Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Robert J. Samuelson Also Exaggerates Social Security Problems Not really a surprise, after all, it is Monday, and RJS has been at this for quite a long time at his post at WaPo.  But the recent release of the Trustees’ Report has not only gotten the Associated Press all bent out and shrieking “insolvency,” but I think with the push coming from the recent massive tax cuts that are swelling the budget deficit, the usual old gang of “cut the entitlements!”...

by Steve Roth What Causes Recessions? A Physicists’ Complex Systems Model I received some very interesting comments from Yaneer Bar-Yam to my recent Evonomics post— “Capital’s Share of Income is Far Higher than You Think.” He pointed me to his very interesting paper, “Preliminary steps toward a universal economic dynamics for monetary and fiscal policy.” I’m using this space to reply with with some stuff that can’t display in that comments space. I...

The Wage[s]-Lump Doctrine — still dogma after all these years “The wage-fund doctrine was the quintessential product of what Marx termed vulgar political economy; a dogma concealing real economic relations, on the one hand, and justifying them, on the other. It was a transparent effort to disarm the working-class movement, and an attempt (largely successful) to rally public opinion behind bourgeois resistance to the demands of working people for a...

This post “America’s allies should respond to steel tariffs with targeted sanctions on the Trump Organization” by Matthew Yglesias is brilliant (even though he is mainly agreeing with the prior brilliant article by Scott Gilmore “Trade sanctions against America won’t work. Sanctioning Trump himself might.” The proposal is so brilliant and the case for it so clear, that, I think, each title is enough to convey the idea. Yglesias elaborates while quoting...

AP Exaggerates Social Security Problems Dean Baker at Beat-the-Press has pointed out (sorry, not able to link to it) that Associated Press put out a tweet that presents an essentially hysterical story about future prospects for Social Security following the recent release of the Trustees.  This report says that as of 2026 Medicare and as of 2034 Social Security will face a “shortfall.”  However, the AP tweeted that what they face is “insolvency.” ...

by Dale Coberly SOCIAL SECURITY TRUSTEES REPORT: There is yet time, brother. But not much. The Social Security Trustees have issued their annual report. It is not much changed from last year. In fact it is a little better.  Last year’s Report projected that by this year Social Security would have reached “short term financial inadequacy.” This year’s projections put that off for another year or possibly two. Short term financial inadequacy means that in...

by Joseph Joyce The Spillover Effects of Rising U.S. Interest Rates U.S. interest rates have been rising, and most likely will continue to do so. The target level of the Federal Funds rate, currently at 1.75%, is expected to be raised at the June meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds rose above 3%, then fell as fears of Italy breaking out the Eurozone flared. That decline is likely to be reversed while the...

By Steve Roth  (originally published at Evonomics) The shares of income going to “capital” and “labor” are vexed issues. How much is received for doing work, and how much is unearned “property income”— interest, dividends, etc.? For a long time, economists thought these relative shares stayed roughly unchanged over time. But since the 70s, and especially sincely the latter. And the ownership share of income goes to a small slice of households that own...

Rejoinder To Rauch’s Response To Me On The Happiness Curve Overhyped On May 15 I posted here on “Overhyping the Happiness Curve,” a critique of the recent book by Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50. After it was linked to on Marginal Revolution, author Jonathan Rauch wrote a Response to my post on May 25, which was also linked to on MR. I did not immediately reply as I was in Santa Cruz and did not have my copy of the...

More evidence of increasing deflationary pressure on wages One of my pet peeves is that economics as a discipline needs to import the entirety of learning theory from psychology, not just parlor tricks like the endowment effect.  For example, learning from models. To wit, once Jack Welch was successful in using a pay scheme at GE that ensured that a given percentage of employees would not get a raise in any given year, it was inevitable that other...