Wealth Taxes? Don’t Hold Your Breath. By James Kwak Tyler Cowen thinks that we are entering an age of debates over wealth taxes. If only. It’s true, as Cowen notes, that national debt everywhere is a relatively small fraction of national wealth and that, therefore, “fiscal problems are best regarded as problems of dysfunctional governance.” One of our central arguments in White House Burning was that the United States obviously, easily has the ability to pay down the national debt, and how it will do so is basically a distributional issue.
Even if wealth taxes make sense, that doesn’t mean they will happen. Cowen claims that “Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, revenue-hungry governments go ‘where the money is.’” Since the beginning of the current round of perceived deficit problems in the late 1970s, tax revenues have shifted away from income taxes (especially the corporate income tax) and toward payroll taxes—at a time when real wages have been falling. The reasons are obvious. What Use Are Economists? by Dani Rodrik. CAMBRIDGE – When the stakes are high, it is no surprise that battling political opponents use whatever support they can garner from economists and other researchers. That is what happened when conservative American politicians and European Union officials latched on to the work of two Harvard professors – Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff – to justify their support of fiscal austerity.
Reinhart and Rogoff published a paper that appeared to show that public-debt levels above 90% of GDP significantly impede economic growth. Three economists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst then did what academics are routinely supposed to do – replicate their colleagues’ work and subject it to criticism. Project Syndicate needs your help to provide readers everywhere equal access to the ideas and debates shaping their lives. Learn more The resulting firestorm has clouded a salutary process of scrutiny and refinement of economic research. Oligarchy Exists Inside Our Democracy. By Ed Walker, who writes regularly for Firedoglake as masaccio Suddenly it looks like we are seeing political victories for progressives, on LGBT rights, on issues important to Hispanics, even occasionally on issues important to women.
At the same time, we lose every single battle over economic issues. How is it that when polls show that a huge majority oppose cuts to Social Security, Democratic politicians like President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin are all for it, as are the Republicans? How is it that when Obama gets elected on a pledge to hike taxes on incomes above $250K, with a huge majority and control of the Senate, and a legislative situation where all he has to do is nothing and it happens, and then it doesn’t?
How is it that the same bill continued a bunch of disgusting loopholes for the richest Americans and the corporations they control, like the NASCAR loophole that essentially only benefits one enormously wealthy family? 1. Gun control: America's gun divide. The Republicans’ war on science and reason. The contempt with which the party views reason is staggering. Republicans have become proudly and unquestionably anti-science. (It is their litmus test, though they would probably reject the science behind litmus paper.)
With the exception of Jon Huntsman, who polls about as well as Darwin would in a Republican primary, the Republican presidential candidates have either denied the existence of climate change, denied that it has been caused — and can be reversed — by man, or apologized for once holding a different view. They have come to this conclusion not because the science is inconclusive, but because they believe, as a matter of principle, that scientific evidence is no evidence at all. It’s on that basis that Ron Paul can say of evolution, “I think it’s a theory and I don’t accept it as a theory.” It’s on that basis that Rick Perry can call evolution “it’s a theory that’s out there, but one that’s got some gaps in it.” Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.
War on Whistleblowers: How the Obama Administration Destroyed Thomas Drake For Exposing Government Waste. By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from Alternet When Thomas Drake, then an official at the National Security Agency, realized that the agency’s decision to shut down an internal data analysis program and instead outsource the project to a private contractor provided the government with less effective analysis at much higher cost, he tried to do something about it.
Drake’s decision to join three other whistleblowers in asking the agency’s inspector general to investigate ultimately made him the target of a leak investigation that tore his life apart. In 2005, the inspector general of the Department of Defense, of which NSA is a part, confirmed the whistleblowers’ accusations of waste, fraud and security risk.
Earlier this year, former NSA Director Michael Hayden even conceded that TrailBlazer, the program for which the NSA paid over $1 billion to the Science Applications International Corporation, had failed. “That’s how that World War I statute was originally designed,” Drake continued. We know what we're protesting. This Crimson article by Harvard undergraduates Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Gabriel H. Bayard from November 2011, addressing the fundamental issues underlying the Occupy Ec 10 movement, did not get nearly the amount of attention that it deserved. Published about a week after the walkout on Mankiw's class, very few sources on the walkout linked to it, instead choosing to focus on the open letter and Crimson editorial(s), which were good, but not very carefully articulated.
We think the exclusion of the Bayard-Sandalow-Ash piece is very unfortunate. The articles which Greg Mankiw chose to cite in this New York Times article "Know What You're Protesting" did not accurately portray the types of issues that most people who chose to walk out have with his course. It would have done more for discourse around the issue if Mankiw had actually spent time dealing with the substantive attacks, instead of largely arguing past the protesters. Sports Stars Versus Business "Stars" Wells Fargo’s “Reprehensible” Foreclosure Abuses Prove Incompetence and Collusion of OCC. Two bankruptcy cases in Louisiana that have revealed systematic, persistent foreclosure abuses by Wells Fargo have gotten enough media attention that it is inconceivable that banking regulators don’t know about them.
The lack of any intervention, or even so much as a throat-clearing by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is yet another proof of how the regulator apparently sees its role as fronting for banks rather than enforcing rules. This story is back in the news thanks to an appeals court smackdown of Wells, which has engaged in a long-standing war of attrition with one of the plaintiffs, a Michael Jones.
The reason for the appeal was that the bank was fighting the judge’s imposition of punitive damages of $3.1 million for Wells’ “reprehensible” conduct. We wrote about the underlying case a year ago. Bankruptcy judge, Elizabeth Magner of the Eastern District of Louisiana, had found Wells Fargo guilty of egregious foreclosure abuses in a 2007 case, Jones v. Wells Fargo. 1. Why gun control matters more than terrorism. Wednesday night's presidential debate is about domestic policy, but that doesn't mean the candidates can't be asked questions that use foreign policy to raise an important point about domestic issues.
Pivoting off this recent column by the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson, here's the question I'd like moderator Jim Lehrer to ask President Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney on Wednesday. "Since 9/11 the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars protecting Americans from "global terrorism. " Yet the number of U.S. citizens killed by terrorists is very low. Since 9/11, in fact, the United States has lost on average fewer than 32 citizens per year to terrorist violence. Even if you include the 2,689 lives lost on 9/11, the annual average over the past 11 years is less than 275. By contrast, every year more than 30,000 Americans are killed by guns here in the United States, a rate higher than any other advanced industrial country.
Lars Baron/Getty Images. Mitt Romney’s Leniency Toward Corporate Welfare Queens. Mitt Romney once seemed like a moderate technocrat. But, as the Republican Convention and the video leak of his comments about the “forty-seven per cent” of Americans who “believe that they are victims” made clear, Romney now seems to fancy himself a small-government zealot, who promises the end of the culture of entitlement. Yet even as he assails people on Medicaid and Social Security, and those who receive the earned-income tax credit, for being “dependent upon government,” Romney has had strikingly little to say about another prominent group that’s “dependent upon government”: the many American companies whose profits rely, in one form or another, on government assistance.
From the days of high tariffs and giant land grants to the railroads, business and government have always been tightly intertwined in this country. But, in recent decades, what you could call the corporate welfare state has become bigger. The tax code, too, is a useful tool for helping businesses.