Utopia, you are standing in it!

When I put forth the “The Case for Social Security Personal Accounts” in early 2011, I pointed out that the program’s long-run fiscal shortfall was more than $27 trillion.

We should be so lucky to have that problem today.

The Social Security Administration just released the annual report on the program’s finances, so I went to to Table VI.G9 of the “Supplemental Single-Year Tables” to peruse the yearly projections for future revenue and spending (which are adjusted for inflation so we have a more accurate method for comparisons).

The bad news is that an ever-increasing amount of our income is going to be grabbed by payroll taxes. The worse news is that Social Security’s spending burden will climb at an even-faster rate (historical data to the left of the red line, future projections to the right of the red line).

For those who focus on

Edward II (April 25, 1284 – September 21, 1327), also called Edward of Carnarvon, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327.

Edward II was the fourth son of Edward I, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Infanta Eleanor of Castile, Countess of Ponthieu in northern France.

Infanta Eleanor of Castile, Countess of Ponthieu was born in Burgos, daughter of King Fernando III of Castile and Joan, Countess of Ponthieu. Her Castilian name, Leonor, became Alienor or Alianor in England, and Eleanor in modern English. She was named after her paternal great-grandmother, Eleanor of England.

By his first wife Eleanor of Castile, King Edward I of England had at least fourteen children, perhaps as many as sixteen. Of these, five daughters survived into adulthood, but only one son, and last child, outlived his father, King Edward II (1307–1327).

Here are the…

There are few economists that have had a bigger influence on my thinking about monetary matters than former Richmond Fed economist Robert Hetzel.

Bob is not only one of my biggest intellectual heroes, but also a very a good friend and I am therefore extremely happy that he has allowed to publish some of this insights and thoughts on Fed’s 50bp ’emergency’ rate cut today.

Lars Christensen

Fed and Covid19

By Robert Hetzel

Cutting the funds rate just before an FOMC meeting sends a strong but not necessarily appropriate message.  The fact that the cut came without the discussion from the regional Bank presidents of their respective regions that would come routinely at an FOMC meeting suggests that the FOMC was responding to the decline in the stock market.

That turned out badly for the Fed in October 1987 when the market fell 20% and the FOMC cut the funds…

As an economist I am not happy about going into having strong views on the causes of why people die from Covid19, but at least I can have a look at correlations.

It has been very clear for some time that very few people younger than 50 years old die from Covid19.

In fact the average of people dying with Covid19 have been around 80 years in most countries and men are more likely to die than women.

These simple facts made me think – how much of this can explain the different mortality rates we observe across countries?

Why has so many people died in Italy and Spain, while mortality rates have been much lower in for example Scandinavia? Similarly why are mortality rates so low in most developing countries?

Can the age composition explain this? The graph below give us the answer.

In the graph I have plotted…

Not the only lunatic making $millions by lying to the masses.

Apoplexy is the order of the day among ‘green’ energy zealots following the release of Mike Moore’s ‘Planet of The Humans’.

In the military they call it “blue on blue”, although when the hard left are pulling the trigger it’s more aptly described as “green on green”.

But the documentary backed by Moore isn’t so much ‘friendly fire’, as an all-out assault on the billionaire hypocrites who whipped up fear and frenzy over changes in the weather and then, as if by magic, produced the notional ‘solution’ to the calamity in the form of heavily subsidised wind, solar and biomass. A ‘’solution’ which, of course, they all heavily invested in.

The film – produced by Moore and made by Jeff Gibbs – has been uploaded to YouTube to allow all and sundry to get the message: renewable energy is…

Today we hear from Dr Andrew Barclay, senior research fellow for our Commons 1640-1660 project. He explores the accuracy of the naming of the so-called Convention Parliament of 1660…

Prior to dissolving itself on 16 March 1660, the Long Parliament had agreed that a new Parliament should meet on 25 April. The elections held over the next six weeks used the old franchises revived for the 1659 Parliament. Unlike then, the new Parliament did not include MPs from Scotland and Ireland. The other obvious difference from 1659 was that it included the traditional House of Lords, not the Cromwellian ‘Other House’. The new assembly was consciously intended as the Long Parliament’s successor, although, crucially, one with a fresh electoral mandate.

