So I’ve been reading What to Expect When No One’s Expecting:  America’s Coming Demographic Disaster, by Jonathan V. Last and wanted to type up my thoughts. There’s a lot of great data in this book, and I wanted to start with just noting down some of the fun facts and figures.  So:   Total Fertility Rate by Household Income Level (p. 44):< $20,000             2.038 $20 – 30K              1.988 $35 – 50K              2.052 $50 – 75K              1.734 $75 – 100K            1.752... Read more

That’s the claim of the new book by Helen Smith. I have in mind to use this blog to share some of what I’m reading and what I think of it, and this book was a significant disappointment. The largest irritant was how little original research there was in the book. “Write a book” has long been on my bucket list — not the Great American Novel, but a serious treatment of the retirement crisis, with an international perspective —... Read more

Detroit has a long history of Big Projects motivated by the hope that, this time, we’ll revitalize the city.  What’s actually remarkable about Detroit is that many of these projects are funded by private dollars to a significant degree, although if I had more time, I’d try to find data on how much city funding was behind the private money, in tax credits, land acquisition, etc. Here’s my partial list, just going from memory, with dates filled in by Wikipedia:... Read more

Start with Fresh Medicine by Philip Bredesen.  (It’s even a bargain book at Amazon.com and I’m tempted to buy this since I’ve only read the library’s copy so far.  ** Note that I’m not recommending Amazon.com in particular but it’s convenient to link to them.) Bredesen basically puts forth a model of what Obamacare should have been, using the tools of government carrots and sticks to insist that private healthcare insurers and providers provide genuinely coordinated care.  There were some quibbles... Read more

Is College Worth It?  That’s the lead article in this summer’s Notre Dame Magazine.  Not surprisingly, the author’s answer is “yes” — both because of the usual statistics that college graduates outearn high school graduates by an amount greater, in present value terms, than the present value of the tuition paid out for their degree, and because a college graduate is a “better person” in various ways for having studied the liberal arts.  But that’s the wrong question. How about:... Read more

“It has taken more than a half-century for Detroit to fall this low, and the Motor City will take a long time to right itself. There are no quick fixes for its deep-rooted, systemic problems. Sharing public services with the suburbs, focusing on small neighborhood-by-neighborhood improvements instead of blockbuster redevelopment projects and improving public schools would be a good start.” From Five Myths About Detroit in the Washington Post. Now, granted, I disagree with much of the rest of what the... Read more

This is awful.  Really, really shows that the Powers that Be in Detroit still don’t understand what will and won’t fix Detroit.  A $444 million hockey statium?  Detroit is all about Big Projects — from the Renaissance Center to the Poletown factory, plus a long list of smaller projects (like this Whole Foods project).  And they haven’t worked, because Detroit is missing in the basic fundamentals of an educated (or work-ready to any degree) workforce, and general infrastructure of all... Read more

Healthcare in the United States is a complex issue, but there are, ultimately, two categories of problems: First, the rising cost of healthcare in general, as it affect everyone:  those insured by their employers, those with individual insurance policies, and taxpayers, insofar as the rising cost of Medicare, Medicaid, and other government-provided healthcare programs impact us.  As a bit of background, I work as a pension consulting actuary in a firm which also has a practice advising companies on healthcare,... Read more

What do I think of Catastrophic/high deductible plans? They have their plusses and minuses.  My employer (which shall be nameless) think’s they’re the best thing going, both in terms of how they advise clients and how they structure their own benefit offerings (the non-catastrophic offerings’ employee premiums are so much higher than the catastrophic plan that you could meet your entire deductible every year and still pay less than if you elected a non-cat. plan). It is true that they... Read more

So it seems that Congress is considering tax reform again.  The last time this was in the news, I pulled out my old copy of Jeffrey Birnbaum’s Showdown At Gucci Gulch, which seems to have taken place in a different era entirely. What deductions/credits would I dump?  Ideally, I’d remove the idea of tax credits entirely, and replace it with an alternate schedule, “subsidies and benefits delivered through the tax filing system,” in which one receives child benefits, winterizing benefits, and... Read more