Payroll Tax Holiday

After reading the details of the Obama/Republican tax cut deal, some Left leaning economists seemed at least not hostile to it. Read below the fold...

Even though I deny that there is a deficit/debt/debt-to-GDP ratio problem, I thought I'd get in on the fun everyone is having this month and offer my own deficit reduction plan. It prescribes 1) Keeping average interest rates at 0.0226; 2) finding a way to increase the growth in nominal GDP from an average annual change ratio of 1.044 (CBO’s assumption about growth) to a more historically (since 1940) typical average annual change ratio of 1.072.; and 3) putting a stop to increasing health care costs by passing Medicare for All immediately. The first two changes would result in deficit reductions in CBO-based projections of $8.3 Trillion from 2011 to 2020. The absolute value of the national debt increases from $9.2 Trillion in 2010 to $10.7 Trillion in 2020, and the debt-to-GDP ratio declines from 69% in 2010 to 37% in 2020. Read below the fold...

[Author's note: This has been re-posted by Joe Firestone (a.k.a. letsgetitdone) on behalf of author Warren Mosler with his express permission. Warren Mosler is currently the Independent Party candidate for the US Senate in CT]

By

Warren Mosler

The latest mortgage foreclosure mess is just another financial crisis.

It’s not a real economic crisis- no houses have been actually destroyed- no fire, hurricane, or earthquake damage, etc.

So the responses aren’t about bulldozers, hammers, concrete pouring, etc.

The question is whether this financial discovery/event spills over into the real economy. Read below the fold...

Nobel prize winner Joe Stieglitz recently called for a second stimulus to reduce unemployment and get the economy working well again. But the Administration seems uninterested in pushing the idea or making it an issue in the election, because it has been unsuccessful in setting the necessary frame for persuading the public that its first inadequate stimulus was only a political compromise that has done some good, but left much more yet to do. Yet we badly need that second stimulus, and if the Democrats could get their act together, get people back to work this month, and were willing to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, we could have it quickly, and they probably could even avoid catastrophic losses in November. Read below the fold...

This is the second in a series of posts based on youtubes from a speech in Milford CT by Warren Mosler. Warren is running for the Senate in CT in the Independent Party primary. Unlike both the Democratic and Republican candidates Warren really understands economics and his forté is explaining it to people. Read below the fold...

It looks like the Democratic Leadership will get its wish, a sprawling “health care reform” bill, mostly focused on changes to the health insurance system that deliver many millions of new customers to the health insurance industry. The Democrats are making many upbeat claims about this bill, calling it historic and claiming that it will produce affordable “universal” health care coverage for Americans, and for 32 million more than are covered by insurance today, while blithely ignoring the contradiction between these two statements. Read below the fold...