John Carney takes a stab at answering my question about why we have a debt ceiling, saying that it “helps raise public awareness about the costs of government”:
Lawmakers must go on record as approving an increase in the debt limit in order to enable the government to borrow to fund the spending the lawmakers have approved. They must confront, in a very public manner, the costs of the programs they have enacted.
I’m not at all sure this is the actual reason why we have a debt ceiling; at best it’s a behavioral reason not to abolish it. But it’s not a good reason.
Let’s take a personal-finance analogy here. A credit card company comes along and offers you a card with a $200,000 credit limit—much more than you should ever borrow. But you know that if the money is there for the spending, you’ll be more likely to spend it. So you phone up the credit card company and do a deal with them. You set the limit very low—$1,000, say—and then, any time you want to go over that limit, you have to phone up the credit card company and get them to raise it.
You know in advance that the credit card company will say yes: after all, they’ve already told you that as far as they’re concerned they’re happy to lend you $200,000. But being forced to phone them up and ask for a credit-line increase helps to drive home the consequences of your spending decisions, in a way that simply whipping your card out at the Apple Store doesn’t.
So far so good. But what if you were using your card not only to buy iPads, but also to make rent? And what if there were possible glitches with the system whereby you phoned up and asked for a credit-limit increase, so that you couldn’t be sure it would always work? And what if a single late rent payment could be catastrophic, ending up with you thrown out of your home? At that point, your clever system would stop seeming so clever, and start seeming downright risky.
And that’s the problem with the debt ceiling. It might have interesting and possibly even beneficial behavioral second-order effects, although there’s precious little evidence for that. But getting those beneficial effects means playing with fiscal high explosives, which run the risk of blowing up in the economy’s face and causing major damage. It simply isn’t worth it.
It’s not a pretty spectacle when a very rich man tells little people they ought to get by with less, particularly when his firm benefitted handsomely from the pump and dump operation that led to the financial crisis.
Pete Peterson, one of the two founders of the Blackstone Group, has had a longstanding campaign against Social Security and Medicare. He’s sufficiently aggressive that to combat consistent poll ratings that show that both programs enjoy substantial support, his foundation set out to generate different survey results by stacking the deck heavily in its favor. As we recounted last July:
For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a wider PR campaign. It’s important to keep tabs on this propaganda effort, since its big budget (the Foundation has a billion dollars to its name), means it will keep hammering away on this topic. But it appears that they overestimated how much public opinion expensively produced and stage-managed presentations can buy.
The brazenness and ham handedness of these so-called “America Speaks” sessions, which have garnered well deserved criticism on the Internet, is probably due to at least two factors: deluded confidence that the average person will fall into line when a confident and well-credentialed presenter makes a pitch and a stunningly naive belief that aggressive efforts to manipulate opinion and mislabel it as polling would not be called out.
And we also noted:
It is refreshing that this effort failed, but it is a given that the Peterson crowd will go back to the drawing board and figure out a way to credibly produce the answer it wants.
The Peterson Institue’s new ruse is to avoid grownups with fully formed opinions, since they are not amenable to short-form reprogramming. Instead, they are targeting high school students with an anti-deficit “education” program, on the assumption if they can inculcate a belief system, the desired policy choices will follow.
From Remapping Debate (hat tip Dean Baker):
No one has done more than the billionaire private-equity investor Peter G. Peterson to stir America’s anxiety over deficits, debt, and what Peterson (among others) considers out-of-control entitlement-program spending. Those same concerns now lie at the heart of a “fiscal responsibility” curriculum being developed for America’s high schools. The curriculum bears the stamp of Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College, but reflects the focus suggested by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which provided $2.4 million in funding for the project.
