by divorced one like Bush So I check my mail today, 10/17 (been attending continuing ed this weekend) and find that as a member of the National Association of the Self-Employed (150K strong) I will now receive a news letter of sorts from a John Mauldin by receiving his latest: Muddle Through, R.I.P? Muddle Through […]
by Bruce Webb That is the subtitle of the new Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) analysis of the Aug 25th CBO and OMB Reports on projected budget deficits that is being injected into the health care debate as a reason for non-action. The CBPP analysis can be read here: New OMB and CBO […]
by Bruce Webb In a previous post I highlighted the chapter of CBO’s Long-Term Budget Outlook that pertained to Social Security. But the Report goes beyond that and in fact focuses on two different possible scenarios outlined in the following Table:The shorthand way of defining ‘extended baseline’ is ‘Bush tax cuts expire on schedule’ while […]
by Bruce Webb In the course of a post called the The Vanishing Surplus-Revealed there arose a semantic dispute about what ‘surplus’ means. Well I maintain that the answer to that question is not in authorial intent but instead on audience reception. If you are writing for a popular audience you have an obligation to […]
I’m going to have to do a little clean-up work here (i.e., run the data in Excel instead of Stata), so I’ll ask forgiveness for the double-labels and all that.Graphic redone; data as per FRED. I think the story is clear. The long version is Bruce’s post below. What is now the top line is […]
Or does he know better? This year’s election coincided with an important moment in the financial crisis. The credit markets have stabilized in the last few weeks and even improved a bit. But the rest of the economy is deteriorating fairly rapidly. It’s now in danger of falling into a vicious spiral, in which spending […]
Responding to EconomistMom, he ends his breakdown of flows with: Aiming for a balanced unified deficit over the business cycle would, I think, be a good thing economically–but I really do not see how we could possibly get there. Apparently, spending eight years Serbing the budget has worked. As the current Administration surely knew it […]
The gents at Capital Gains and Games—and soon, likely, the ma’am at EconMom—are in the throes of ecstasy (not necessarily the drug). There are “bond vigilantes” on the horizon. Stan Collender: The bond market “vigilantes” — the same people who forced the Clinton administration to propose and push for deficit reduction — are starting to […]