Much ado about nothing: the nonsense of Steve Hanke s inflation rates laotimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from laotimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For more than three years, Steve Hanke, an economist at Johns Hopkins University's Department of Environmental Health and Engineering, has been computing inflation rates for more than twenty developing countries and claiming that the official inflation rates of these countries have been deliberately underreported by their statistical agencies
all this as a big battle brews over what to do about the growing decifit. take a look at that number, folks. whether or not lawmakers should green light plans to raise the debt ceiling is a very big question facing lawmakers and facing our guest right now, peter marici is former secretary of commerce at the trade commission, and jeffrey frenkel served under president clinton s council of economic advisers and is joining us from harvard today. nice to have you both. let s talk about this debt kraoeg. jeffrey, first with you, under the current circumstances and what you see in the economy, is this a necessary evil, do we need to and have to raise the debt ceiling? i hope anybody talking about this understands that to say we re not going to raise the debt ceiling is talking about a tactic, you re putting you re pulling a pin on a hand grenade and saying i m going to blow us all up if we don t get what we want. to illustrate, the budget
it is absolutely ludicrous we re talking about only increasing the retirement age, you know, by 2050 to age 68. americans are going to have to work to live to the 70th birthday, that counts for everybody, no special exclusions, including public sector workers and neither party is really willing to talk about those things because they re afraid of the political consequences. jenna: that gets us to a back and forth. jeffrey, we have time for one more quick comment and i apologize for the lack of time on this, but when we talk about cutting spending we get a reaction from the white house budget director that says if you cut spending you will cut off all job growth that s happening now in this very meager recovery right now, but does spaoeulment spending like medicare spending, does that create jobs? i think in the longer term, we certainly do have to address spwaoeuments. i disagree with peter, who implied that nancy pelosi somehow has to do with the increase in spwaoeument spending. th
spending was president bush s drug benefits. i agree in the term, we have to address everything. we can t do it by nondefense discretionary spending, it s arithmetic arithmetically impossible. we have to look at entitlements, letting the bush tax cuts expire eventually and until we realize that shared sacrifice is the only way to address a decifit like this we won t do it, we won t make progress at all. jenna: it will be interesting to see how we distribute that shared sacrifice. peter, jeffrey, looking forward to talking to you again soon. we want to hear from you on this hot issue as well, do you think congress should vote in fave of raising the debt ceiling? you just heard we have to do it from the economistis. log on to foxnews.com, leave a comment, and you can see how others are voting by clicking the view results tab. jon: iran is inviting a group of international diplomats to tour one of its nuclear plants, but the u.s., it didn t get an invitation. iran says it wants to show