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Posts Tagged ‘Social Security’

The Rhetoric of Economic Policy: Inequality vs. Dispersion

Posted in Budget, Politics, Taxes, tagged , , , , on March 21, 2012 | 2 Comments »

Rhetoric matters in economic policy debates. Would allowing people to purchase health insurance from the federal government be a public option, a government plan, or a public plan? Would investment accounts in Social Security be private accounts, personal accounts, or individual accounts? (See my post on the rule of three.) Are tax breaks really tax cuts or [...]

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More Budget Foxes, Fewer Hedgehogs

Posted in Budget, Politics, tagged , , , , , on August 19, 2011 | 3 Comments »

My latest column at the Christian Science Monitor: America’s fiscal challenges are often portrayed as a conflict between hawks and doves. The real battle, however, is between foxes and hedgehogs. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” wrote the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. Both foxes and hedgehogs play important roles [...]

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Chain, Chain, Chain, Chain CPI

Posted in Budget, Macroeconomics, tagged , , , , , , on May 12, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Over at the Moment of Truth project (a continuation of the president’s fiscal commission), Adam Rosenberg and Marc Goldwein make a compelling case that the government should use a different inflation measure when calculating cost of living increases and indexing the tax code: Maintaining purchasing power in spending programs and indexing various parts of the tax code [...]

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Another Deficit Panel at the Milken Conference

Posted in Budget, tagged , , , , , on May 5, 2011 | 5 Comments »

A few hours after attending the “Attention Deficit” panel at the Milken Global Conference, I spoke on a panel about another deficit you may have heard about: “The Federal Deficit: What Options Are Really on the Table?”   My fellow panelists were: Charles Blahous, Research Fellow, Hoover Institution Peter Passell, Senior Fellow, Milken Institute; Editor, The [...]

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Bowles-Simpson, Health Insurance, Social Security, and Payroll Taxes

Posted in Budget, tagged , , , , on November 19, 2010 | 1 Comment »

The other day I discussed the Tax Policy Center’s distributional analysis of the Bowles-Simpson tax proposal. As you may recall, a key feature of the proposal we considered (“Option 1″) is that it eliminates almost all existing tax breaks and reduces tax rates on most types of income (but raises them on capital gains and dividends). We subsequently learned that we [...]

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Another Year Without a Social Security COLA

Posted in Budget, Politics, tagged , , on September 17, 2010 | 37 Comments »

It looks like 2011 will be another year without a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security recipients. Why? Because consumer prices haven’t yet returned to the peak they reached in the third quarter of 2008, when the 2009 COLA was set. Beneficiaries received a healthy 5.8% boost in their payments in 2009, which made sense [...]

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Fiscal Policy in Interesting Times

Posted in Budget, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged , , , on August 16, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Back on August 5, I gave a speech at the Retirement Research Consortium’s annual conference “Retirement, Planning, and Social Security in Interesting Times.” I’ve been saving up the link to the C-Span video to share during my vacation. Here it is. (I hope the link still works; if not, I will fix it once I [...]

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The Social Security Windfall

Posted in Budget, Politics, tagged , on October 15, 2009 | 5 Comments »

As you have probably heard, Social Security recipients won’t be getting a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in 2010. Well, at least under current law. The reason is simple: The annual COLA is based on a measure of consumer inflation from the third quarter of one year to the next. Last year, that measure was boosted by [...]

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Latest Data on Transfers and Income

Posted in Budget, Economy, Macroeconomics, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 13, 2009 | 6 Comments »

In a series of posts (most recent here), I’ve documented that Americans are getting an increasing portion of their income from the government. BEA released new data on incomes a couple weeks ago, including revisions back to 1995. These data reinforce the story I’ve described in my previous posts: Transfers accounted for 17.3% of personal [...]

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Stimulus Lifts Government Transfers

Posted in Budget, Finance, Macroeconomics, tagged , , , , , , , on June 28, 2009 | 6 Comments »

A few weeks ago, I posted some charts showing that Americans are increasingly reliant on government transfers as a source of income. Friday’s data on personal income for May confirmed that the trend is continuing.  Government transfers made up a record 18% of personal income in May: In interpreting this increase, it’s important to keep [...]

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