Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Kevin Drum has a nice graphic on where federal spending goes.

I think most people don’t know this:

Note further that despite the 21% outlay, Social Security has for many years actually reduced the deficit, because the social security tax has been taking in more than social security pays out.   That said, this year may be different: due to the super recession, payroll taxes are down (few jobs) and involuntary retirements are up (ditto).  But the built-up surplus in the Social Security trust fund should cover it for a couple more decades at least; and the tax changes required to keep Social Security solvent until the age distribution bulge sorts out are pretty small. (Health care spending, aka Medicare, is a much harder story.)

Update: Here’s a really good CBO chart showing social security’s past and projected contribution to total federal spending, and thus to the deficit.

Thomas Friedman, writing today about Mubarak, says,

He had no vision, no high aspiration, no will for great educational attainment. He just had this wildly exaggerated sense of Egypt’s greatness based on the past. That is why I feel sorry for those Egyptians now clamoring to get back money they claim the Mubaraks stole. That is surely a crime, if true, but Mubarak is guilty of a much bigger, more profound, theft: all the wealth Egypt did not generate these past 30 years because of the poverty of his vision and the incompetence of his cronies.

We could already say pretty much the same thing about GW Bush (with the difference being that the money siphoned to crony corporations like Halliburton was in the main not stolen, just wasted legally). How long before we are saying something similar (minus the personal enrichment) about Obama?

Obama’s budget is cruel; the Republicans’ is even crueler. Both are failures to deal with our needs and our problems. These are budgets for rich people on the backs of the poor. They are forms of fiddling while the new Rome burns.

Watch this: Jeffrey Sachs tells the truth about the budget. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

But Sachs’s is a lonely voice in our public debate.