By: MPAVictoria
“JohnR, Social Security is financed by taxing those whose share of the national income has been dropping like a rock. At some level the Republicans are responding to real problems: a collapsed...
View ArticleBy: Bill Jones
“Of course, Packwood was proven wrong. By the end of the Clinton presidency, there was a surplus” This is the lie that will not die. Here is the history of the debt....
View ArticleBy: eddie
Remind us, if you will, Bill Jones, what is the distinction between the debt and the deficit. Do you see any distinction at all? Should there be? Personally I think there shouldn’t be, but am open to...
View ArticleBy: chris
chris, why would a richer country need to spend more on government? Paved roads? Indoor plumbing? Decent lifestyles for the retired? Health care for all citizens (leading more of them to live long...
View ArticleBy: Patrick
Both Corey Robin and Watson Ladd have used strange to me metrics for measuring government. My thought for the “first approximation” measure would have been spending as a fraction of GDP. Fraction of...
View ArticleBy: Random Lurker
@Watson Ladd 30 “Fred has real government spending on a largely upwards trajectory when divided by population.” But if you speak of “real” spending, you have to take in account that government...
View ArticleBy: chris
Random Lurker has a good point, too. There was a thread a while back, IIRC, about the standards of living of First World and Third World bus drivers and whether allowing the latter to immigrate would...
View ArticleBy: Watson Ladd
@Random Lurker: Why can’t we expect productivity to rise in the public sector? The other reasons given (aging population, urbanization) are generally good ones. The increased need to transfer money...
View ArticleBy: Corey Robin
@Bill Jones 48: The full sentence from my piece, which you neglected to quote, reads as follows: “By the end of the Clinton presidency, there was a surplus, and Gore ran on a platform in 2000 of using...
View ArticleBy: Random Lurker
@Watson Ladd 53 Short anedoctical answer first, complex but imho interesting theoric answer later: Here in Italy, we have a mostly public (statalized) health service. This would be an example of a...
View ArticleBy: ajay
I think what’s puzzling Bill Jones is that he can’t work out a way in which you can be making a surplus each year and your total debt load is still going up. I can, but he can’t.
View ArticleBy: understudy
Echoing Watson, military personnel productivity is starting to become a big focus on front end design. When labor is cheap, you have +5,600 people on an aircraft carrier. When labor is expensive, you...
View ArticleBy: Bruce Wilder
“Baumol’s cost disease” is a round-about way to talk about a microeconomic side-effect of macroeconomically moving income distribution in an egalitarian direction. It was written at the culmination of...
View ArticleBy: Bruce Wilder
This might be relevant to the point about Baumol’s cost disease: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/business/majority-of-new-jobs-pay-low-wages-study-finds.html?smid=pl-share What Baumol studiously...
View ArticleBy: Bruce Webb
Bill at 48: “Here is the history of the debt. http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm It has gone up every year since 1958.” Well that might better be called “partial...
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