Brad DeLong adds his voice to the people addressing the retirement woes of many: Edward Filene’s idea from the 1920s of having companies run employer-sponsored defined-benefit plans has, by and large, come a-crashing down. Companies turn out not to be long-lived enough to run pensions with a high enough probability. And when they are there […]

by Dale Coberly CHUCK BLAHOUS FINDS THE ANSWER FOR SOCIAL SECURITY AND LOSES IT. Charles Blahous is one of the politically appointed Trustees for Social Security. He has written “A Guide To The 2013 Social Security Trustees Report” at e21 Economic Policies for the 21st Century http://www.economics21.org/commentary/guide-2013-social-security-trustees-report . Blahous tells us “Social Security faces a […]

Well I am back at Angry Bear and just getting my feet wet with WordPress, so this first post won’t be ambitious.   The 2013 Annual Report of the Trustees of Social Security was released today Friday the 31st of May. The short take-aways are ‘not much change’ and ‘no news is good news’: date […]

by Linda Beale Another reason for NOT cutting Social Security benefits–seniors poorer than you think As everybody knows, a constant refrain of the far-right GOP establishment is a desire to cut taxes for the wealthy while cutting benefits for the poor. The ideological right talks about benefits for the poor as “welfare” but never talks […]

by Linda Beale Robert Reich: Chained CPI Makes No Sense For Seniors With MoveOn.org, Robert Reich has produced a new video on the proposed change to Social Security that would REDUCE BENEFITS for seniors and wreak the most havoc on the most vulnerable.  As he notes in the video, the proposed change–which the Obama Administration […]

by Linda Beale Obama caves yet again: offering Social Security cuts to appease the right… Obama’s budget isn’t even released yet and he’s already caving to the “let’s make the rich richer and forget the rest” crowd.  That crowd that claims that we need a capital gains preference so the rich can gather all that […]

It’s history lesson time again. An awful lot of talk and writing about the chained CPI has been focused on the results of its implementation on Social Security. Using this formula for figuring the cost of living ends up reducing the money citizens will receive in their SS checks. One of our commenters, Denis Drew […]

There is a lot of posting on the proposed budget (out next week) from our President focusing on his insistence of including the cuts to Social Security benefits as part of the 11 dimensional chess game analogy Beltway convention likes to applaud. How clever of them. Yves Smith gives us an impassioned declaration of outrage over the […]

This item confirms that the Northwest Plan for Social Security would work rather well for Congress, Social Security, and beneficiaries. Beltway conventional wisdom thought otherwise. My own reaction was of puzzlement by the Beltway conventional wisdom. Fiscal Times reports: We’ve already seen evidence that consumers have largely shrugged off this year’s expiration of the payroll tax […]

Via Bloomberg comes this note on demographics and the work force, and continues a conversation about how that impacts all of us. Probably not in the way most often provided in punditry…such as taking jobs away from the millenium generation, wealthy old geezers stereotypes, or alarms sounded about who is to pay for services we […]