Thursday, September 15, 2011

? 09/14/11

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  • TimesPeople recommended a blog post:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Making Laws About Making Babies - Room for Debate
    In America, one sperm donor can have 150 or more offspring. Other nations would not allow this. Should the U.S. emulate their stricter laws?
    No.
  • TimesPeople recommended a blog post:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Can the Middle Class Be Rebuilt? - Room for Debate
    Should the government strive to create middle-paying jobs? If that is a lost battle, what is the alternative path to recovery?
    There is no direct path to middle class recovery.  
    Get the blue collar labor force employed and the middle managers will be employed.  There is much that can be done.
  • TimesPeople recommended a blog post:
    Sep 14, 2011
    The Lack of Regulation Has Been a Boon - Room for Debate
    The fertility business needs regulation, but we’ll miss the lawlessness when it’s gone.
    There are enough rules.  Shop for sperm.
  • TimesPeople recommended a blog post:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Social Security Is Like a Ponzi Scheme, but It Isn't One - Room for Debate
    Social Security, like a Ponzi scheme, relies on the constant entry of new participants to pay off old ones. Both plans are better deals for earlier entrants.
    Tax supported. Collect the taxes, pay the benefits.
     http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/the-ponzi-thing/

    The Ponzi Thing

    Well, I gather that a lot of right-wingers are quoting selectively from a piece I wrote 15 years ago in the Boston Review, in which I said that Social Security had a “Ponzi game aspect.” As always, you should read what I actually wrote. Here’s the passage:
    Social Security is structured from the point of view of the recipients as if it were an ordinary retirement plan: what you get out depends on what you put in. So it does not look like a redistributionist scheme. In practice it has turned out to be strongly redistributionist, but only because of its Ponzi game aspect, in which each generation takes more out than it put in. Well, the Ponzi game will soon be over, thanks to changing demographics, so that the typical recipient henceforth will get only about as much as he or she put in (and today’s young may well get less than they put in).
    Notice what I didn’t say. I didn’t say that the system was a fraud; I didn’t say that it would collapse. I said that in the past it had benefited from the fact that each generation paying in to the system was bigger than the generation that preceded it, and that this luxury would be ending in the years ahead.
    So why did I use the P-word? Basically because Paul Samuelson had done the same; he was basically just being cute, and I was emulating him — which now turns out to be a mistake.
    But anyway, anyone who uses my statement as some kind of defense of Rick Perry and all that is playing word games. I explained what I meant in that Boston Review article, and it was nothing at all like the claims that Social Security is a fraud, is destined to collapse, and all that. Social Security is and always has been mainly a pay-as-you-go system, which is nothing at all like a classic Ponzi scheme.
    Of course, the usual suspects won’t pay any attention to what I’ve just said. But if anyone is actually listening …

  • TimesPeople recommended a blog post:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Social Security Is Not a Scheme, but Change Is Needed - Room for Debate
    Raising the ceiling on income hit by the payroll tax would restore balance to the system and make it solvent for the long term.
    Robert Reich is right.
  • TimesPeople recommended a blog post:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Remember Museums' Duty to the Public - Room for Debate
    For most New Yorkers, a visit to MoMA has become a luxury experience.
    "What the traffic will bear."
  • TimesPeople recommended a user:
    Sep 14, 2011
    KenDenno
  • TimesPeople recommended a video:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Delivering Alpha: Cramer & Geithner
    These guys are nuts.
    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/the-death-of-the-confidence-fairy/
     

    "The Death of the Confidence Fairy

    In the first half of last year a strange delusion swept much of the policy elite on both sides of the Atlantic — the belief that cutting spending in the face of high unemployment would actually create jobs. I went after this stuff early and hard (I suspect that the confidence fairy will be one of my lasting contributions to economic discourse); still, it’s good to have a steadily mounting weight of evidence about just how wrong that view was.
    The latest entry is a comprehensive review of past episodes of austerity by economists at the IMF, from which the figure above is taken. Yes, contractionary policy is contractionary. And as the authors point out, it’s probably even more contractionary than usual under current conditions:
    The reduction in incomes from fiscal consolidations is even larger if central banks do not or cannot blunt some of the pain through a monetary policy stimulus. The fall in interest rates associated with monetary stimulus supports investment and consumption, and the concomitant depreciation of the currency boosts net exports. Ireland in 1987 and Finland and Italy in 1992 are examples of countries that undertook fiscal consolidations, but where large depreciations of the currency helped provide a boost to net exports.
    Unfortunately, these pain relievers are not easy to come by in today’s environment. In many economies, central banks can provide only a limited monetary stimulus because policy interest rates are already near zero (see “Unconventional Behavior” in this issue of F&D). Moreover, if many countries carry out fiscal austerity at the same time, the reduction in incomes in each country is likely to be greater, since not all countries can reduce the value of their currency and increase net exports at the same time.
    Simulations of the IMF’s large-scale models suggest that the reduction in incomes may be more than twice as large as that shown in Chart 2 when central banks cannot cut interest rates and when many countries are carrying out consolidations at the same time. These simulations thus suggest that fiscal consolidation is now likely to be more contractionary (that is, to reduce short-run income more) than was the case in past episodes.
    Unfortunately, austerity programs are now the rule everywhere; even if the new Obama plan became law, which it won’t, it would only slow the pace of fiscal consolidation in America, and there’s nothing like it even on the table elsewhere.
    Economic policy: we’re doing it wrong."
     
  • TimesPeople recommended a user:
    Sep 14, 2011
    Steve
  • TimesPeople recommended an article:
    Sep 14, 2011
    NASA Unveils Giant New Rocket Design
    Can we just stop whining about money?
    The money is not spent yet. Get the engineers busy working out the details.

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