In his New York Times oped, Dr. Varian clearly distinguishes between the solvency issue facing the Trust Fund and the risk-return choices individuals might rationally make with their retirement portfolios. Alas, Donald Luskin mischaracterizes what Dr. Varian said in order to launch another pointless personal attack as Luskin shows how little he knows about financial […]
Jesse Taylor has been reading some of the latest from the free lunch supply-siders so we don’t have to. Shorter Jesse: last year’s increase in real GDP and tax revenues only partially makes up for the losses in the earlier part of Bush’s first term. But I want to pick up on this from Alan […]
The Bush administration acheived one of its goals today: North Korea on Thursday declared itself a de facto nuclear power, claiming in its strongest terms to date that it had “manufactured nuclear weapons” to defend itself from the United States and saying it would withdraw indefinitely from international disarmament talks. A self-proclaimed nuclear North Korea […]
Cesar Conda’s guest oped makes a point that I can almost agree with: Personal-Account Myths: They’re not the speculative vehicles Democrats want you to think they are… Like the TSP, personal retirement accounts would be invested in a conservative mix of broadly diversified bond and stock funds. Let’s be clear – a shift from a […]
Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley explains why his bearishness on China’s property market has become difficult to, er… bear: “I lost 20% because of you,” a schoolmate in Shanghai screamed at me. “I had to hire several guys to line up for seven days and seven nights to buy three flats last month.” Last October, […]
In response to the news (pointed out by AB below) that the actual cost of the Bush administration’s vaunted Medicare drug benefit will be far more than they first admitted, Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel states the obvious: “The new cost estimate destroys the credibility of the Bush administration. Officials were so far off in estimating […]
New White House Estimate Lifts Drug Benefit Cost to $720 Billion WASHINGTON, Feb. 8 – The Bush administration offered a new estimate of the cost of the Medicare drug benefit on Tuesday, saying it would cost $720 billion in the next 10 years. That is much more than the $400 billion Congress assumed when it […]
He writes over at their Social Security blog “Club for Growth Rejects Investing Soc. Sec. Funds in Stocks” Because that statement is completely false, whoever wrote it clearly has lazy fact-checking skills. Well, he got my title right but he forgot to read the first sentence of my post. Notice I challenged readers to see […]
David Hogberg has made some rather outrageous claims on this alleged Social Security crisis but Yes, Virgina, It’s a Crisis is interesting: One might think that a system whose surplus will begin declining in 2009, that will begin taking in less in taxes than it pays out in benefits in 2018, and will cost taxpayers […]
A proposal from David Brooks is labeled back door privatization by Noam Scheiber. Brooks writes: We could start by indexing Social Security benefits to prices, not wages, so the system wouldn’t go broke. Then we could give everybody under a certain age KidSave accounts. Scheiber responds: So, if I’m understanding this correctly, we’d create private […]