Teachers College gave Remapping Debate access to a set of 24 lessons set to be test-taught in four states this spring prior to a wider roll-out in 2011-12. Heavily weighted toward the themes and arguments of Peterson and other deficit hawks, the trial lessons could be seen as part of an effort by one of the country’s wealthiest men, now 82, to spread his gospel to coming generations…
Yves here. Tactically, this is very clever. Education schools are academic backwaters, which means they have no brand to tarnish by association with a venture like this And it’s patently clear what is at work here. Teachers College initially approached the Peterson Foundation to get some modest funding to develop a program about personal finance. The Foundation came back to pitch a completely different concept with ultimately 48 time as much money to the college involved. Guess whose idea prevailed? Back to the article:
[T]he trial lessons repeatedly point toward two core ideas of Peterson’s long crusade: first, that America’s future is threatened by deficit spending, and, second, that Social Security and Medicare have helped put our economy on an “unsustainable course.”
Andrew Fieldhouse, one of several economists asked by Remapping Debate to review parts of the 409-page curriculum, objected strenuously to what he said was a loaded discussion of the debt and deficit, one designed both to fuel alarm and to put undue focus on the spending rather than the revenue side of things.
Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst at the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, questioned the practice of treating taxes, spending and fiscal balance as issues unto themselves. “Budgeting is the numeric embodiment of all your national values and priorities,” he said. “It’s about the public goods you want to provide for the nation, and how you pay for them.”
Robert Prasch, an economics professor at Middlebury College, voiced similar complaints about the way the curriculum deals with Social Security. “No effort is made to explore whether, and to what extent, there may or may not be a fiscal crisis facing Social Security,” Prasch said. “It is presumed or taken as an unimpeachable fact.”
In its discussion of Social Security and other issues, the curriculum does sometimes cite materials from liberal as well as conservative sources, but the effort to provide balance is often brief or oblique….
The article is very much worth reading in full, since it discusses the biases and scare messages woven into the indoctrination course in some detail.
Parents may want to make inquiries to see if their children will be among the guinea pigs. If you don’t like the answers, consider writing letters to school administrators, the local media, and the Dean of Columbia University about the propriety of letting a billionaire use high schools as a marketing channel for his long-standing political agenda. At a minimum, Soros should demand equal time.
bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
bench craft company John Carney takes a stab at answering my question about why we have a debt ceiling, saying that it “helps raise public awareness about the costs of government”:
Lawmakers must go on record as approving an increase in the debt limit in order to enable the government to borrow to fund the spending the lawmakers have approved. They must confront, in a very public manner, the costs of the programs they have enacted.
I’m not at all sure this is the actual reason why we have a debt ceiling; at best it’s a behavioral reason not to abolish it. But it’s not a good reason.
Let’s take a personal-finance analogy here. A credit card company comes along and offers you a card with a $200,000 credit limit—much more than you should ever borrow. But you know that if the money is there for the spending, you’ll be more likely to spend it. So you phone up the credit card company and do a deal with them. You set the limit very low—$1,000, say—and then, any time you want to go over that limit, you have to phone up the credit card company and get them to raise it.
You know in advance that the credit card company will say yes: after all, they’ve already told you that as far as they’re concerned they’re happy to lend you $200,000. But being forced to phone them up and ask for a credit-line increase helps to drive home the consequences of your spending decisions, in a way that simply whipping your card out at the Apple Store doesn’t.
So far so good. But what if you were using your card not only to buy iPads, but also to make rent? And what if there were possible glitches with the system whereby you phoned up and asked for a credit-limit increase, so that you couldn’t be sure it would always work? And what if a single late rent payment could be catastrophic, ending up with you thrown out of your home? At that point, your clever system would stop seeming so clever, and start seeming downright risky.
And that’s the problem with the debt ceiling. It might have interesting and possibly even beneficial behavioral second-order effects, although there’s precious little evidence for that. But getting those beneficial effects means playing with fiscal high explosives, which run the risk of blowing up in the economy’s face and causing major damage. It simply isn’t worth it.
It’s not a pretty spectacle when a very rich man tells little people they ought to get by with less, particularly when his firm benefitted handsomely from the pump and dump operation that led to the financial crisis.
