NSA Knows Who You Are

5 billion cellphone calling records have been collected by the NSA as part of a location and data tracking system, according to The Washington Post.

Details of the program were among the many documents leaked by former defense contractor Edward Snowden to news organizations earlier this year.

Stop Corporate Welfare

Farm aid distorts agriculture, harms the environment, and nearly all goes to well-off businesses.

Energy subsidies have been disastrous — from a $500 million loss on Solyndra to $700 million wasted on a clean coal project in Mississippi.

Phasing out farm and energy subsidies would save $160 billion.

Military Bloat

At the current pace, unrestrained compensation costs will edge out funds for training, readiness and weapons of America's Military.

A recent Congressional Budget Office study said that between 2001 and 2012, when private-sector wages were effectively flat, basic military pay rose by 28 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. The study also said that cash compensation for enlisted personnel, including food and housing allowances, is greater than the wages and salaries of 90 percent of their civilian counterparts.

Big Bank Protectionism

Since the 2007–08 financial crisis, global regulators have engaged in a lengthy struggle to reshape the international financial system to make it more resilient under stress.

Two recent proposals: the "Foreign Banking Organization" proposal of the U.S. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the United Kingdom’s "ring-fencing" plan are purportedly a part of this effort. The proposals are intended to protect national financial systems from the risks posed by a failure of one or more global, interconnected banking organizations operating within national borders.

As such, the proposals may merely amount to national regulators adopting a parochial, protectionist, or "home country first" approach to regulation, which may insulate banks without reforming them, and could slow world economic growth.

Classics

From time to time, an ambitious student will ask me where she can find one or another classic of economic literature that I may have referenced during a lecture. Of course, not wanting to dampen her fledgling curiosity, I recommend FREE sources of such information, like the following:

site 1 / site 2

Disability System Disabled

The combined spending on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) has risen to a huge $200 billion a year, and it seems many of the nearly 12 million Americans who receive such benefits are merely scamming the system, a system that will soon run dry, provided that taxes on working people are not raised substantially.

The abuse and overspending in government disability programs is so bad that even National Public Radio and 60 Minutes have taken notice.

Income Redistribution

This paper considers how Social Security’s many benefit and tax features have redistributed income across groups over time.

Using Current Population Survey data from 1970 through 1994 and micro-simulation projections from the Urban Institute’s DYNASIM3 model, research found that for many decades, Social Security redistributed from African-Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color, to whites.

And these transfers will likely to continue in future decades, as findings suggest that future reforms that place the burden of Social Security reform solely on younger, more diverse generations may have undesired distributional consequences if the aim of the program is to provide greater relative protections to more vulnerable groups.

Tax Reform

In The Benefit and the Burden, Bruce Bartlett explores the distributional, technical, and political advantages and costs of the various proposals and ideas that will come to dominate America’s political conversation in the years to come.

End Extreme Poverty Now!

The number of people worldwide living in extreme poverty—defined as living on $1.25 a day or less—was cut in half between 1990 and 2010. Yet more than one billion people still subsist at this level, and about three billion live at under $2.50 a day.

Laurence Chandy, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, discusses the possibility that by 2030 the world might eradicate the most extreme poverty. He explains how we measure the problem, what the private sector and aid agencies can do about it, whether or not current targeting approaches are effective, and talks about the poverty problem in the United States.

MOOC's, Partners in Propoganda?

The MOOC learning provider Coursera has launched Coursera Learning Hubs that seek to facilitate learning in Internet-enabled physical locations around the world. The U.S. State Department is "lending a hand" to Coursera as one of its learning partners. The Learning Hubs will cover 30 embassies, American Spaces, campuses, and other locations globally.

Foreign Aid is Bad

In his new book, “The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality”, Angus Deaton, an expert’s expert on global poverty and foreign aid, puts his considerable reputation on the line and declares that foreign aid does more harm than good.

He argues that it corrupts governments and rarely reaches the poor. It is high time for the paternalistic West to step away and allow the developing world to solve its own problems.

Vampire Economics

Canadian author William Gairdner, co-founder of the Civitas think tank, estimates that in the current welfare state only one third of the population constitutes the producing sector; another one third is affiliated with government, either clerically or contractually, and the remaining third consists of government dependents. Thus two thirds of the modern “social democratic” state is dependent for its maintenance on a dwindling minority of economic generators.

