Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

Via Truthout: In every community, there are nonprofit charities that serve real needs: local food pantries, programs addressing the opioid crisis, the Red Cross chapters that come to our aid after a storm. Charities provide vital services to the people and places they serve. These organizations lean heavily on volunteers, fundraisers, and donors. And most ordinary donors give without consideration of a tax break — people give their time, treasure, and...

Click this link. Data For Progress decided to ask people about policy proposals which very serious centrists consider way too far left for America. American voters respond differently. As should already be clear from existing polls (click and search for “fair”), there is strong support for egalitarian populist redistributive public policy. At Data For Progress, they chose to emphasize the positive — four proposals with overwhelming support, but I think...

run75441: Student Loan Justice Organization has started a letter/email campaign to Senator Elizabeth Warren via one of her aides Joshua Delaney. I have read Senator Warren on numerous occasions and she has been forthright in her proposals and opposition to the Financial and Banking industry taking advantage of the Middle Class. For whatever reason, Senator Warren has been reluctant to take up the crusade for students who have been indentured to a system...

Germany Organizing Anti-Trump Coalition Mark Thoma th other day links to a story in Der Spiegel about a visit to Japan by new German Foreign Minister, Heike Maas.  He met with PM Shinzo Abe, and apparently the two of them agreed on the need for creating a network of like-minded nations that wish to maintain portions of the “post-war order,” especially in the areas of trade policy rules and climate change agreements.  All of this is in reaction to...

Rigging the student loan system  Americans today hold $1.5 trillion in student debt, and recent research reveals that the effects of this outsized and growing debt are much more devastating than previously thought, particularly for communities of color. From bankruptcy protections and lower interest rates and fees to safeguards from fraudulent educational programs and even fullstudent debt cancellation, economic justice and higher education advocates...

The Soybean Boom Via TalkingPointsMemo AP notes: Private forecasters cautioned that the April-June pace is unsustainable because, they say, it stems from temporary factors, including a rush by exporters of soybeans and other products to get their shipments out before retaliatory tariffs took effect. They predicted the rest of the year is likely to see solid, but slower growth of around 3 percent. The transformation is also not as dramatic as Trump...

Economic Policy Institute answers two laymen questions on wage stagnation: Why is wage growth so slow? It’s not because low-wage jobs are being added disproportionately: One explanation worth looking into is whether today’s low wage growth is due to a composition effect—i.e. low-wage jobs being added faster than middle- and/or high-wage jobs and, as a result, pulling down wage growth…But since 2013, as the recovery has strengthened, the opposite has been...

Trump Tariffs Hit Largest US Aluminum Company, ALCOA In the history of antitrust law, one of the most important rulings by the US Supreme Court came in 1945, when the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), long based in Pittsburgh with heavy Mellon family ownership, was ordered broken up for being a monopoly, following a ruling by Judge Learned Hand.  This was the famous “per se” ruling that said that simple domination of an industry by size was...

by Joseph Joyce Can Globalization Be Reversed? The wide-scale imposition of tariffs by the Trump administration is part of a larger effort to undo the expansion of markets around the globe and ensure that the goods consumed in the U.S. will be produced here. Will it be successful? And what would a world that represented a retreat from the globalization of the 1990s and early 2000s look like? Martin Sandbu of the Financial Times believes that the open...

Lawfare blog published a solid read of the latest indictment announced by Rod Rosenstein. The indictment Friday morning of 12 Russian military intelligence officials in connection with the 2016 election hacks and the resulting distribution of purloined emails was not a total surprise. Observers of the Mueller investigation have been expecting it for a long time, particularly since the Feb. 16 indictment of 13 Russian individuals and three companies over...