The Wonk Monkey was incredibly busy today and has not been able to do much reading, which makes the monkey sad.
The Planet Money team at NPR once again delivers the goods. This time they explain the insanity of Social Security Trust Funds.
But a Treasury bond, remember, is the way the government borrows money. So the government is lending the Social Security surplus to itself. And the obligation to repay those loans is the trust funds.
Obama is pledging to stand by the Afghans.
President Obama is upset at Republicans for delaying the START vote for what appears to be obvious political reasons.
If the pending treaty is not ratified quickly during the ongoing lame-duck legislative session, the president said, years of work and negotiations would go to waste, forcing the two nations to start from scratch in January
“Without ratification," Obama said, "we risk undoing decades of American leadership on nuclear security, and decades of bipartisanship on this issue.”
Many of the GOP governors are saying that they are going to make their states lean by cutting popular programs and touching many of the third rails of politics, and they suggest that Washington DC do the same.
But as the 2012 presidential campaign slowly gets under way, both veteran and newly elected Republican governors argue that the GOP can seize the high ground by becoming the party of truth-telling about the country’s pressing fiscal difficulties.
“We’re going to have to be for a very bold set of changes, we’re going to have to grab a lot of so-called ‘third rails,’” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a potential presidential hopeful, in an interview about his party.
FactCheck.org reports that despite claims to the contrary, most of the increases in Healthcare Insurance Premiums are due to rising medical costs, not the new healthcare law.
Premium rates for many in the individual market are going up. But state insurance commissioners and health care experts told us the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is responsible in most cases for only a small portion of these increases. The main cause of double-digit rate hikes is rising medical costs.
In silly political news, it is true that there is a rule in the House of Representatives that says you are not allowed to wear a hat while the House is in session.
Newsweek talks about how the Merchant of Death was captured, and why Russia didn’t want him to be extradited to the United States.
Why were the Russians so anxious to keep Bout out of American hands? Known as “Africa’s merchant of death,” Bout is thought by U.S. officials to have built an empire worth perhaps $6 billion. According to a U.N. report, he supplied arms to Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Sudan (not to mention Afghanistan). “Bout had the ability to acquire the most sophisticated weapons systems that the former Soviet bloc could offer,” Braun says. “He could not have acquired the weapons systems he did without complicity at the highest ranks of the government and military in Russia.”
Europe doesn’t have as much of a problem with their debt as their productivity.
Europe’s productivity had been catching up with that of the United States for decades, but the gap has been widening since the mid-1990s. New research by the McKinsey Global Institute finds that Europe would need to accelerate productivity growth by about 30 percent (or opt to work more) just to maintain past GDP growth—and by much more to start catching up to the U.S.’s per capita GDP.
Insider Trading is about to get a big old spotlight shown on it.
Federal authorities have been investigating a wide range of insider-trading charges for three years and are getting ready to file charges that "could ensnare consultants, investment bankers, hedge-fund and mutual-fund traders and analysts across the nation," reports the Wall Street Journal before noting that the probes "could eclipse the impact on the financial industry of any previous such investigation."
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