Pete Peterson, one of the two founders of the Blackstone Group, has had a longstanding campaign against Social Security and Medicare. He’s sufficiently aggressive that to combat consistent poll ratings that show that both programs enjoy substantial support, his foundation set out to generate different survey results by stacking the deck heavily in its favor. As we recounted last July:
For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a wider PR campaign. It’s important to keep tabs on this propaganda effort, since its big budget (the Foundation has a billion dollars to its name), means it will keep hammering away on this topic. But it appears that they overestimated how much public opinion expensively produced and stage-managed presentations can buy.
The brazenness and ham handedness of these so-called “America Speaks” sessions, which have garnered well deserved criticism on the Internet, is probably due to at least two factors: deluded confidence that the average person will fall into line when a confident and well-credentialed presenter makes a pitch and a stunningly naive belief that aggressive efforts to manipulate opinion and mislabel it as polling would not be called out.
And we also noted:
It is refreshing that this effort failed, but it is a given that the Peterson crowd will go back to the drawing board and figure out a way to credibly produce the answer it wants.
The Peterson Institue’s new ruse is to avoid grownups with fully formed opinions, since they are not amenable to short-form reprogramming. Instead, they are targeting high school students with an anti-deficit “education” program, on the assumption if they can inculcate a belief system, the desired policy choices will follow.
From Remapping Debate (hat tip Dean Baker):
No one has done more than the billionaire private-equity investor Peter G. Peterson to stir America’s anxiety over deficits, debt, and what Peterson (among others) considers out-of-control entitlement-program spending. Those same concerns now lie at the heart of a “fiscal responsibility” curriculum being developed for America’s high schools. The curriculum bears the stamp of Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College, but reflects the focus suggested by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which provided $2.4 million in funding for the project.
Teachers College gave Remapping Debate access to a set of 24 lessons set to be test-taught in four states this spring prior to a wider roll-out in 2011-12. Heavily weighted toward the themes and arguments of Peterson and other deficit hawks, the trial lessons could be seen as part of an effort by one of the country’s wealthiest men, now 82, to spread his gospel to coming generations…
Yves here. Tactically, this is very clever. Education schools are academic backwaters, which means they have no brand to tarnish by association with a venture like this And it’s patently clear what is at work here. Teachers College initially approached the Peterson Foundation to get some modest funding to develop a program about personal finance. The Foundation came back to pitch a completely different concept with ultimately 48 time as much money to the college involved. Guess whose idea prevailed? Back to the article:
[T]he trial lessons repeatedly point toward two core ideas of Peterson’s long crusade: first, that America’s future is threatened by deficit spending, and, second, that Social Security and Medicare have helped put our economy on an “unsustainable course.”
Andrew Fieldhouse, one of several economists asked by Remapping Debate to review parts of the 409-page curriculum, objected strenuously to what he said was a loaded discussion of the debt and deficit, one designed both to fuel alarm and to put undue focus on the spending rather than the revenue side of things.
Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst at the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, questioned the practice of treating taxes, spending and fiscal balance as issues unto themselves. “Budgeting is the numeric embodiment of all your national values and priorities,” he said. “It’s about the public goods you want to provide for the nation, and how you pay for them.”
Robert Prasch, an economics professor at Middlebury College, voiced similar complaints about the way the curriculum deals with Social Security. “No effort is made to explore whether, and to what extent, there may or may not be a fiscal crisis facing Social Security,” Prasch said. “It is presumed or taken as an unimpeachable fact.”
In its discussion of Social Security and other issues, the curriculum does sometimes cite materials from liberal as well as conservative sources, but the effort to provide balance is often brief or oblique….
The article is very much worth reading in full, since it discusses the biases and scare messages woven into the indoctrination course in some detail.
Parents may want to make inquiries to see if their children will be among the guinea pigs. If you don’t like the answers, consider writing letters to school administrators, the local media, and the Dean of Columbia University about the propriety of letting a billionaire use high schools as a marketing channel for his long-standing political agenda. At a minimum, Soros should demand equal time.
bench craft company>
Read our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
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bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
bench craft companyJohn Carney takes a stab at answering my question about why we have a debt ceiling, saying that it “helps raise public awareness about the costs of government”:
Lawmakers must go on record as approving an increase in the debt limit in order to enable the government to borrow to fund the spending the lawmakers have approved. They must confront, in a very public manner, the costs of the programs they have enacted.
