I just compared age demographic data from the 2010 Census with data from the 2000 Census. And the numbers very clearly reveal the coming economic challenges that will be experienced by both Social Security and Medicare. Overall, the percentage of the population between 65 and 85-plus grew from 21 percent in 2000 to 23.4 percent in 2010. A small part of this growth was in the 85 and older group, which grew from 1.5 percent of the population to 1.7 percent. The biggest growth in the oldster demographic,...

Many countries have a sense of being exceptional. The idea here is that their special relationship with God, or their indigenous holy sites, or some ruins of a great civilization past, or a battle that saved civilization, or some political innovation that has become the guiding light of the world, makes their own land a heck of a lot better and more important than all the others. America has now taken this exceptionalist notion into a brave new realm. We are practicing an economic and financial...

Over the past two years my feelings toward President Obama have gone through a number of stages. 1. Denial. I didn’t think Barack Obama was ready to be president in 2008. I thought he had a huge potential but needed a few more years of seasoning — needed the kind of experience that would make him less prone to go along with Clinton-era financial gurus, and less dependent on the policy advice from best-and-brightest political advisors who adhere to the national Democratic Party like barnacles....

The natter coming out of the White House these days is that the tax package just negotiated with the Republicans will act as a mini-stimulus that will give the economy an added boost in 2011 as the last of he $700 billion stimulus measure passed in 2009 expires. If the White House crowd actually believes this, along with its other problems, it has a counting problem. Virtually none of this tax stimulus is actually new, The Bush-era tax cuts, for both middle class and upper income tax payers, have...

That old saying that we have the best congress and president money can buy is wrong. With all the money that was spent buying these worthies in the last two election cycles we should have gotten a far better political product. We didn’t end up with a president with liberal leanings as so many voters believed they would get in 2008. What we got instead is someone surrounded and advised by the same crowd that ran things in the Clinton years — a time these folks regard as a golden age rather...

The New York Times ran a really scary story the other day. Titled “Mounting state debt stoke fear of looming crisis,” it detailed how a few states such as California and Illinois are in such dire financial straits that they might soon have trouble meeting their obligations — even after steep reductions in state services. This was spooky enough. But buried in this long piece was a single line that was truly sinister in its implications. Hedge funds,” it read, “are already...

Many people are confused about the seemingly incomprehensible behavior of the Democratic Party in recent years. Not me. That’s because I’m a regular viewer of old episodes of the sitcom “Senfield.” And if you understand what that sitcom was all about, you’ll understand today’s Democratic Party. “Seinfeld,” as was often stated during this series itself, was about nothing. It merely followed a group of dysfunctional, amoral New Yorkers doing silly things...

Is the notion that the our government’s economic, tax and regulatory policies have largely been created by Wall Street and its proxies in recent decades a liberal fantasy? Here’s some things to consider in this regard. Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary for most of the Clinton years, came from a quarter century career at Goldman Sachs, and after leaving government became an adviser to Citigroup and for a time its chairman. Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush, who presided...

Yes, even in tough times there are still ways to get rich in America. In this regard, here’s a half-dozen tips guaranteed to get you into the big buck big leagues. 1, Run for public office every two years. The office and the party you choose aren’t important. What matters is that the positions you espouse with great heat and furious energy attract a following that includes some individuals or groups with money to support your campaigns. Spend these contributions frugally, and keep what’s...

Here’s a basic rule to think about before joining a poker game. If after looking around the table you haven’t spotted the “fish,” the person almost certain to be the big loser, you’re the fish. And in case you haven’t noticed it yet, in the great game of Afghan Poker now being played in that benighted land, the United States has become the table’s big, really big, fish. The other major players at this table are al Qeada, the Taliban, the Pakistani intelligence...

When Paul Krugman sounds like Glenn Beck, you know the country is in trouble. Bad trouble. In today’s New York Times Krugman’s “Let There Be Blood” column keyed off a remark by Alan Simpson, one of the chairs of the bipartisan presidential commission established to formulate ways to address the national debt. Simpson’s remark referred to an upcoming vote next April on raising the nation’s debt limit, and the political crisis this now seems likely to spawn. The...

I was speaking with a good friend the other day, Kay Wood, an astute observer of American politics, and she had an insight that rang true. Democrats behave a lot like dogs, and Republicans a lot like cats. Dogs long to bond. They want to be loved, to lick your hand, to be patted in return. Getting a health care measure through a Democratic Congress illustrated this dog-like behavior nicely. Potential opponents in the health care industry were fuzzied up to and accommodated. Obstructionist senators...

In recent days we’ve been presented with two bipartisan plans to address America’s horrific annual deficits. The spending cuts suggested in both these plans are similar. They envision extremely painful reductions in Social Security payments, much higher co-pays for Medicare recipients, and a sharp decrease in military spending. The tax-related ideas in these plans, however, are not so straight forward. Rather, they feature complex tweaks and reshapings of the tax code. Neither plan mentions,...

