Club for Growth’s Social Security blog is a useful tool for keeping up on the latest from the rightwing hacks. Case in point is the post “The Trust Fund Hoax”, which links to a couple of attempts to defend 2018 “just IOUs” yahoo-ism (and Max Sawicky is welcomed to jump in at any point as […]
Well, they don’t want the government to do this according to the latest from Andrew Roth and the Cato crowd: In today’s Washington Post, columnist William Raspberry suggests “… the president ask the Social Security Administration to sell those bonds now in its trust fund and invest the proceeds in the stock market.” The increased […]
The brand-new White House budget proposal for 2006 contains some interesting details. One of them is this: the White House is not requesting, or planning for, any reform of the AMT system in this budget. As such, it may represent a backhanded way of effectively repealing the Bush tax cuts. And yes, I’m actually taking […]
The White House has just released their budget proposal for FY2006. Bush is a tough-guy with this budget, as he himself said earlier today: It’s a budget that is a lean budget. People on both sides of the aisle have called upon the administration to submit a budget that helps meet our obligations of — […]
For the household survey types, the key number from the recent Employment Situation Summary should be the 62.4% employment-to-population rate which was unchanged. As the author of this post, I was wondering if Lawrence Kudlow might be elated that the only reason the unemployment rate fell to 5.2% was that the labor force participation rate […]
It seems their political masters wanted the CEA to say the Social Security Trust Fund will soon be bankrupt so they write: A Small Business Analogy: Consider a small business that has $750,000 in annual revenue and $1 million in annual costs, for a $250,000 annual loss. Obviously, that business would be able to stay […]
Don Luskin nitpicks himself into a corner again with another attack on Paul Krugman that also goes after Peter Orszag. He notes that Krugman argued: when you divert some of your Social Security payroll-tax dollars into a personal account of the kind that President Bush is proposing, the government is effectively making a loan to […]
From CNN: OMAHA, Nebraska (AP) – President Bush, on a campaign-style road trip to pressure recalcitrant Democrats and reluctant Republicans on a Social Security overhaul, warned Friday against “scare tactics” in the burgeoning debate. The president decried the kind of opposition campaigns now being waged against his proposals, saying they mislead seniors into thinking they […]
Jobs were created in January on net, but not as many as one might have wished for, according to the BLS: Nonfarm payroll employment increased by 146,000 in January and the unemployment rate decreased to 5.2 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Job growth continued in several […]
As posed by Josh Marshall: The Social Security Trust Fund now has accumulated roughly $1.8 trillion worth of US Treasury bonds. That total debt of the United States government is, if memory serves, just over $7 trillion. US Treasury bonds are owned by Americans, foreigners, individuals, pension funds, everybody under the sun. Most of the […]