Andrew Olmsted may think I’m kind but I’m beginning to wonder if Andrew gets Social Security at all: …while PGL is kind enough to suggest that my comment is not as bizarre as he might like to believe. (Of course, the down side to being noticed is that when the better-known bloggers don’t understand your […]

The Bush administration and some congressional allies are considering ways to keep Social Security privatization from adding to the budget deficit: simply put the expenses that necessarily come with privatization “off-budget”, so that they don’t add to the official measure of the US federal budget deficit. There’s a good justification for doing this, according to […]

Kent Smetters poses this question as the title of this paper. Several economists including myself would answer yes to this question but then Smetters notes that we are assuming policymakers set spending and tax rates for the other levels of government so as to insure that the General Fund adheres to a long-run balanced budget […]

In last week’s Sunday NY Times, there’s a good roundup of economists’ thinking about how to finance prescription drug research, by Eduardo Porter, with the unfortunate title “Do New Drugs Always Have to Cost So Much?” This kind of article seems to be a specialty of Porter’s. He’s really good at finding the right economists […]

Gallup recently asked America about evolution. Here’s one question: “Just your opinion, do you think that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is: a scientific theory that has been well-supported by evidence, just one of many theories and one that has not been well-supported by evidence, or don’t you know enough about it to say?” Here […]

That’s the only explanation I can imagine for the latest from our Republican masters: This weekend Congress was working on a massive $388 billion omnibus spending bill that will cover all manner of federal spending. But at the request of Rep. Ernest Istook of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee, a special provision […]

Jesse Taylor has fun with how many times Peggy Noonan wrote “Ssssssssssssshhhhhhh….” in this WSJ oped. OK, I have come to expect WSJ opeds to miss the point but they often try to make a point. I can’t believe Noonan ever wrote speeches for President Reagan given that this has less substance than a teenage […]

Today Alan Greenspan gave an address to a central bankers’ conference in Frankfurt — at the end of a week that has seen the dollar plumb new depths of weakness against the euro. In his speech Greenspan reveals his latest thinking about the US’s external imbalances. The question now confronting us is how large a […]

A story in today’s Washington Post discusses some of the possible tax changes that seem to be most likely in whatever “tax reform” package that Bush proposes: [T]he administration plans to push major amendments that would shield interest, dividends and capitals gains from taxation, expand tax breaks for business investment and take other steps intended […]

So here’s a question for you: how many times will the Bush administration have to ask Congress to increase the government’s debt ceiling? This week’s action makes #3 so far, but the new limit of over $8 trillion will probably be reached in less than two years. So it will at least be four, and […]