USA Today offers an outstanding analysis of why an “Aging Population Makes this Deficit Scarier“ than the one in the 1980s: “When deficits started taking off 20 years ago, the retirement of the baby boom generation was just a distant worry. Now, as the nation faces years of red ink, including at least a $400 billion shortfall in 2003 alone, the graying population is a fast-approaching reality that will put unprecedented strains on Medicare, Social Security and the economy starting around 2010.

Courtesy of LRC: “The Price of Freedom“ (Slate): “Americans are not so innately freedom-loving that we would never let it dribble away without noticing. I can prove this because it actually happened, within the adult lifetimes of anyone over about 50. On August 15, 1971, more or less out of the blue, President Nixon declared a freeze on wages and prices. Legislation authorizing this had passed Congress the year before, with little controversy.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the creation of the National Recovery Act, Glass-Steagall, and several other New Deal laws that helped make the 1930s the “happy days” that they were.  (They were actually American attempts to imitate European fascism.)  The New York Times is offering copies of its June 16, 1933, issue for sale, and you can read the lead story describing the legislation here.  A quote:

The WSJ runs a good attack on the “Medicare Drug Folly,” which the editorial blasts: “We’re all for a prosperous old age, but it is hardly a step toward social justice for comfortable retirees to be further subsidized by working taxpayers with mortgages and kids...” But one name is missing: George W. Bush, who is the primary backer of the $400 billion bill.

Lionel Robbins writes concerning deflation (”Consumption and the Trade Cycle,” Economica, Volume 12, [35-38], November 1932, pp. 418):”the belief that there is nothing detrimental to the smooth working of the economic machinery in the changes which result in a consumers’ goods price index falling with increased productivity, is not the esoteric creed of a handful of  ’sadistic deflationists’—as is sometimes suggested nowadays.

The business headlines are dominated by today’s “stampede,” of course, so it is interesting to look back at Frank Shostak’s article from last week (Has a New Bull Market Begun?): “Since January of this year the growth momentum of adjusted money AMS [Austrian Money Supply] shows a visible rebound. The yearly rate of growth jumped from 1% in January to 5.5% in May.

It keeps anger at bay, says David Leonhardt in the New York Times.  

Doug Noland, an analyst for the Prudent Bear Mutual Fund, writes a weekly column called The Credit Buble Bulletin on the Prudent Bear’s web site.  This week, he reprints a presentation he gave at an asset manager’s convention (scroll down a few pages from the top to the heading  Contemplating the Evolution From the Way We Were to The Way It Is).  Although Austrianism is one of his influences, his economic views are heterodox.  I think th

The Telegraph, 16/06/2003

The party’s over as misfiring Ford puts fear into Motown
By Simon English in Detroit

When the 1970s soul veterans Earth, Wind and Fire were booked for a concert to open a five-day jamboree of cars, stars and fireworks to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Ford Motor Company, cynics claimed that it was the ideal booking.

Despite the all the complaining (during their vast time off).