Shut Down

Lawmakers in Washington almost shut down the government recently over a series of contentious budget riders, but to learn what Congress did to the less visible issues in areas such as science, research and technology funding, keep an eye on the Computer Research Association's policy blog, written by Peter Harsha.

A Stupid Student "Right"

Recently, the Los Angeles Unified School District embarked on a $1 billion initiative to place an iPad in the hands of each of the more than 600,000 students in the nation's second largest school district. But while Apple counts its coin, the district is learning a hard lesson in security and how technology can create as many problems as it solves.

School Superintendent John Deasy, who was featured in an iPad commercial, insists that the initiative he pushed hard for is right on track. To Deasy, putting iPads in the hands of kids in a school system of mostly low-income families and a dropout rate of 20% is a "civil rights issue."

What's astonishing is the idealism driving Deasy to spend $1 billion in school bond money for the iPads, software and for wiring the campuses has led to record numbers of security breaches, stolen property and lawsuits. Meanwhile, that is a billion dollars that is no longer available to be spent on textbooks, teacher's aides, better facilities, etc....I suppose what they say is true, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

Debt, Fear and the Unknown

While the latest debt stalemate could soon be resolved with a short-term fix, the threat of a default is liable to rear its head again before year's end.

Government officials and market observers worry such uncertainty could have an enduring effect on financial markets.

Bankers have been assured by the Fed that the central bank would accept defaulted Treasury securities as collateral for emergency loans in the event of a liquidity crunch, but the Treasury Department of the Obama Administration has yet to commit.

Such mixed signals creates uncertainty and could provoke a panic that would make such a liquidity crunch more likely.

Unwarranted, But Real Fear

For investors, there is fear that a government shutdown would set the stage for a more momentous battle over the so-called debt ceiling. That is, if there is no agreement to raise the borrowing limit by mid-October, the government will not be able to issue more bonds and could default on its outstanding borrowing.

But as paying this debt is considered "essential" and there are plenty of taxes rolling in, this is not actually going to happen. On the other hand, to the extent that investors believe it will and act accordingly, it could wreak havoc in the financial markets and send ripples through the economy.

Let us hope this circumstance is simply avoided, because it is less likely that we'll have a better informed or less irrational electorate any time soon.

Bloomberg, Correct As Usual

Mayor Bloomberg provoked anger when he recently attributed much of New York’s rising income gap to the many rich people who have found the city an attractive place to live.

As it turns out, he's correct.

Since Mr. Bloomberg was elected mayor 12 years ago, the % of poor people, as defined by the federal government, has increased by roughly 6%, while New Yorkers earning more than $1 million annually has almost doubled. And nearly 18 percent of all city personal income taxes were collected from its 1,200 richest citizens.

Global Lying

Scientists working on a landmark U.N. climate change report are struggling over how to address a wrinkle in the meteorological data that has given ammunition to global-warming skeptics: The heating of Earth's surface appears to have slowed in the past 15 years even though greenhouse gas emissions keep rising.

Some statisticians have dismissed the purported slowdown as a statistical mirage, arguing among other things that it reflects random climate fluctuations and an unusually hot year picked as the starting point for charting temperatures. They also say the data suggests the "missing" heat is simply settling — temporarily — in the ocean.

Closing Loopholes

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has unveiled a plan to limit international tax evasion.

Dubbed the Action Plan on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, it consists of 15 points targeting domestic and international tax rules that allow companies to avoid paying taxes.

The plan depends on international cooperation to close gaps that allow income to 'disappear' for tax purposes by using multiple deductions for the same expense and 'treaty-shopping'. And stronger rules would allow countries to tax profits stashed in offshore subsidiaries.

Food Stamps

There's been a lot of controversy regarding the immense expansion of the food stamp program in recent years, but a simple fact should not be overlooked. In the past few years, our economy has struggled and thus generates more qualifying individuals for the program.

Of course, the long run solution is not handouts of any kind; however, one must balance short run alleviation of suffering where that suffering is most severe, with programs to expand the productivity and horizons of the unemployed. If government has had a major failing of late, it is with regard to the latter imperative, not the former.