All Life Is Problem Solving

Self-styled “progressive organizations” and commentators have been releasing their own deficit reduction plans in reply to the plans released by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici, and The Peterson-Pew Commission. These new plans, were released by the Institute for America’s Future, Citizens Commission on Jobs, Deficits, and America’s Economic Future and […]

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In a recent post I wrote about “The Real Solution to the Fiscal Sustainability Problem.” But I was just kidding, folks. That was a solution only for people who think that Fiscal Sustainability means controlling the growth of the national debt, and stabilizing and reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio. That view of Fiscal Sustainability, however, doesn’t […]

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As I’ve blogged many times before, I don’t think there is a “fiscal sustainability problem” as the people who are presently deluging us with exhortations to bring the national debt and the debt-to-GDP ratio define it. That’s because I define “fiscal sustainability” in a different way than they do, as I’ve explained in another post. […]

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Pretty soon I plan to start blogging about the presentations and discussions emerging from the Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-Conference. But, first, I want to discuss the program design and its logic. That design was basically a reaction to the framing of the deficit hawk messaging developed from the beginning of the Obama Administration. The Peterson […]

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A few days ago I began a critique of the Catfood Commission Co-Chair Proposals draft, by focusing on a single slide of their presentation stating “our guiding principles and values.” There was enough objectionable material on that slide to justify a post. But there’s much more worth commenting on in the succeeding slides on the […]

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On April 28, 2010, The Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In Counter-Conference was held at The Marvin Center of The George Washington University In Washington, DC. The Conference was first proposed in a post I blogged on April 7th at a number of sites including this one. A group of bloggers responded and collectively, using primarily the Correntewire.com […]

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Ezra Klein did a piece yesterday offering the conventional deficit dove position on deficits and debt. Here’s a commentary on it. Gallup’s survey of voter preferences for closing the entitlement gap is incomplete It suggests the options on entitlements are like a second-grade arithmetic problem: You can either add stuff (tax increases) or subtract stuff […]

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Orszag’s maiden voyage at the New York Times entitled “One Nation, Two Deficits,” is full of myths, and that’s the polite way to say it. I’ll review these and comment on each of them one-by-one.

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New Deal 2.0 (ND20) is, well, more New Dealish than other web sites, so instead of the usual conflict between deficit hawks and deficit doves, we might see at, say, the New York Times. Here things are shifted to the left, and we see a debate between the deficit doves and the deficit owls. The […]

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Paul Krugman, well-known for his opposition to the austerity concerns of the deficit terrorists and his advocacy of additional Government stimulus to lower unemployment and end the recession, just ignited a paradigm conflict which promises to clarify for many, the issues dividing “deficit doves” like Paul, from economists who take a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) […]

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