The Clash of Generations: Saving Ourselves, Our Kids, and Our Economy
The United States is bankrupt, flat broke. Thanks to accounting that would make Enron blush, Americaâ€™s insolvency goes far beyond what our leaders are disclosing. The United States is a fiscal basket case, in worse shape than the notoriously bailed-out countries of Greece, Ireland, and others. How did this happen? In The Clash of Generations, experts Laurence Kotlikoff and Scott Burns document our six-decade, off-balance-sheet, unsustainable financing scheme. They explain how we have balanced our longer lives on the backs of our (relatively few) children. At the same time, we've been on a consumption spree, saving and investing less than nothing. And thatâ€™s not to mention the evisceration of the middle class and a financial system that has proven it canâ€™t be trusted. Kotlikoff and Burns outline grassroots strategies for saving ourselvesâ€”and especially our children--from what could be a truly catastrophic financial collapse. Kotlikoff and Burns sounded the alarm in their widely acclaimed The Coming Generational Storm, but politicians didnâ€™t listen. Now the need for action is even more urgent. Itâ€™s up to us to demand radical reform of our tax system, our healthcare system, and our Social Security system, and to insist on better paths to investment return than those provided by Wall Street (mis)managers. Kotlikoff and Burns's "Purple Plans" (so called because they will appeal to both Republicans and Democrats) have been endorsed by a whoâ€™s who of economists and offer a new way forward; and their revolutionary investment strategy for individuals replaces the idea of financial capital with "life decision capital." Of course, we won't be doing all this just for ourselves. We need to fix Americaâ€™s fiscal mess before our kids inherit it.
Diminishing Quality of Fiscal Institutions in the United States and European Union
U.S. Government debt relative to the size of the economy has risen to the point where it is likely to be interfering with real economic growth. Short-run fiscal policy has deteriorated from being counter-cyclical to pro-cyclical. The decline in the quality of U.S. fiscal institutions calls for major reform that might include a limit on the ratio of government debt to GDP. The EU also faces fundamental fiscal problems, but for a different reason.
The General Theory of Relativity
THE WORD “SPECIAL” IN “SPECIAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY” means that the theory is restricted to those frames of reference for which the law of inertia holds, that is, inertial frames of reference.* Einstein sometimes referred to them as Galilean frames of reference. At first glance, it does not seem reasonable to expect that the principle of relativity can be extended to non-inertial frames. The reasons are fairly obvious. The principle of relativity that we have been using states that the laws of physics have the same form in all frames of reference to which the principle applies. In other words there should be no way to determine by an experiment which of two frames of reference is in motion relative to the other.