The Daily Kos featured the Cartoon: Paul Ryan tours the ‘inner city’.

If Paul Ryan had really said this, it would be a classic example of kidding on the square.

The New York Times has the OpEd The Timidity Trap by Paul Krugman.

And I’d argue that an important source of failure was what I’ve taken to calling the timidity trap — the consistent tendency of policy makers who have the right ideas in principle to go for half-measures in practice, and the way this timidity ends up backfiring, politically and even economically.
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The classic example is the Obama stimulus, which was obviously underpowered given the economy’s dire straits. That’s not 20/20 hindsight. Some of us warned right from the beginning that the plan would be inadequate — and that because it was being oversold, the persistence of high unemployment would end up discrediting the whole idea of stimulus in the public mind. And so it proved.

What’s not as well known is that the Fed has, in its own way, done the same thing. From the start, monetary officials ruled out the kinds of monetary policies most likely to work — in particular, anything that might signal a willingness to tolerate somewhat higher inflation, at least temporarily. As a result, the policies they have followed have fallen short of hopes, and ended up leaving the impression that nothing much can be done.

This is another ironic Paul Krugman piece where he unknowingly identifies his own problem and blames it on others.

The irony is that a purported Keynesian economist is too timid to come right out and say what it is that Keynes taught us.  There is no monetary solution to this problem.  Anybody who pretends that the Fed has any effective tools to combat the type of Great Recession that we faced is setting us all up for a huge disappointment.

Krugman does identify the weakness in Obama’s stimulus.  He should never leave that topic.  To hint that there is another solution in the hands of the Fed is to promote Milton Friedman propaganda.  At various points, Krugman admits that he was mesmerized and bamboozled by Friedman, but he seems to forget these moments of clarity for the most part.

Truthout has the article Abby Huntsman Promotes the Wall Street Banksters’ Big Lie. The article has this piece of information that I am surprised that I did not know (because it is not true).

From when it was created in 1935 up until the 1980s, Social Security was paid for by taxes coming in from people who were currently working. In other words, people currently in the workforce paid for the Social Security benefits of people who had already retired and started collecting Social Security checks.

But in 1983, the Reagan administration changed things around. It raised Social Security taxes so that, in effect, working people from the Boomer generation would pay for both their own retirement and the retirement of people older than them.

The Reagan administration did this so that Social Security could afford the benefits surge that would come about once all the Boomers retired. The extra money it got from raising Social Security taxes was invested in government bonds. Today we call that extra money the Social Security trust fund.

And right now, that fund is working just swimmingly. In fact, it’s running at a $2.6 trillion surplus!

As a result, Social Security, will continue to pay out 100 percent of its scheduled benefits, until 2033, when the trust fund runs out of money.

Again, though, this isn’t a problem. It’s part of the plan.

The trust fund was created to pay for Boomers’ retirements, and since by 2033 most Boomers will be well into their eighties and nineties, it makes sense that the fund will run out by then.

Maybe, I need to do some more research on this.  It is odd that I have never seen this information about the trust fund until today.

The Social Security Administration web site has the article Debunking Some Internet Myths.

The Social Security Trust Fund was created in 1939 as part of the Amendments enacted in that year. From its inception, the Trust Fund has always worked the same way. The Social Security Trust Fund has never been “put into the general fund of the government.”

The statement at the end of the excerpt from the article about Abby Huntsman is very misleading.  The trust fund was not created to pay for Boomer’s retirements.