Just another Reality-based bubble in the foam of the multiverse.

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

Stopping the rush

What Krugman says here .

Why he says it here . Warning: a .cgi file written by a Princeton economist, Dr. Krugman himself. You have to download it and read it with an Acrobat reader- a free application you can get from the site.

Read it if you haven't already, for goodies like:

There are three main points of confusion in the Social Security debate (confusion
that is deliberately created, for the most part, but never mind that for now). These
are:
• The meaning of the trust fund: in order to create a sense of crisis, proponents of privatization consider the trust fund either real or fictional, depending on what is convenient
• The rate of return that can be expected on private accounts: privatizers claim that there is a huge free lunch from the creation of these accounts, a free lunch that is based on very dubious claims about future stock returns
• How to think about implicit liabilities in the far future: privatizers brush aside the huge negative fiscal consequences of their plans in the short run, claiming that reductions in promised payments many decades in the future are an adequate offset.


The details are in pretty much non technical language, too.

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