Prof Barkley Rosser expresses irritation with suggestions of pay roll cuts as stimulus: In yesterday’s WaPo, accessible as one of Mark Thoma’s general links, http://www.economistsview.typepad.com , Nouriel Roubini sounded very reasonable for anyone addressing the utterly corrupt and degraded “catfish” deficit commission soldouts. He proposed a cut in payroll taxes, to be made revenue neutral […]
by Bruce Webb (A contest with no prizes, AB doesn’t have fundraisers or sell t-shirts and is lucky if ad money keeps the servers on. And this is just a solo effort by me anyway.) ‘Catfood Commission’ or alternately ‘Cat Food Commission’ apparently started as a lefty-blogger in-joke but has since caught on in a […]
by Bruce Webb Want to make the move from wanking to wonking on Social Security finance and policy? Consider the following list. First read an Annual Report, you don’t need to understand every number but you do need some grounding in the terms and concepts. 2010 Trustees Report Then fill out your knowledge with this […]
by Bruce Webb A curious feature of the battle over Social Security is that it is almost always a battle of adjectives and adverbs and not numbers, In particular almost everyone agrees that ‘Nothing’ is not a plan, People are not always clear on the consequences of ‘Nothing’ whether that be ‘massive’ benefit cuts or […]
by Bruce Webb Regular readers of Angry Bear will be familiar with bond trader turned blogger Bruce Krasting and his, can we say non-standard conclusions about Social Security solvency. Well he is at it again today under the provocative title of SSTF – Steve Goss’s Bombshell – What Could it Mean?. SSTF means Social Security […]
by Bruce Webb When I first started paying serious attention to Social Security reporting back in 1997 I was struck by its curious mix of precision and fluidity and how that mix moved from the latter to the former as you went from the data tables to the top line numbers and then on to […]
This is the title of a post of a diary at another site, one of no particular interest on its own because it just puts people on the wrong road. A straight out analysis of the economic numbers underlying Social Security ‘crisis’ shows pretty clearly that there is no ‘there’ there. To the extent that […]
by Bruce Webb Dean asks: 1) How much higher are real wages projected to be in 2040 than today? In other words, how much richer do we expect the average worker to be 30 years from now? 2) How did the 2010 Trustees Report change the projections for 2040 wages compared with the 2009 report? […]
by Bruce Webb House Minority Leader John Boehner said in a statement marking the 75th anniversary that while the law has served the needs of millions of Americans seniors, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees have “repeatedly warned Congress and the American people that reforms are necessary or future benefits will be threatened.”He added that […]
by Bruce Webb If I had to pick out the two biggest sources of confusion about Social Security finance it would have to be one, the relation of the Trust Funds to Public Debt and two, the relation of Social Security surplus/deficits to Budget Scoring. At Angry Bear we have discussed the equation Debt Held […]