Monthly Archives: February 2014

The Ominous Message in 2 Centuries of Global Public Finances

After our recent article showing the history of non-defense budget balances for large, developed countries, some readers wondered how our results might change with defense spending included. Here’s a new chart showing total budget balances:

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Technical Notes for ‘Real World’ Scenario

This is an appendix for our earlier post, “Reviving the ‘Real World’ Scenario That’s Disappeared from Government Reports.”

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Reviving the ‘Real World’ Scenario That’s Disappeared from Government Reports

For 50 years or so the federal government has deliberately and to an increasing extent misstated probable future budget deficits. Democrats and Republicans are guilty. The White House is guilty. And so is Congress. Private firms that deliberately misrepresent their … Continue reading

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Revisiting the Reinhart-Rogoff Kerfuffle, Part 2

This is part two of an article that was published last month in the POLICY Magazine of the Centre for Independent Studies. We updated our reporting on last year’s Reinhart-Rogoff controversy in the first part. In the second part, we explain … Continue reading

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Revisiting the Reinhart-Rogoff Kerfuffle and the Consequences of High Government Debt

Last September, the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) asked us for an article updating our commentary on the Reinhart-Rogoff controversy, while combining it with one of our government debt studies.  The article appeared in the latest issue of the organization’s POLICY Magazine, which hit … Continue reading

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Technical Notes for ‘Mr. Smith’

This is an appendix for our earlier post, “Why the CBO’s Mr. Smith Has More Work To Do.”

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Why The CBO’s ‘Mr. Smith’ Has More Work To Do

From budget projections released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) last week: CBO now expects that output will fall slightly short of its potential, on average, even after the economy has largely recovered from the recent economic downturn. Translation: We’ve … Continue reading

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Technical Notes For ‘Why The Next Global Crisis…’

If you like knowing that your faithful blogger scours obscure data sources in dark corners of libraries to bring you analysis you’re unlikely to find in the mainstream media, you’ve come to the right place. As we worked on the … Continue reading

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Why The Next Global Crisis Will Be Unlike Any In The Last 200 Years

Sometime soon, we’ll take a shot at summing up our long-term economic future with just a handful of charts and research results. In the meantime, we’ve created a new chart that may be the most important piece. There are two … Continue reading

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Your Government At ‘Work’

From today’s CBO report: CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers will choose to … Continue reading

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