Tag Archives: Taxes/regulation

by Dale Coberly DID MAYA MACGUINEAS of CRFB LIE on TIME magazine website OR WAS SHE JUST FOOLIN’ AND DID ANYONE NOTICE Maya MacGuineas is president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) which reliably confuses the Federal Budget with the Social Security program.   CRFB claims to want to cut government spending to balance the Budget,  but it spends most of its time arguing for the need to cut Social Security. Social Security is not funded...

Via Alternet, Thom Hartmann writes: …This type of labor system has been the dream of conservative/corporatists, particularly since the “Reagan Revolution” kicked off a major federal war on the right of workers to organize for their own protection from corporate abuse.Unions represented almost a third of American workers when Reagan came into office (and, since union jobs set local labor standards, for every union job there was typically an...

Financialized business models sticks to faith based “Market knows best” rule. …The number of MBAs graduating from America’s business schools has skyrocketed since the 1980s. But over that time, the health of American business has decreased by many metrics: corporate R&D spending, new business creation, productivity, and the level of public trust in business in general. There are many reasons for this, but one key factor is that the basic training that...

Angry Bear has over the years described the Pharma industry and its spending on Rand D and stock buybacks, among other developments in comparing US health outcomes to other countries. Via New York Times discussing this study at Ineteconomics. US Pharma’s Financialized Business Model JUL 2017 | Price gouging in the US pharmaceutical drug industry goes back more than three decades. In 1985 US Representative Henry Waxman, chair of the House Subcommittee on...

Trump: the endgame There was some economic news last week which is important for the long term, and I’ll try to post about it later today or tomorrow, but in the meantime … I’m as interested in the latest Trump-Russia tidbit as the next person, but really, don’t we all already know the endgame? Remember during the campaign, no matter what devastating gaffes Trump made, he always rebounded into the low 40%’s? Well, about the same thing has been true for the...

Dan here…another post by Steve Why Tyler Cowen Doesn’t Understand the Economy: It’s the Debt, Stupid Steve Roth | November 16, 2015 In a recent post Tyler Cowen makes an admirable effort to lay out his overarching approach to thinking about macroeconomics, revealing the assumptions underlying his understanding of how economies work. (Even more salutary, this has prompted others to do likewise: Nick Rowe, Ryan Avent.) Cowen’s first assertion: In world history,...

Nation “Too Broke” for Universal Healthcare to Spend $406 Billion More on F-35 (Photo: Forsvarsdepartementet/flickr/cc) The nation’s most expensive weapons program isn’t done showing U.S. taxpayers how much it will ultimately cost them, with Bloomberg reporting Monday that the F-35 fighter jet budget is now predicted to jump by a cool $27 billion. “Think about [F-35's] $405 billion price tag when a family member dies of a preventable disease. Get angry.”...

Dan here….Steve Roth in 2014 How Do Households Build Wealth? Probably Not the Way You Think. Three Graphs Steve Roth | October 28, 2014 12:52 pm US/GLOBAL ECONOMICS Work hard. Save your money. Spend less than you earn. That’s how you become wealthy, right? That’s not totally wrong, but if you think that’s the whole story — or even a large part of the story – you may be surprised by this graph: (Note: these are not realized capital gains, which really only...

A thought for Sunday: Trump voters and the “peasant mentality” I am currently reading a comprehensive tome on 19th century European history, “The Pursuit of Power,” by Richard J. Evans. One episode that made a big impression on me was the decision by Otto von Bismarck (no conservative he) upon the establishment of the German Confederation, to eschew property qualifications for the franchise for the Reichstag and embrace universal male suffrage (p. 257).  Why?...

Former Ohio official who accidentally released Social Security numbers is on Trump’s voter fraud panel LA TImes reports: The Republican gubernatorial primary was just weeks away, and then-Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell had his sights set on securing the nomination. Blackwell had served as mayor of Cincinnati and state treasurer before becoming Ohio’s top elections official, so a bid for governor in 2006 seemed a logical next step in his political...