But was this a ‘Parliament’? Modern historians have usually said that at this stage it was instead a ‘Convention’, on the basis that it had not been…

Things not looking too good right now? Let’s take a nostalgic trip back to the world of April 1975. This month, the Vietnam War ended after around 1.35 million people had been killed; a further two million Vietnamese would subsequently flee the communist regime. In neighbouring Cambodia, the Khymer Rouge emerged as victors in the civil war; genocide would follow, with up to two million deaths – a quarter of the population – in the next five years. Meanwhile, civil war broke out in Lebanon; by the time it finished in 1990, an estimated 150,000 had been killed. Oh, and there was a military coup in Chad.
And this was the top 10 in Britain for the week ending 26 April 1975.

1. Bay City Rollers, ‘Bye Bye Baby’ (Bell)

As you were.

1. Bobby Goldsboro, ‘Honey’ (UA)

When this was first released in 1968, it reached #2 in the British…

The Bride

Mary I, Queen of Scotland (December 8, 1542 – February 8, 1587), reigned over Scotland from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567.

Mary I, Queen of Scotland

Mary was born on December 8, 1542 at Linlithgow Palace, Scotland, to King James V of Scotland and his French second wife, Mary of Guise. She was said to have been born prematurely and was the only legitimate child of James to survive him. She was the great-niece of King Henry VIII of England, as her paternal grandmother, Princess Margaret of England, was Henry VIII’s sister. Besides being the queen of Scotland, Mary was a granddaughter of Claude, Duke of Guise, a very influential figure at the court of France.

On December 14, 1542, six days after her birth, she became Queen of Scotland when her father died, following the Battle of Solway Moss after drinking contaminated water while on…

Michael Moore has put his latest movie, “Planet of the Humans” free on YouTube. It’s directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs (Moore is the executive producer) and is 1 hour and 40 minutes long: just right for quarantine watching. I have to admit that I haven’t yet seen it, but I surely will. (I regard watching videos, or television, as luxuries that induce in me a sense of guilt.) But what I gather is that—as with all Moore’s films—it’s Manichaean, and two of the villains here are the mainstream environmental movement and “green energy”. The lesson seems to be that we’re doomed unless we practice stringent population control.

Here are the YouTube notes:

Michael Moore presents Planet of the Humans, a documentary that dares to say what no one else will this Earth Day — that we are losing the battle to stop climate change on planet earth…

Patton: A Genius For War
by Carlo D’Este
977 pages
HarperCollins
Published: November 1995

“Patton: A Genius For War” was published in 1995 and is the biography for which Carlo D’Este is best known.  He is an author, military historian and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. Three years ago I read and reviewed his 2002 biography of Dwight Eisenhower as part of my journey through the best presidential biographies.

There are few better pairings in the world of biography than George S. Patton – a wickedly complicated, imperious and colorful military mind – and Carlo D’Este. With 820 pages of text and a treasure trove of uncommonly illuminating notes and bibliography this book is comprehensive, balanced, unfailingly attentive and the product of meticulous research. What it is not, however, is efficient.

Published 50 years after Patton’s death, this book features an excellent prologue and…

So-called ‘green’ jobs are a case of easy come, easy go. The wind and solar ‘industries’ that gave birth to those jobs simply can’t survive without massive and endless subsidies, which means their days are numbered.

With the axe being taken to subsidies across the globe, their ultimate demise is a matter of when, not if.

The German wind industry is in free-fall: new construction is at a standstill, in no small part due to the fact that rural Germans are in full-scale revolt against the wind industry.

In 2019 less than 200 turbines were erected onshore and a trifling 160 are planned for 2020, so far.

Tens of thousands of those groovy ‘green’ jobs that the wind industry promised would last forever, have disappeared, almost overnight.

Seeking to cash in on America’s response to the coronavirus crisis its wind and solar power outfits tried to snare $billions out of…

One distressing characteristic of the Left, at least as far as science is concerned, is to let our ideology trump scientific data; that is, some of us ignore biological data when it’s inimical to our political preferences. This plays out in several ways: the insistence that race doesn’t exist (and before you accuse me of saying that races do exist, read about what I’ve written here before: the issue is complex), that there are no evolutionarily-based innate (e.g., genetically based) behavioral or psychological differences between ethnic groups, and that there are no such differences, either, between males and females within humans.

These claims are based not on biological data, but on ideological fears of the Left: if we admit of such differences, it could foster racism and sexism.  Thus. any group differences we do observe, whether they reside in psychology, physiology, or morphology, are to be explained on first principle as resulting from culture rather…