Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

US Federal deficits

Mark Thoma posted yesterday Is Galbraith Right that Deficits are Never a Problem? on Paul Krugman’s NYT piece I Would Do Anything For Stimulus, But I Won’t Do That (Wonkish) on MMT and soveriegn debt (using Angry Bear’s posting of Jamie Galbraith’s testimony to Congress as a link), and has included Jamie Galbraith’s response. It […]

Procurement and research are in the ‘gaining’ portion of the budget

Hat tip reader ilsm for this article by Tony Capaccio, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg.com July 6, 2010 U.S. spending on weapons through 2016 likely will grow faster than the overall defense budget, which will have annual increases of only about 1 percent above inflation, according to Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale. “Our goal would be to get […]

Professor Jamie Galbraith’s testimony to Deficit Commission

Hat tip reader 1Watt,Hermit Democratic Underground and New Deal 2.0. Testimony is public domain…here it is in entirety. Statement to the Commission on Deficit ReductionJames K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen, jr., Chair in Government/BusinessRelations, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at AustinJune 30, 2010 Mr. Chairmen, members of the commission, […]

CBO Releases Long Term Budget Outlook

by Bruce Webb CBO Director’s Blog summary of Long Term Budget Outlook (Interesting side comment: “Later this week, CBO will release a report on a number of different policy options for changing Social Security”). Elmendorf, not surprising given his history and current job, is fully on the side of the deficit hawk/hysterics. Report text (1.2MB […]

How the Deficit Commission Painted Itself into Corner on Social Security

by Bruce Webb High on the list of tasks mandated of the Obama Deficit Commission is to get the deficit down to 3% of GDP by 2015. Unfortunately for them they have set up a situation where they can’t move that number via cuts to Social Security, if anything such cuts more one of their […]

Bush vs Obama Deficits: In pictures.

by Bruce Webb Reader BuffPilot has been asking Angry Bear for awhile now to post the following graphhttp://blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/If you follow the link you will see that Heritage updated it with new CBO and OMB data this year. That is below the fold.http://blog.heritage.org/2010/02/05/past-deficits-vs-obamas-deficits-in-pictures/ Which I will amplify with the actual CBO Tablehttp://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/Chapter1.shtml I am not sure […]

Conclusion to my Kauffman Institute Presentation

Note: This is “what I believe I said,” not“what I would have said” and is presented here solely to document the confluences that were, perhaps, clearer in my head than they were in the presentation itself.  As such, several references here are echoes of earlier pieces of the presentation. (Links to same will be updated […]

Social Security and Deficit Reduction: Some Fun with Numbers

by Bruce Webb Well it looks like we are going to get a Deficit Commission and one way or another Social Security will be on the table. But what exactly does that mean for either Social Security or the total deficit picture? Before answering that lets review a couple of basics. In talking deficit reduction […]

Can Nobody Play this Game Correctly?

CBO: At 9.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), that deficit would be slightly smaller than the shortfall of 9.9 percent of GDP ($1.4 trillion) posted in 2009. [emphasis mine] A 7.1% decline in real GDP terms isn’t just “slightly smaller”; it’s a real improvement that is greater than any (mythical or not) “spending freeze” […]