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John C. Goodman

Inflation Relief for Seniors

Inflation Relief for Seniors

Senior retirees on fixed incomes are inflation’s worst victims. What can be done?

  • Index the Social Security benefit tax thresholds – so that seniors do not lose more of their benefits because of inflation.
  • Inflation indexed bonds (TIPS) can protect seniors from inflation. We should also protect seniors from higher taxes when inflation causes income from those bonds to rise.
  • Seniors should be able to exchange their non-indexed pensions (which lose value as prices rise) for an inflation-indexed annuity, which rises whenever prices rise.

More from Larry Kotlikoff

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Whatever Happened to the $15 Minimum Wage?

Whatever Happened to the $15 Minimum Wage?

It seems like only yesterday that the $15 minimum wage was high on the agenda of every self-respecting progressive politician, including Hillary Clinton in her presidential campaign. The “Fight for 15” was successful in several states and even went statewide in New York and California. So why aren’t we hearing more about the idea these days? It may be because labor markets are working, just like textbook economics say they should. More

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Obamacare: Promises Made, Promises Broken

Obamacare: Promises Made, Promises Broken

When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, health care was a major issue. Although many on the left were advocating single-payer, national health insurance, Obama pledged private health insurance reform instead.

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Why a Billionaire’s Tax Could Be Bad for You

Why a Billionaire’s Tax Could Be Bad for You

The Biden administration is proposing a new tax on households worth more than $100 million. Tagged as a “billionaire tax,” the new levy would apply not just to ordinary income, but also to unrealized capital gains. If a wealthy person owns shares of stock and the stock is worth more today than when it was purchased, Biden wants the federal government to take 20 percent of the increase. So, what’s wrong with that?

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Pro-Patient, Pro-Family, Pro-Free-Enterprise Health Reform

Pro-Patient, Pro-Family, Pro-Free-Enterprise Health Reform

Two years ago, 81 think tanks and grass roots organizations signed onto Health Care Choices, a comprehensive reform of the health care system. This was a huge accomplishment – since the conservative think tanks had been at odds over health policy for almost three decades.

The most important innovation in our approach is this: We should begin by saying Obamacare has made health insurance unaffordable and the best doctors and hospitals inaccessible. In other words, we should go right to the heart of what the other side promised and didn’t deliver; and then pledge to do what they didn’t do by empowering individuals and letting markets work.

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More on that contract

More on that contract

Almost three decades ago Republicans recaptured the House, for the first time in 40 years. Led by Newt Gingrich, they ran on a one page (Reader’s Digest size) set of promised reforms. My colleagues and I supplied the tax reforms for the document.

There has been a lot of media speculation about another Contract for this fall’s election. I have made a number of suggestions, but I can’t guarantee it will happen. Nonetheless, because of the prospect that it might happen the original Contract is now being trashed as partisan and self-serving by the mainstream media.

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Financial Planning for Dummies

Financial Planning for Dummies

Most people are really bad at personal, financial planning. The people who make these mistakes are not just ordinary folks. They include highly educated, sophisticated people – including virtually all economists and Wall Street analysts. They almost certainly include you, the reader. So why do so many people get so many things wrong?

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How the States Can Reform Health Care

How the States Can Reform Health Care

In most places the state employee health plan is one of the largest, if not the largest, health plan in the state. So, state legislators who want to reform health care should start with the one plan over which they have a great deal of direct control.… Another reform that is long overdue is the elimination of certificate-of-need (CON) laws, which create huge regulatory obstacles to newcomers who want to open a hospital or a nursing home, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center or even an ambulance service. Studies show that CON laws raise costs and lower quality. For that reason, 15 states have repealed all, or almost all, of them.

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