I’m not at all sure this is the actual reason why we have a debt ceiling; at best it’s a behavioral reason not to abolish it. But it’s not a good reason.
Let’s take a personal-finance analogy here. A credit card company comes along and offers you a card with a $200,000 credit limit—much more than you should ever borrow. But you know that if the money is there for the spending, you’ll be more likely to spend it. So you phone up the credit card company and do a deal with them. You set the limit very low—$1,000, say—and then, any time you want to go over that limit, you have to phone up the credit card company and get them to raise it.
You know in advance that the credit card company will say yes: after all, they’ve already told you that as far as they’re concerned they’re happy to lend you $200,000. But being forced to phone them up and ask for a credit-line increase helps to drive home the consequences of your spending decisions, in a way that simply whipping your card out at the Apple Store doesn’t.
So far so good. But what if you were using your card not only to buy iPads, but also to make rent? And what if there were possible glitches with the system whereby you phoned up and asked for a credit-limit increase, so that you couldn’t be sure it would always work? And what if a single late rent payment could be catastrophic, ending up with you thrown out of your home? At that point, your clever system would stop seeming so clever, and start seeming downright risky.
And that’s the problem with the debt ceiling. It might have interesting and possibly even beneficial behavioral second-order effects, although there’s precious little evidence for that. But getting those beneficial effects means playing with fiscal high explosives, which run the risk of blowing up in the economy’s face and causing major damage. It simply isn’t worth it.
It’s not a pretty spectacle when a very rich man tells little people they ought to get by with less, particularly when his firm benefitted handsomely from the pump and dump operation that led to the financial crisis.
Pete Peterson, one of the two founders of the Blackstone Group, has had a longstanding campaign against Social Security and Medicare. He’s sufficiently aggressive that to combat consistent poll ratings that show that both programs enjoy substantial support, his foundation set out to generate different survey results by stacking the deck heavily in its favor. As we recounted last July:
For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a wider PR campaign. It’s important to keep tabs on this propaganda effort, since its big budget (the Foundation has a billion dollars to its name), means it will keep hammering away on this topic. But it appears that they overestimated how much public opinion expensively produced and stage-managed presentations can buy.
The brazenness and ham handedness of these so-called “America Speaks” sessions, which have garnered well deserved criticism on the Internet, is probably due to at least two factors: deluded confidence that the average person will fall into line when a confident and well-credentialed presenter makes a pitch and a stunningly naive belief that aggressive efforts to manipulate opinion and mislabel it as polling would not be called out.
And we also noted:
It is refreshing that this effort failed, but it is a given that the Peterson crowd will go back to the drawing board and figure out a way to credibly produce the answer it wants.
The Peterson Institue’s new ruse is to avoid grownups with fully formed opinions, since they are not amenable to short-form reprogramming. Instead, they are targeting high school students with an anti-deficit “education” program, on the assumption if they can inculcate a belief system, the desired policy choices will follow.
From Remapping Debate (hat tip Dean Baker):
No one has done more than the billionaire private-equity investor Peter G. Peterson to stir America’s anxiety over deficits, debt, and what Peterson (among others) considers out-of-control entitlement-program spending. Those same concerns now lie at the heart of a “fiscal responsibility” curriculum being developed for America’s high schools. The curriculum bears the stamp of Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College, but reflects the focus suggested by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which provided $2.4 million in funding for the project.
Teachers College gave Remapping Debate access to a set of 24 lessons set to be test-taught in four states this spring prior to a wider roll-out in 2011-12. Heavily weighted toward the themes and arguments of Peterson and other deficit hawks, the trial lessons could be seen as part of an effort by one of the country’s wealthiest men, now 82, to spread his gospel to coming generations…
Yves here. Tactically, this is very clever. Education schools are academic backwaters, which means they have no brand to tarnish by association with a venture like this And it’s patently clear what is at work here. Teachers College initially approached the Peterson Foundation to get some modest funding to develop a program about personal finance. The Foundation came back to pitch a completely different concept with ultimately 48 time as much money to the college involved. Guess whose idea prevailed? Back to the article:
[T]he trial lessons repeatedly point toward two core ideas of Peterson’s long crusade: first, that America’s future is threatened by deficit spending, and, second, that Social Security and Medicare have helped put our economy on an “unsustainable course.”
