Works and Days » Unchained World

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A perfect storm of events is eroding the perception of American deterrence—and the world will shortly become an even scarier place. The fiscal crisis has cast doubt on the government’s ability to act forcefully, especially the president’s emasculation during the entire process. These perceptions, of course, pale in consideration to the reality of out of control spending the first three years of the Obama administration that added almost $5 trillion to the U.S. debt and is both humiliating America and questioning whether it can still pay for its enormous military. Almost every day, we are borrowing $4 billion, enough to build a new fleet aircraft carrier and, of course, are not building aircraft carriers with such daily deficits as we did in World War II.

via Works and Days » Unchained World.

Retirement planning for late starters – MSN Money

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Retirement planning for late starters – MSN Money.

via Retirement planning for late starters – MSN Money.

10 signs you’re not ready to retire

Before you report for your last day of work, be sure that you’ve taken care of these details. You could save yourself a whole lot of money and regret later, MSN Money’s Liz Pulliam Weston says.

Full story

[Related content: retirement, retirement planning, retire well, 401k, Social Security]

The Basics

• 5-minute guide to retiring on time
• Your magic number for retirement
• 55 and haven’t saved a dime? Yikes
• How $10 could save your retirement
• 7 guides to fixing your finances
• Why you’ll outlast your money
• Article Index

 

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Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck

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Postal Service close to going broke

Postal Service close to going broke.

Comparisons to the Great Depression keep popping up

Comparisons to the Great Depression keep popping up.

Franklin Roosevelt 1937 and the deficit

via guardian.co.uk

FDR’s New Deal broke with the past in a number of ways: for the first time in American history, the federal government assumed responsibility for providing jobs. New programmes came into being almost overnight to stabilise farm incomes, finance home ownership, regulate banks and the securities industry and bring affordable electricity to millions of homes. Not all of these innovations were successful. But none of them would have been possible without Roosevelt’s willingness to defy the economic orthodoxy of the day – then known in the US, as in Britain, as “the Treasury view” – which held that deficit spending was not just evil but ineffectual.

The US treasurer in 1937 was Henry Morgenthau, a gentleman apple farmer who, as historian Alan Brinkley points out, owed his job “largely to an accident of geography: he was a neighbour of Franklin Roosevelt in Dutchess County, New York.” Morgenthau wasn’t a total waste of space; he made a genuine pest of himself trying to get his friend to notice the Nazi Holocaust. But even his admirers would hesitate to call him a great economist, and after FDR’s landslide reelection in 1936, Morgenthau made cutting the federal deficit his personal cause.

By the fall of 1937, he’d convinced the president that though “the patient might scream a bit”, it was time to “throw away the crutches”. Not everyone agreed. Marriner Eccles, a Mormon banker who thought along the same lines as John Maynard Keynes, warned that the recovery was too fragile; so did the tiny handful of US economists who’d actually heard of Keynes. But Roosevelt, like David Cameron, believed that a balanced budget was a sign of fiscal virtue, and hundreds of government programmes were cut back or eliminated.

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