Larry Kotlikoff’s Commentaries

President Biden and members of Congress have offered several proposals to lower Americans’ $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt. As...

If you follow my writings, you’ll know that I often write about matters of personal finance using my company’s economics-based, personal...

Home testing and ‘digital passports’ could stop outbreaks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it’ll be mid-2021 before a...

Saving means different things to different people. To some, it means putting money in the bank. To others, it means buying stocks or...

Back in April, I wrote about Bank of America’s horrible handling of Payroll Protection Loans. I wrote about a case I knew — my own. After...

Short of a game-changing vaccine, our only sure way of ending COVID-19 before it kills or sickens millions more of us is testing every...

Republican tax reform could have been better. An ideal reform, originally proposed by Paul Ryan would have produced a of 20.5 percent...

With easy-to-use tests, everyone can check themselves every day. Simple at-home tests for the coronavirus, some that involve spitting...

So far, 117,000 Americans have died of Covid-19. The CDC projects Covid-19 deaths at 1,000 per day over the next month. At this rate, the...

The Washington Post just named its top 11 vice presidential picks for Joe Biden. They’re all women, and they’re all Democrats. Each is...

Marginal Net Taxation of Americans’ Labor Supply The U.S. has a plethora of federal and state tax and benefit programs, each with its own...

Understanding why some countries are literally getting killed by COVID-19 and others aren’t is of critical importance. The countries that...

Dear Drs. Fauci and Birx, You are working tirelessly and heroically to fight Coronavirus. I and hundreds of millions of other Americans...

Containing the ever-mounting butcher’s bill from Covid-19 will be hard enough. Getting the economy back on track when universal testing...

It’s been only three months, but 33.5 million Americans have already lost their jobs. The unemployment rate, now 15 percent, will soon...

The effect of the coronavirus pandemic on our sense of economic confidence will have everything to do with how long we are stuck inside,...

The Bank of America, my small company’s bank of 27 years, is now being sued by small businesses for shutting my and other small...

Cashing out your 401(k) and using the proceeds to pay off your mortgage lets you borrow at a low rate and invest at a high rate and do so...

How to get the economy safely back to work in just 2 weeks Our country desperately needs a coronavirus end game. Putting the country into...

A Social Security Application Mistake Or A Malicious Policy With Frightening Consequences? Richard has spent over 80 hours trying to fix...

Group testing all Americans every day is our surefire secret weapon to save potentially millions of lives and immediately restart the...

This is the perfect macroeconomic storm — a tremendous supply-side shock due to inability to work compounded by threats to the global...

In 2008 the S&P fell half off its peak and nothing physical happened to the economy. Now we have two very physical things — supply and...

Trump payroll tax cut won’t stop coronavirus becoming a financial crisis. Here’s what might. It’s one thing to use monetary and fiscal...

It’s the $85 trillion (global GDP) question: Will the coronavirus kill the global economy? What we know is incredibly scary. The disease...

It’s the $85 trillion (global GDP) question: Will the coronavirus kill the global economy? What we know is incredibly scary. The disease...

Leveraging posterity’s prosperity Laurence Kotlikoff – 19 February 2020 The US has spent the entire post-war period running a massive and...

Laurence Kotlikoff (Contributor) Sue has learned an extremely painful lesson, which, in her case, will materially lower her living...

Laurence Kotlikoff (Contributor) Two years ago today, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) released their report A-09-18-50559 which...

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How many of you are dreading the breakout of political warfare over Christmas dinner? I am and I’m not even formally eligible to...

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) are catching lots of flak for the cost of their “Medicare for All” (MFA)...

Unless you’re super rich or super poor, you’re probably going to take out a mortgage at some point in your life to buy a house. The...

In a recent column, I pointed out that mortgages can be major financial and tax losers. In particular, I used my company’s Maxifi...

In 2015 and again in 2018, I wrote about the Social Security Administration (SSA) defrauding, whether intentionally or not, large numbers...

Economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley are advising Elizabeth Warren’s presidential...

Mrs. Jimmy Rogers of Houston, Texas, was disabled in 1996 in an aircraft accident while working for American Airlines. To this day she is...

Our country is split down the middle on man-made climate change. Roughly half of us believe it’s real, and half of us believe it’s fake....

Traditional banks borrow money and fail when they can’t repay. The result, as the Great Recession showed, is potential economic...

My Preferred Planning Software is MaxiFi I’ve been working on a research paper with UNC econometrician, Neville Francis for the past year...

If you have children, the quality of schools is critical. But, in general, the question to economists, of which I’m one, is the expense...

Like many Americans, I’d support any of the more than 20 Democratic presidential candidates over the current occupant of the White House....

United Income, a financial planning advisory service, just released an important study called, “The Retirement Solution Hiding In Plain...

Three days ago, I posted a column showing that Social Security is mailing out wildly incorrect benefit statements. I say statements...

As I’ve written in the past, you can’t rely on Social Security to provide accurate information on your options. In my experience, over...

Whether the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) disproportionately helped the rich may be 2020’s biggest political issue. Treasury Secretary...

There are plenty of scam artists trying to separate us from our Social Security benefits. The list, as incredible as it may seem,...

Social Security is Broke Social Security’s annual Trustees Report came out recently, and it showed Social Security ran a gigantic $9...

The Major Technology Breakthrough to Guide Portfolio Choice by Laurence Kotlikoff, 4/22/19 Optimizing retirement outcomes means funding...

A new study shows that the benefits of tax reform vary widely – and state taxes are the most important reason. The study is produced by...