Tag Archives: US/Global Economics

Steve Roth writes What is the secret to joining the rich country club at Evonomics: By Steve Roth There’s a curious fact about the wealth and growth of nations that you rarely see mentioned: No country has ever joined the modern, high-productivity, rich-country club without massive doses of redistribution, and universal government programs for social support and financial security. Not one. Ever. You can get a rough feel for the scale of those programs here...

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...

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...

« Back I am reposting this at Dan’s suggestion as it relates to the recent post by Steve Roth.  I have edited it slightly along with a retitle to clean up some wording and hopefully have made it easier to read.  For those new here, my posts started with income inequality and a thought that we changed our economy as to how we would make money starting in the 80′s.   My one new thought is that the obvious political party to promote policy that addresses the...

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?...