Their Powerpoint slide on this issue can be found here in what Max calls “A Pack of Lies”. Look at pages 4 and 5 and then read why Duncan Black says this is “Dumb as Rocks”. My question to Max comes from pages 18, 19, and 44. The GOP has as one of its principles […]
This post might be seen as a 3-part math workout with the warmup being the news that the Club for Rich People (aka Growth) has their own Social Security webpage. Featured is a graph from Don Luskin of the first derivative of the Social Security reserves (well almost as Luskin’s graph omits the interest income […]
The latest installment of the CBO’s Budget Outlook for the US government was released yesterday. The headline figure being reported is an estimate of a 2005 budget deficit of $368bn, not including funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. But the more troubling part of the report is the prospect for little improvement in the budget any […]
Not surprisingly, the latest widely mocked Luskin piece has now been edited by the honest folks hacks over at National Review. Let’s take a look: Before After FactCheck.org also cited concerns about public perceptions of the $11 trillion deficit number in the 2003 report of the Technical Panel on Assumptions and Methods — a group […]
Via Jesse Taylor and many other wise bloggers comes a roar of laughter at the latest from Donald Luskin: Doing this may have toned down that big, bad $10.4 trillion number by setting it against a big, good $295.5 trillion number. But this is misleading, too, in its own way. If payrolls are $295.5 trillion […]
Congressman Bill Thomas went on Meet the Press to explain that his “dead horse” comment does not mean he opposes Bush’s Social Security deform. Thomas supports Bush on this issue. In this interview, there were four odd statements but only three came from Mr. Thomas. Thomas’s “dead horse” comment was really a complaint that “the […]
Robert Reich was on CNN trying his best to rebut the disinformation from Steve Forbes as Wolf Blitzer proved him to be a rather biased referee in the duel. Forbes kept repeated the 2018 date as if the alleged Social Security crisis was just over a decade away: STEVE FORBES, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think […]
From The Financial Times: During the past few years the US has become dependent, not so much on millions of investors around the globe but on a few individuals in a few of the world’s central banks. In 2003, the most recent year with full international statistics, central banks financed 83 per cent of the […]
Michael Ventre weighs in on the SpongeBob controversy with this definition of “Crackpot Christians”: But of course, not all Christians are alike. Many, if not most, Christians understand the true message of Jesus. But there is a frightening number of so-called Christians who can be best described as creepy, rigid, arrogant, cruel, know-it-all, pompous, obnoxious […]
Never mind the fact that David Brooks once claimed opponents of the Bush Social Security plan do not trust markets, George Will is actually getting praised for the following: Voluntary personal accounts will allow competing fund managers, rather than a government monopoly on income transfers from workers to retirees, to allocate a large pool of […]