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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (703104)	3/7/2013 12:39:06 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577031

Paul Krugman Declares Personal Bankruptcy dailycurrant.com Mar. 06, 2013 Economist and columnist Paul Krugman declared personal bankruptcy today following a failed attempt to spend his way out of debt. In a Chapter 13 filing to the United States Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York, lawyers for Krugman listed $7,346,000 in debts versus $33,000 in assets. The majority of his debts are related to mortgage financing on a $8.7 million apartment in lower Manhattan, but the list also includes $621,537 in credit card debt and $33,642 in store financing at famed jeweler Tiffanys and Co. The filing says that Krugman got into credit card trouble in 2004 after racking up $84,000 in a single month on his American Express black card in pursuit of rare Portuguese wines and 19th century English cloth Rather than tighten his belt and pay the sums back, the pseudo-Keynesian economist decided to "stimulate" his way to a personal recovery by investing in expenses he hoped would one day boost his income. Cockroaches and Creditors Between 2004 and 2007 Krugman splurged on expensive cars, clothes, and travel in hopes that the new lifestyle would convince his bosses at the New York Times to give him a giant raise. "They say always dress for the job you want," Krugman explains. "So I thought maybe if I showed up in $70,000 Alexander Amosu suits they would give me ownership of part of the company. If I had only been granted a sliver of the New York Times Co., I could have paid everything back." Even after he realized an equity stake was not going to happen, Krugman continued to spend wildly hoping his bling and media appearances would increase demand for his personal brand and lift his book sales. His biggest mistake came in 2007, when at the height of the financial bubble he decided to invest in high-end real estate in New York City. His multi-million dollar apartment lost 40 percent of its value just months after its purchase, and has been underwater ever since. "You'd think a Nobel Prize winning economist could recognize a housing bubble," says Herman Minsky, a retired television executive who purchased Krugman's home at a huge discount. "But hey, I'm not complaining." Conscience of a Fraud Krugman, a renowned trade economist, joined the New York Times as a columnist in 2000. Since the start of the financial crisis he as used the platform to argue vociferously for what he terms Keynesian deficit spending. However, Keynes did not advocate using debt financing to stimulate the economy. Rather, he argued that government should save in the good times and spend in the bad. Through his lawyer, Bertil Ohlin, Krugman explains that despite his travails with spending and debt in his personal finances, he stands by his pseudo-Keynesian policies. "I still defend my analysis that on the macroeconomic level sovereign debt crises can be fixed by increasing government borrowing to lift aggregate demand. I admit, however, that on the microeconomic level this strategy has failed spectacularly."

To: i-node who wrote (703104)	3/7/2013 12:59:03 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577031

Broadening the Definition of "Entitlement Reform" by Ed Kilgore At the New York Times' Opinionater blog, Tom Edsall makes a very comprehensive case for dealing with the solvency issues of Social Security and Medicare via increasing the dedicated revenues supporting them (partially in the case of Medicare) instead of reducing benefits. And he also aims at pretty sharp "J'Accuse!" at Beltway elites who are obsessed with "entitlement reform" but somehow only see benefit cuts as legitimate ways of accomplishing "reform." The basic facts on the regressivity of federal payroll taxes are generally known, but Edsall brings them into sharper relief: The Medicare and Social Security taxes are jointly known as FICA (for Federal Insurance Contributions Act) — or payroll — taxes. The combined FICA taxes are highly regressive. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center found that the poorest quintile pays a 7.3 percent FICA rate, while the top quintile pays 6.8 percent. The top 1 percent of the income distribution pays a 2 percent rate, and the top 0.1 percent pays just 0.9 percent. In other words, the rate paid by the poorest quintile is 8.1 times as high as the rate paid by the top 0.1 percent.Simply lifting the cap on the Social Security portion of FICA would entirely solve that program's funding shortfall for the next 75 years, according to Congressional Budget Office projections cited by Edsall. That would eliminate the egregiously regressive nature of FICA taxes, but wouldn't exactly "soak the rich," particularly since these taxes only apply to earned--not investment--income. Edsall is less specific in the kinds of revenue measures that could be applied to the Medicare portion of the payroll tax, which does not have the arbitrary "cap" applied to Social Security taxes. But he's right that this whole subject rarely appears in discussions of "entitlement reform." As someone who does not consider Social Security and Medicare to be sacrosanct programs progressives are not allowed to consider changing because that represents "playing on the other team's turf" or some other violation of slippery-slope fears, I find Edsall's piece important not just because he offers an alternative to benefit cuts--but because he challenges the straightened definition of "entitlement reform" that makes the whole topic inherently partisan and impossibly ideological. Finding ways to reduce health care inflation, which would have a massively beneficial effect on the financing of Medicare, Medicaid, and the entire federal budget, is a form of "entitlement reform." Boosting payroll taxes is a form of "entitlement reform." Only when the term stops being ill-disguised code for a particular type of "reforms" favored by conservatives and Beltway deficit hawks from both parties can we have a real discussion on options for maintaining the solvency and effectiveness of the social safety net.