Poor Jim DeMint. The Republican senator from South Carolina, the financial godfather of the Tea Party movement, the other day had to explain on TV the “compromise” being worked out between his party and the Democrats over extending tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of American earners. And he had to do so while being so deliriously and deliciously bemused about what he and his pals are about to get away with, that the poor man had to fight not to laugh so hard he fell off his chair. The...

A great blues lyric goes: “He was a good old wagon but he done broke down.” That’s a pretty good description of both the Democrats and Republicans today — two good old political parties that have both broken down to such an extent that neither any longer is configured to meet our country’s strained and painful domestic realities, or the challenges of our fast eroding position in the world. We have a weak and vacillating Democratic President. We’ve had weak presidents...

Some presidents rock. Some presidents roll. Our present chief executive is a world class roller. He’s in the process of rolling today when it comes to extending lower tax rates for America’s top 2 percent earners. It’s just the latest of his seemingly endless rollovers. He’s rolled for Natanyahu, for Karzai, for Patraeus and the gang at the Pentagon, for every senator with a health care itch or twitch, and for pretty much any Republican school yard media bully who calls him...

One definition of a lousy poker player is someone who throws away a winning hand, someone who loses with two pair to the guy across the table who’s sitting with eight high and bluffs a win. That’s also a pretty good definition of a lousy politician. Or a political party whose time has passed. The big issue before the coming lame duck session of Congress, an issue that will likely set the tone for the next two years in the relationship between a Democratic President and Senate, and the...

One of the few upsides of a down economy is supposed to be a lack of inflation. And indeed, all the experts agree inflation in our own economy hardly exists these days. Except, of course, it does. The latest contradiction of the officially decreed “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” approach to inflation reality came to me the other day in the form of a notice from my health insurer. Beginning this coming January, my monthly payment is going up 22 percent — a pretty hefty...

In a recent post I used a statistic that appeared in a Bob Herbert New York Times column. It incorrectly stated that Americans making more than $50 million a year had seen a huge increase in their earnings between 2008 and 2009, when their earnings had actually decreased by 7.7 percent in that period. Herbert apologized today for using this incorrect statistic in his column. I would like to do the same here. We live in difficult times. And like so many other Americans, folks making $50 million or...

There is no recovery underway except in the minds of a few myopic economists and a Geithner-ridden Obama Administration. Though it desperately wished to avoid doing so, the Federal Reserve has been forced to twig to this reality. It has tried all the old style ways of getting the economy back on its feet, most notably lowering the fed funds rate to virtually zero, all to no effect. It’s latest panic move to rouge the economic corpse involves pumping $600 billion over the next eight months...

Doctors have a problem diagnosing when a patient’s only complaint is that he or she just feels really rotten. It can be even harder for the medico if this patient has all kinds of symptoms to go along with this generalized feeling, many of them seemingly contradictory. The same sort of diagnostic challenge today confronts political analysts looking over the outcome of yesterday’s midterm election. Yes, the patient here, the American voter, obviously feels really, really rotten. But the...

I started writing TV commercial reviews decades ago. I didn’t do it because I found these commercials so entertaining — though in truth they are often far more entertaining than the programs they interrupted. I did these reviews because I thought the commercials themselves represented a genuinely indigenous American art form, perhaps this country’s only truly indigenous art form. Many people describe jazz in this way. Its rhythms are African, however, and its instrumentation European....

In his recent interview with Jon Stewart, President Obama seemed surprised when the audience laughed after he said his policies had made the economy better. The poor man. Surrounded by economists in his administration who view growth of the GDP (gross domestic product) as the only true measure of an economy’s health, he naturally thought his policies had made our economic lives better. There had, after all, been at least a tepid GDP uptick in recent months. Mr. Obama shares a misapprehension...

There are those who seem disturbed, indeed disgusted, that Hamid Karzai, the current head of what passes for a government in Afghanistan, declared publicly that he has accepted bagfuls of cash from both Iran and the U.S. These critics even point to the what-are-you-gonna-about-it smirk he wore when announcing this cash gobbling. Fie! on such critics, I say, Fie! It’s been made clear by the Supreme Court in our own country that money is free speech, which of course legally licenses buying...

Breakfast with Omar Khayyam A decaf cup and with it will appear a toasted bagel with a schmeer together now at Starbucks served—who knew! Empty thy plate, now crammed with scrambled eggs and home fries floating in the eggy dregs the breakfast special hath an expiry of 10 a joy!—’til lunch time prices come again. Come, read thy Times without a morning froth at news you think is flagrantly contrived confront not angrily this journalistic broth before some joe thy spirits have revived. Some...