Spatial Price Index Despite the importance of the CPI and all the discussion about it one of the things we do not have is data to compare the price of living in one city or state as compared to another.Well the Federal statisticians are working on it and the BEA just published a working paper […]

Tom’s working on explaining Savings 101, so this is specifically to deal with the “issue with” retirement accounts. Via Lawrence G. Lux, we find the A.P. (and maybe the NYT) highlighting a “study” by an investment management firm that “discovers” problems with the way people manage their 401(k)s: Some of the diversification problems stemmed from […]