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2 days ago | 
aei.org | Andrew Biggs
Economics, what is it good for? (Huh!) Much of the field is just common sense grafted to math. But one area where economists and, well, normal people differ is foreign trade, in particular the trade deficit. It’s not hard to explain in accounting terms. But those explanations are typically not very helpful, because the underlying intuition remains murky. So, in that light, here’s a stab at making things more understandable.
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3 days ago | 
aei.org | Andrew Biggs
It’s being reported that President Trump’s tax plan will fulfill his pledge to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits – but only for four years. Eliminating benefit taxation is both unnecessary for retirees’ financial security and harmful to Social Security’s finances. But making the elimation of benefit taxation temporary could actually harm some Americans’ retirement security. Since 1983, part of Social Security benefits have been subject to income taxes.
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2 weeks ago | 
littleknownfacts.substack.com | Andrew Biggs
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1 month ago | 
littleknownfacts.substack.com | Andrew Biggs
The Wall Street Journalreports on dangerous levels of underfunding in church pension funds, which are not required to follow the federal funding rules that govern private sector “single-employer” pensions. Employees of church-run organizations such as hospitals have experienced significant benefit cuts when their pension plan – which previously told participants the plan was well-funded – ran out of money. This isn’t the first pension funding scandal in recent years.
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1 month ago | 
aei.org | Andrew Biggs
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Jan 14, 2025 | 
aei.org | Andrew Biggs
The Social Security Fairness Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden on Jan. 6 thanks to strong bipartisan support. The intent was to provide greater retirement security and “fairness” to people who have dedicated their careers to public service, with bill supporters saying the old law unfairly stripped many low-income government and public workers of the benefits they deserve. But did they get it wrong? Andrew G.
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Jan 6, 2025 | 
littleknownfacts.substack.com | Andrew Biggs
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Dec 30, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Andrew Biggs
The word bankruptcy has been hanging over Chicago like a storm cloud about to burst. Mayor Brandon Johnson is the latest leader to attempt to close Chicago's gaping fiscal gap: He proposed a $300 million property tax increase to partly fill Chicago's $982 million budget deficit, only to be unanimously rejected by the City Council. The City Council narrowly passed a budget on Dec. 16, with far less in tax increases than the mayor had initially demanded.
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Dec 4, 2024 | 
aei.org | Andrew Biggs
…When so few public employees in most states are even affectedThe Social Security Fairness Act – sorry, the Social Security “Fairness” Act – is, as I’ve said before, a $200 billion giveaway to people who neither paid for these benefits nor need them.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
aei.org | Andrew Biggs
About seven years ago, some friends who had high school-age children urged me to attend a meeting to discuss our district’s math curriculum, called College Preparatory Math (CPM). Until then I hadn’t given math instruction much thought. But what friends told me was worrying: the CPM curriculum, which is based on the idea of “discovery” or “inquiry learning,” minimized explicit instruction by the teacher, to the degree that teachers often refused to answer students’ questions.
