A Gilded Planet

Over at Digby's place, David Atkins has argued against any cuts to Medicare or Medicaid as part of a laughably unnecessary "grand bargain" meant to avoid the largely mythological "fiscal cliff," by referring to increasingly depressed wages of working people in the U.S. But in a recent post , he repeated a myth about how globalization has factored into the downward pressure on the livelihood of the vast majority of Americans: Now, it's certainly true that we live in a brave new world that structurally advantages the wealthy: labor is global and expendable, jobs are increasingly mechanized, the world is flattened, vertical integration and economies of scale are commonplace. But as Hacker and Pierson persuasively argue , this is also a product of intentional public policy, including (as I have frequently argued) an obsession with  inflating assets over wages . Atkins correctly points out that a major part of the story that explains the stagnation of m...

California Forward, a non-partisan front group for sanctimonious centrists who think problems can be solved by anodyne nonsense and half-measures, has polluted the ballot in our state with a truly moronic proposition that would give large businesses the ability to elude environmental regulations by playing county governments against each other. While it purports to move power and authority down to the local level, it would have the effect of giving private business entities the power to rewrite California's laws as long as they can convince already beleaguered local governments to go along with them. I am a strong supporter of the principle of local control of decision-making. Every day, city governments all over the country enact great policies that federal and state governments are too sluggish and cowardly to touch. But often "bringing power back to local government" is code for "corporate privatization of laws and regulations", in the same sense that ...

Continued from Part II . The Mechanics of a Progressive Consumption Tax Let’s look at how a progressive consumption tax would actually differ from the federal income tax by looking at the prospective tax bills of two fictional American families of very different means. The Smiths, a middle class family of four, earn $50,233 annually. That puts them very near the median income of the U.S. Under the status quo federal income tax, their first $16,700 of earnings is taxed at a 10 percent rate and the rest is taxed at a 15 percent rate. This adds up to a total liability of about $6,700. Without going into too much detail, we can assume that a family at this income level probably does not itemize deductions but is very likely to be eligible for benefits such as the child tax credit so their actual tax bill will be lower. Let’s assume a final liability of around $4,500. Now, let’s recalculate the Smiths’ tax liability under the progressive consumption tax. The Smiths would report $50,2...

"The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes." - Noah Webster Wealth disparity in this country has grown to vast proportions. If we want to save our democracy and secure our investments in the future, we must reverse this alarming trend. We simply can't keep turning our back on education and expect a prosperous tomorrow. Keeping this in mind, I ask anyone who will listen to sign on in support of the Millionaires Tax both because it will bring funding back to California's public schools from kindergarten through higher education and it has the capacity to start translating the agitation of the Occupy movement into public policy that will reshape the conditions of economic power in this country.

Recently, Michael Moore made a speech to protestors in Wisconsin which was published as an editorial in the Huffington Post under the title "America is Not Broke." The idea that America is not, in fact, broke has come as a surprise to many. Don't we have a giant federal budget deficit? Aren't state governments (including our own here in California) scrambling to deal with massive shortfalls? What about high unemployment? And on and on. The geniuses at Reason.tv recently decided to tap into such misunderstandings in order to make the following highly misleading video: The breathtakingly ugly dude in this video either has no understanding of how finance works, or he is being deliberately obtuse in order to keep his viewers from understanding the financial condition of the U.S. The most obvious way to look at whether the US government is broke is to look at interest rates on federal government bonds. This is the same as looking at how much the government has to pay t...

After a self-imposed exile from political writing , as well as an accompanying partial news blackout, my growing addiction to movies metastisized to a nearly unfathomable degree. While I will continue to chronicle this addiction regularly, the recent events in my home state of Wisconsin have made it untenable for me to continue avoiding comment on politics, economics and the like. On these subjects, I plan to begin writing about how the radical right wing of this country has been using government to further enrich the rich while screwing the rest of us along with some discussion of how ordinary people can fight back.

Aside from the indispensable Ezra Klein , I don’t usually read the Washington Post because it seems to have adopted a policy of deliberately misleading its readers on its editorial page while its news section…well, the less said , the better . But the other day as I was walking into Moffitt Library, a WaPo headline caught my eye and I had to stop to see if I was hallucinating. The headline read “World's Wealthy Pay a Price In Crisis.” I blinked and rubbed my eyes in disbelief. The richest people in America were richer in 2007 than at any time since the 1920s. Similar statistics showed the same story around the world. Many economists and policy analysts further believed that the rich were the only people seeing real income gains from growth across the entire economy for many years before the recession. Since the recession began, I understand that the rich became slightly poorer than before. Instead of being unimaginably wealthy, they are now only obscenely wealthy. But...