Analysis of a Permanent Prohibition on Implementing the Major Health Care Legislation Enacted in March 2010

[Excerpt] This letter discusses many of the potential effects of a permanent ban on the use of appropriated funds to implement the health care laws and, where possible, provides information on whether those effects would increase or decrease direct spending or revenues. Because of the uncertainties discussed below, however, CBO and JCT do not have sufficient basis to provide a comprehensive estimate of the budgetary effects of legislation that would prohibit the use of funding to implement the 2010 health laws, yet would not repeal any provisions of that law

Permutative categories, multicategories, and algebraic K-theory

We show that the $K$-theory construction of arXiv:math/0403403, which preserves multiplicative structure, extends to a symmetric monoidal closed bicomplete source category, with the multiplicative structure still preserved. The source category of arXiv:math/0403403, whose objects are permutative categories, maps fully and faithfully to the new source category, whose objects are (based) multicategories

Realising formal groups

We show that a large class of formal groups can be realised functorially by even periodic ring spectra. The main advance is in the construction of morphisms, not of objects.Comment: Published by Algebraic and Geometric Topology at http://www.maths.warwick.ac.uk/agt/AGTVol3/agt-3-8.abs.htm

Budget Deficits, Tax Incentives and Inflation: A Surprising Lesson From The 1983-84 Recovery

The first two years of the economic expansion that began in 1983 were unusually strong and were accompanied by better inflation performance than would have been expected on the basis of experience in past recoveries. Our evidence contradicts the popular view that the recovery was the result of a consumer boom financed by reductions in the personal income tax. We also find no support for the proposition that the recovery reflected an increase in the supply of labor induced by the reduction in personal marginal tax rates. The driving force behind the recovery of nominal demand was the shift to an expansionary monetary policy. The rapid expansion of nominal GNP can be explained by monetary policy without any reference to changes in fiscal and tax policy. But the growth of real GNP was more rapid than would have been expected on the basis of the rise in total nominal spending and the increase in the price level was correspondingly less. The most likely cause of this favorable division of the nominal GNP increase was the sharp rise in the dollar that occurred at this time. Although part of the dollar's rise can be attributed to the successful anti-inflationary monetary policy, the dollar also increased because of the rise in real interest rates that resulted from the combination of the increase in anticipated budget deficits and the improved tax incentives for investment in equipment and structures. Thus, expansionary fiscal policy did contribute to the greater-than-expected rise of real GNP in 1983-84 but it did so through an unusual channel. The fiscal expansion raised output because it caused a favorable supply shock to prices and not because it was a traditional stimulus to demand. The budget deficit and investment incentives were expansionary in the short run because, by causing a rise of the dollar, they reduced inflation and thus permitted a faster growth of real GNP.

Social Security Reform and National Saving in an Era of Budget Surpluses

macroeconomics, Social Security, Social Security Reform, National Saving, Budget Surplus

Completed representation ring spectra of nilpotent groups

In this paper, we examine the `derived completion' of the representation ring of a pro-p group G_p^ with respect to an augmentation ideal. This completion is no longer a ring: it is a spectrum with the structure of a module spectrum over the Eilenberg-MacLane spectrum HZ, and can have higher homotopy information. In order to explain the origin of some of these higher homotopy classes, we define a deformation representation ring functor R[-] from groups to ring spectra, and show that the map R[G_p^] --> R[G] becomes an equivalence after completion when G is finitely generated nilpotent. As an application, we compute the derived completion of the representation ring of the simplest nontrivial case, the p-adic Heisenberg group.Comment: This is the version published by Algebraic & Geometric Topology on 26 February 200