Andrew Fieldhouse, one of several economists asked by Remapping Debate to review parts of the 409-page curriculum, objected strenuously to what he said was a loaded discussion of the debt and deficit, one designed both to fuel alarm and to put undue focus on the spending rather than the revenue side of things.
Fieldhouse, a federal budget analyst at the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute, questioned the practice of treating taxes, spending and fiscal balance as issues unto themselves. “Budgeting is the numeric embodiment of all your national values and priorities,” he said. “It’s about the public goods you want to provide for the nation, and how you pay for them.”
Robert Prasch, an economics professor at Middlebury College, voiced similar complaints about the way the curriculum deals with Social Security. “No effort is made to explore whether, and to what extent, there may or may not be a fiscal crisis facing Social Security,” Prasch said. “It is presumed or taken as an unimpeachable fact.”
In its discussion of Social Security and other issues, the curriculum does sometimes cite materials from liberal as well as conservative sources, but the effort to provide balance is often brief or oblique….
The article is very much worth reading in full, since it discusses the biases and scare messages woven into the indoctrination course in some detail.
Parents may want to make inquiries to see if their children will be among the guinea pigs. If you don’t like the answers, consider writing letters to school administrators, the local media, and the Dean of Columbia University about the propriety of letting a billionaire use high schools as a marketing channel for his long-standing political agenda. At a minimum, Soros should demand equal time.
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bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
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bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
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bench craft company bench craft companyRead our news of Raven's James Bond now 20 months old?.
Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. ... Breaking news: Obama quits smoking. Share. posted at 5:30 pm on February 8, 2011 by Allahpundit printer-friendly � He had to do it. If his system wasn't in peak shape, he'd never have been able to ...
Fox News has learned that President Obama will call on Congress to support a permanent normal trade relations status with Russia and that his U.S. trade ambassador will tell Congress Wednesday the White House will intensify efforts this ...
bench craft company Have you considered using a personal finance program or are you currently using one? Here is a list of 5 personal finance tips to help you get the most out of your personal finance program.
The Ability to Watch and Understand Your Spending Habits
A great benefit of having a personal finance program, for instance like Quicken, is you're able to watch the trends in your spending. You can bring up charts, and see during which months you spend the most money, and which items take up a great deal of your budget.
If you tend to make small purchases, but do it in high volume, you will be able to see this through the charts and graphs within your personal finance program. If you're spending money on large ticket items, you will know that you're a power spender. Knowing your spending type will help you be mindful of your spending habits..
You Will Be Able to Keep Track Of All Your Assets
The benefit of a personal finance program, is that you can include all your bank accounts, investments, business ventures and property into one program and see where your total asset value lies. Many programs, like Quicken, allow you to keep track of more than just your bank account. On any given day of the month, you will know your total assets.
Help You Set Up Your Budget
By watching your spending trends and seeing what is available in terms of income every month, it's a lot easier to set up a budget. This will allow you to have the freedom to live and still know you will have extra money left over every month to go to your savings, to pay off debts, or to help you in preparing for purchases you know you will be making in the coming months.
This is also a great way to prepare for seasons like the Christmas or the start of school. If you know when your major purchases will be, you can plan your budget around having a little extra over for those times.
Make it Easier For You to Balance Your Checkbook
Most personal finance programs allow you to auto import your income and expenses directly from your bank account online. Instead of having to add and subtract numbers in a checking book ledger, you can press a button and have all the information you need within a span of 1-2 minutes.
Easily Do Your Taxes
An advantage of a personal finance program, is that more of them are being integrated into being able to take into account all your expense deductions so you can get an accurate tax form during tax season. You compile it as the year progresses, and during tax time, you simply can send your tax information online or print it out and send it to the Internal Revenue Service.
