Federal Debt

Motels evict, gouge; tent/RV camping sucks, and kids suffer the most, but we don’t ‘shiv-a-git’ — As summer rolls around, one group of motel-dwellers will feel the heat the most — families and individuals who’ve lost housing. Motels/hotels welcome tourists in summer, so they want to get rid of the “riff-raff” using these accommodations as a substitute for housing. In every community, if you look beyond…

** It’s a story as old as Capitalism. Downtown, the borrower frets over their next loan payment. They’re strapped and don’t have enough cash to meet their current payment. If they’re not careful, they’ll go into default, and no one is quite sure what that would mean. While across town…

A Moral Economy #10. Part III: How do we get from here to there? — This continues a three part series of excerpts from Social Security Basic Income: A Safety Net for All Americans, which I published in March 2020. Part I: What would it look like? concluded with #2 and Part II: What do we have? concluded with #8. This essay includes text from…

The interest rate on the 10-year treasury has done something that has only occurred one other time in the history of the series (dating back to the 1950s), it has managed to rise above the fed funds rate peak from the previous rate hiking cycle, in this case the cycle…

I heard a politician the other day claiming that we needed to address Social Security to bring the federal deficit under control. This was a claim I had heard many times before by a wide range of politicians. So, I investigated how much Social Security was adding to the deficit. …

You’ve probably noticed by now that prices for many consumer goods have gone up significantly (if they are available at all). The Labor Department recently reported that the producer price index for wholesalers increased by 9.7% in 2021. Major news outlets report inflation at its highest level in 40 years. …

It is very possible that Moody’s Investors Service, or Fitch Rating agency, (or both) may downgrade the credit rating of the U.S. sovereign debt in the near term.[1] This is an alarming scenario with major negative repercussions for domestic and global financial markets and the overall U.S. …

Go into politics. It’s a great time. Work your way up the ranks and get yourself to Washington. The new-era thinking doesn’t apply to local or state government, just federal. By the time you get there it will be fully entrenched. You’ll find yourself inside a historical window that might…

Terry H. Schwadron July 30, 2021 In the three-ring circus that is our government, off to the side, Republicans are forcing a traditional, if tedious attack on federal spending once again, by threatening a refusal to raise the national debt ceiling anytime soon. Even as Washington celebrates a bipartisan win…