Is Medicare a good program, financially speaking, for ordinary working people?  Medicare Part A (the part that’s funded by payroll taxes) spent $394.6 billion in 2024 for the approximately sixty million of the over 65-years-of-age Americans on Medicare Part A (about 11.8% of the total recipients of the sixty-eight million people on Medicare are under 65 years old and generally not part of Medicare Part A). This means Medicare Part A paid out an average of $6,577 for each of its sixty million recipients in 2024. It’s important to stress that this analysis is designed to evaluate Medicare Part...

Everybody knows housing unaffordability and home sticker prices peaked at all-time highs in 2023, even higher than the peak of the 2007 real estate bubble in real terms. Both sticker prices and median mortgage payments for homes remain today at among the most unaffordable levels in U.S. history.  The free market has failed American homebuyers by not building enough homes Americans are willing and eager to buy, the official narrative goes. Vice President Kamala Harris told Stephen Colbert, “We don’t have enough housing. We have a housing shortage.” Harris has therefore promised to build three...

“The inflation tax, while largely ignored, hurts middle-class and low-income Americans the most,” Ron Paul wrote back in 2006, concluding that “Federal spending, deficits, and Federal Reserve mischief hurt the poor while transferring wealth to the already rich.” A friend of mine from Venezuela told me an extreme example of how inflation transfers wealth, which I’ve told before. This Venezuelan saved up a down payment and bought a home for about 300,000 Bolivars in 2007 (roughly $25,000). After five years of payments, he still owed far more than half the principal, but his monthly payments...

If you are middle class and lately feel like you're not getting ahead, you're not wrong. The economic facts bear this out. The middle class household is taking home about the same in inflation-adjusted dollars after taxes today compared to their income in 1971. According to the U.S. Census, in 1971 the median household income (the households in the 50th percentile, the middle-est of the middle class) was $9,030. Adjusted for inflation using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers for the Consumer Price Index, that's $67,394.56 in December 2023 dollars purchasing power. By 2023 that median...