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John C. Goodman

Can we Stop the coronavirus from Creating a financial Crisis?

Can we Stop the coronavirus from Creating a financial Crisis?

I believe the only answer is to follow a more focused version of Italy’s hard-nosed policy: put the country into a nationwide monthlong quarantine, requisition labs and build new ones and use the month to produce hundreds of millions of virus test kits and millions of ventilators. When people leave their homes, they’ll need to be tested every few days and then every week for months to ensure there are no further outbreaks.

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Will the Coronavirus Kill the global Economy?

Will the Coronavirus Kill the global Economy?

Well, consider how passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise liner fared. On February 1, just one passenger had clear signs of coronavirus. Thanks to their on-board, two-week quarantine, 691 passengers are now infected for an infection rate of one in five. If the virus can reach so many so quickly, what can it do over time?

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Paul Krugman Is Selling Snake Oil

Paul Krugman Is Selling Snake Oil

Krugman hates Republicans and hates economists who advise them. His specialty in trade is the argument ad hominem. He doesn’t just disagree with people; he psychoanalyses them. He attacks their character, their motives, their honesty and their morality.

But why attack Republicans? If we accept Krugman at his word, he cares about income inequality, racism and the lack of progress for people at the bottom of the income ladder. Republican politicians have very little control over any of that. In virtually every large city in the country, minority families are all too often forced to send their children to the worst schools. They live in the worst housing. They endure the worst environmental hazards. And in virtually every case, these cities are being run by Democrats!

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What Is Socialism?

What Is Socialism?

On Wikipedia you will discover an enormously lengthy essay on the topic. But it’s all about aspirations. Not one word about all the evil things that happened to people who lived in socialist countries in the last century or who are living under socialism today. Many people like socialism because they have no idea what it is.

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Will the Coronavirus Kill the global Economy?

Kotlikoff on the Coronavirus

I predict a massive drop in global stock markets in coming days with no rebound until what is now being called a pandemic is brought under control. Such a drop in the market will exacerbate the pessimism, which will slowly but surely engulf global business leaders and consumers and wreak havoc on the world economy. We have something very real to fear, which is producing real-time economic reactions, like the closing off of China, that are truly beyond belief. These reactions are fully capable of panicking billions of investors and consumers in our highly interconnected and mutually dependent global economy.

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Kotlikoff: Why We’re Going Broke

Kotlikoff: Why We’re Going Broke

The US has spent the entire post-war period running a massive and ever-growing Ponzi scheme that takes from the young and gives to the old. … The scheme has been and is being run by expanding take-as-you-go-financed Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems, by running huge official deficits, and by imposing a larger share of taxes on the young and a smaller share on the old. [It has] reduced the US’s national saving rate from 13% in the 1950s and 1960s to 3% in the last two decades. This underlies, in large part, a commensurate drop in the domestic investment rate, which was also 13% between 1950 and 1969 and is now running at 4%. The textbook predicted consequence? Lower median labor productivity and median real wage growth.

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Dangers in Nationalizing Health Care

Dangers in Nationalizing Health Care

Thousands forcibly sterilized by the progressives in the early 20th century. Experimentation (by withholding treatment) on black males with syphilis in the mid century. Swine flu vaccine that killed people without preventing the flu in the 1970s.

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Costly Surprises are Hidden in Medicare’s Rules

Costly Surprises are Hidden in Medicare’s Rules

You can’t trust that you are getting the real story from Social Security and Medicare websites. Medicare tells seniors they don’t have to sign up for Part B and Part D coverage if the gap between jobs is 8 months or less. The surprise: it counts the gap between ever job change and life time penalties can be a 20% increase in premiums or more. It also doesn’t warn seniors that taking capital gain can double or triple their Medicare premiums.

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Social Security Cheated 11,000 Widows Out of $130 Million

Social Security Cheated 11,000 Widows Out of $130 Million

That’s the estimate of the Office of Inspector General and it averages $10,000 a piece. Social Security personnel have been signing up widows for widow’s benefits and retirement benefits at the same time – thereby robbing them of much high retirement benefits they would have later qualified for if the paperwork had been done correctly.

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Climate Change: We Don’t Have to Sacrifice for Future Generations

Climate Change: We Don’t Have to Sacrifice for Future Generations

Greta Thunberg, the determined 16-year-old Swedish activist, has it wrong. If there is an economic payoff from avoiding global warming, there is no reason why the current generation should bear all the costs and future generations should get all the benefits. The climate can be fixed in a manner that makes every generation in every part of the world better off.

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