Category Archive: Income and poverty

• Is the Chained CPI the Right Fix for Social Security?

  Ed Dolan April 29th, 2013

  One of the most controversial elements of President Obama’s 2014 budget is the proposal to reduce future cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security benefits by changing the inflation index. The Social Security Administration now bases inflation adjustments to on the consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers (CPI-W), a close cousin of the [...]

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• Understanding the Plutocrats: Talent vs. Capital, The Illusion of Skill, and the Winner’s Curse

  Ed Dolan February 27th, 2013

  In my spare time, I have been reading Chrystia Freeland’s The Plutocrats. A refreshingly nonjudgmental book, it seeks neither to condemn nor defend the super-rich, but simply to understand them. The author’s brisk, journalistic prose, with references hidden away at the end by page number, belies the fact that she has done her homework in [...]

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• Tax Incentives for Retirement Saving are not Working. Can we Find a Better Way? (Part 2)

  Ed Dolan January 25th, 2013

  In a previous post in this series, I criticized proposals to raise the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare. It is already getting harder to save enough for a comfortable retirement; raising the eligibility age would just make it  still more difficult. In this installment, I turn to policies to encourage retirement saving, explaining [...]

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• Let’s Not Make it Any Harder to Retire; It’s Getting Harder All the Time as it is. (Part 1)

  Ed Dolan January 21st, 2013

  Last week the Business Roundtable came out with a position paper entitled “Social Security Reform and Medicare Modernization Proposals.” Its centerpiece is an increase to 70 in the eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. According to Gary W. Loveman, Ph.D., Chairman, CEO & President, Caesars Entertainment Corporation, and Chair of the Roundtable’s Health and Retirement [...]

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• When Does ‘It Will Hurt the Poor’ Outweigh ‘It’s Good for the Environment?’

  Ed Dolan February 24th, 2012

  “Nearly every environmental policy hurts the poor the most,” say Iain Murray and David Bier of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Writing recently in the Washington Examiner, they don’t limit their criticism to absurdities like federal tax credits for the $100,000 plug-in Fisker Karma (“a bold expression of uncompromised responsible luxury.”) The two analysts have it [...]

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• Reforming the Payroll Tax: We Need More Than Another Temporary Cut. We Need a Permanent Fix

  Ed Dolan February 14th, 2012

  President Obama’s 2013 budget includes a proposal to extend the current 2 percent payroll tax cut, first put in place last year, for the balance of 2012. Congress will probably go along after another round of grandstanding. Yes, the payroll tax is too high. In itself, even a small, temporary cut might be welcome, but [...]

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• Latest Economic Data Begin to Shift the Counterfactual in Favor of Democrats

  Ed Dolan February 6th, 2012

  For all of last year, as the parties tested their rhetoric in the early stages of the election campaign, Democrats were stuck in the unenviable position of arguing a counterfactual: “The economy is bad, but without what we have done, it would have been even worse.” That could very well  have been true, but it [...]

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• Best Economics News Story of 2011: Dickens Meets Hayek in a Mumbai Slum

  Ed Dolan December 31st, 2011

  My one-man committee has met and made a decision: The award for best economics news story of the year goes to Jim Yardley of The New York Times for an article titled “In One Slum, Misery, Work, Politics and Hope,” published in the December 29 issue. It is a story about Dharavi, Mumbai’s most famous [...]

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• Understanding the New View of Poverty (2): What Helps and What Hurts

  Ed Dolan November 14th, 2011

  Last week, the Census Bureau published a new Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that changes our understanding of poverty in America. The first installment of this post looked at the way it erodes our stereotypes of who is poor, especially by showing that there are more poor white, working-age, home-owning Americans than we thought. No matter [...]

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• Understanding the New View of Poverty (1): The Erosion of Stereotypes

  Ed Dolan November 8th, 2011

  We all thought we knew who is poor in America. Children, especially in one-parent households. Racial minorities. Families who aren’t able to participate in the great American dream of home ownership. Really? The Census Bureau’s new Supplementary Poverty Measure (SPM) erodes all of these stereotypes. They still contain some truth, but less than it seemed. [...]

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