With 30 years of service, most employees of Washington state can retire with full defined-benefit pension benefits at age 62. Given today’s life expectancies and low investment returns, this places an enormous burden on taxpayers, most of whom don’t have the luxury of defined-benefit plans. Republicans in the Washington State [continue reading . . . ]
[Updated March 20; see below] Is Boeing’s bulging backlog a figurative block of Swiss cheese, full of holes? It isn’t if Boeing’s own figures are reliable. The excess of orders over deliveries at the end of February 2012 reached more than 4,000 (data and chart updated March 18). Simple math [continue reading . . . ]
I think a lot about China these days. For nearly a year, a copy of the USA weekly edition of the China Daily, the official newspaper of China’s communist party, has landed on my doorstep every Friday, unbidden. It is a sample, probably related to my Wall Street Journal subscription. [continue reading . . . ]