New personal income and spending figures for October were released this morning. The BEA reports a headline figure of a 0.6% increase in income and a 0.7% increase in spending, both of which are quite high. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with the report, too. Much of the increase in income and spending […]

The very good discussion of the Social Security issue between Andrew Samwick and Max Sawicky has been extended as Andrew and Max point to this contribution from David Altig. David’s blog will become a must read for me – and his point is simply that the timing of spending versus tax receipts is less important […]

This Reuters story tries to give one of those “fair and balanced” discussions but one word tips us off just a wee bit. The story includes: Facing record budget deficits, the Bush administration likely will turn to short-term government borrowing to help finance its plan to add personal retirement accounts to Social Security, officials said […]

Had Senator Kerry been elected President, we would be talking about his proposal to reduce the corporate tax rate to 32% and to eliminate the deferral benefits under Subpart F, which would have reduced the temptation to abuse the transfer pricing regulations under section 482. Instead, there is much discussion of The American Jobs Creation […]

The Washington Post updates us this morning on the current thinking in the White House about changing Bush’s economic team. It looks like Snow will be out soon too: Aides said changing four of the five top economic officials — including the Treasury and Commerce secretaries, with only budget director Joshua B. Bolten likely to […]

The dollar’s downward slide of the past two months is continuing today. The dollar has hit a new record low against the euro, unsurprisingly; but the dollar is also at multiple-year lows against the Canadian dollar, Korean Won, and Swiss Franc, and has declined significantly against the pound and yen in recent weeks. What had […]

The Bush administration will soon have a couple of positions open for economists. Bush’s chair of the CEA and director of the NEC will both be stepping down in the next couple of months: Stephen Friedman, who left Wall Street to assume one of the top economic posts in the White House, will return to […]

Via Josh Marshall comes more GOP passing the buck on the Istook Amendment: WASHINGTON – Sen. Ted Stevens on Monday showed reporters a handwritten legislative proposal from an IRS employee that slipped into and nearly stopped the massive appropriations bill passed by Congress this weekend. Stevens said the note proves that neither he nor any […]

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 […]