Chicago Daily Observer

The most alarming thing about Mr. Obama’s proposal is that the $250,000 threshold, above which the payroll tax would be applied, refers to household income, not individual income. So it’s quite deceptive when he claims that the $250,000 threshold will “ensure that lifting the payroll tax cap does not ensnare any middle class Americans.”

Suppose your household consists of you and your spouse, each earning wages of $150,000 per year. Currently, you are each subject to the payroll tax up to $102,000 of wages, so together you are taxed on $204,000. Under the Obama plan, you’d be taxed again on another $50,000 of wages.

Age typically is associated with maturity, with maturity being associated with taking on adult responsibilities like providing for one’s self and one’s family. Yet in his Chicago Daily Observer column, Don Rose demands that as our population ages, our politicians should take the expedient 10–15 year time frame, rather than acting as stewards for lasting financial security. Whatever his reason, it’s clear he doesn’t want to address the underlying actuarial problems of Social Security.

This is the equivalent of US retirees throwing a big party and then flying out of town at the end of the party, leaving friends and family to clean up the mess. Or, really, just the younger friends and family.

If you know anything about mathematics, you know that Social Security is a demographic time bomb. It will begin to run a deficit at some ... Read More...

Among our longest-standing political clichés is that Social Security is the third rail in American politics—threaten it and you will be politically electrocuted. This could easily happen to John McCain come general election time, and here’s why:

A few years ago, 2005 to be exact, George W. Bush sidled up to the issue by proposing the creation of private social security investment accounts to supplement the present system—in effect partially privatizing the system. It didn’t take the public long to recognize that this was the first stage of the ultraconservative agenda to ultimately do away with Social Security and similar entitlements.

The response was somewhat slow to build, but soon the uproar knocked the administration back on its heels.

They tried fitfully to change the name “private” accounts to “personal” accounts, but it was too late. An overwhelming majority of the country saw privatization as a threat to the lifeline ... Read More...

The recent revelation that the FBI has received information about “possible holiday terror attacks on Chicago and Los Angeles shopping malls” has caused some alarm, even though, as the Chicago Sun-Times points out, ”[t]he FBI downplayed” the warning, while an FBI spokesman told the L.A. Times that “There is no information to state this is a credible threat.” According to the L.A. Times, “a declassified version of an intelligence report” detailing possible threats was “distributed to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country” and—surprise, surprise—was quickly leaked to the media, which slipped into panic mode. (TV stations need to keep their ratings up during the writers’ strike, after all.)

FBI spokesman Richard Kolko explained that, “Out of an abundance of caution, and for any number of other reasons, raw intelligence is regularly shared within the intelligence and law enforcement communities—even when the value of the ... Read More...

I settled into my seat for a flight a few days ago from Chicago to Washington, D.C., and opened my book: “What Makes a Terrorist.” I now recognize that this probably wasn’t the best choice of reading material for a crowded plane.

But it is a good read. The author, Princeton economist Alan Krueger, has written an accessible and interesting book on the causes of terrorism. (Disclosure: Krueger was my statistics professor in graduate school; I did badly in the class, which is why I now happily write articles like this that involve no math.)