As I write this during the second week of October, the two presidential campaigners have suddenly shifted to discuss retirement income security rather than just health care and taxes. The financial market meltdown in the last weeks of September and October has caused pension assets to fall by 20%. That means near retirees’ and retirees’ lives have been turned upside down as their risky 401(k) savings accounts erode.

Candidate John McCain still wants to turn Social Security into private accounts, which is remarkable since if such accounts had existed the one and only source of guaranteed retirement income would be at risk.

Candidate Barak Obama will likely move away from his plan expand the 401(k) and other individual and commercial retirement accounts to plans that guarantee a supplement to Social Security.

Larry Bartels, author of Unequal Democracy:The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age writing for the Huffington Post about the upcoming presidential elections:

C Students Welcome

Clips of Sarah Palin’s interviews with Katie Couric have generated lots of buzz about whether Palin is sufficiently well-informed about national and international affairs to be an effective vice president. Palin fans will be tuning in to tomorrow night’s vice presidential debate eager to see her allay those doubts, while skeptics will be viewing in much the same spirit as the people who watch NASCAR races hoping to witness a crash.

Former New Yorker editor Tina Brown has launched the news & commentary site, The Daily Beast, earlier this week. The page, The Buzz Board: Smart People Recommend, features insiders’ picks on the news of the day. According to the site, Bill Clinton included Unequal Democracy in a short list of 3 bailout-related books.

Bryan Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter is interviewed on the October 10th episode of 20/20 by John Stossel in a segment on “Should Some People Not Vote?”

The 2008 election is likely to be a close contest in a number of states and a key question that many will ask prior to the election is the same one that was asked in 2004:  will my vote actually be counted by the voting technology that I use?

The 2000 election exposed Americans to the various ills that exist in the voting electoral process and voters became concerned that some voting technologies did not accurately record votes. Voters quickly recognized that by making a stray mark on their paper ballot or not paying attention to the button they push on a direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machine, their vote could be invalidated or, worse, that they could completely miss voting on a race.

“There’s a book that’s come out right now, by prominent economist—irrefutable—looking at the evidence showing that when Democrats have been in charge of the economy, the economy has grown faster and it’s also been fairer in the sense that everybody benefits. And when the Republicans have been in charge, the economy has grown slower and there’s been greater inequality. And this is, you know, looking back over the last 80 years.”

–Barack Obama

As reported last week by MSNBC, Barack Obama spoke about key ideas found in Larry Bartels’ new book Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age during a stop on the campaign trail in Pennsylvania.