The folks at Open The Books decided to take a deep dive into the salaries of 1.97 million federal employees, using data collected from the Office Of Personnel Management and the USPS via FOIA requests, and the endless examples of excessive pay and pure waste are sure to make you sick, if not downright suicidal. Here are just some of the key takeaways as summarized by OTB:
Authored by Chris Hamilton via Econimica blog,
The phony assumptions that go into calculating public pension underfundings in the United States are a frequent topic for us. As our readers are aware, state pension administrators are given fairly wide leeway to simply pick a discount rate out of thin air. Of course, since pensions are nothing but a massive stream of future liabilities that stretch out into perpetuity, every 100 bps increase can substantially, and artificially, lower the fund's reported underfunded level.
Will you be paying US taxes in 2018? If so, this interactive model created by JPM is for you.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which was signed into law by Donald Trump this week, is projected to reduce individual tax payments by over $1 trillion over the next 10 years, more than triple the tax cut impact on businesses and corporations.
However, the impact on individual taxpayers will differ, and depends on their income and deduction characteristics.
By Political Calculations
When it comes to the health of his state's economy, California Governor Jerry Brown has been walking on eggshells this year.
Twice each year, once in January and again in May, Gov. Jerry Brown warns Californians that the economic prosperity their state has enjoyed in recent years won't last forever.
Brown attaches his admonishments to the budgets he proposes to the Legislature – the initial one in January and a revised version four months later.