National Institute on Money in State Politics The Institute's Blog: Nonpartisan. Timely. Transparent. The Sun Never Rises: Sources of Michigan’s Dark Money Set to Remain HiddenTwo days after Christmas, Governor Rick Snyder gave a belated gift to dark money groups and those donors who felt stifled by Michigan’s campaign finance limits. Thanks for your Support We're thankful for new general support from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for the Institute's work to invigorate debate about the role money plays in elections and policy decisions with data-backed evidence. Watch for Updates! We now offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds of our data that enable you to stay up-to-date on our data, track new reports, and see new contributions to candidates, parties, ballot measures, committees and states.
Dangerous Minds Public Citizen Groups Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division champions consumer interests before the U.S. Congress and serves as a government watchdog. We engage in public education and advocacy, and are focused on the following: - Strengthening health, safety and financial protections. - Ensuring access to the courts to hold corporations accountable for wrongdoing. - Strengthening our democracy by exposing and combating the harmful impact of money in politics. Public Citizen’s Energy Program works to combat climate change by promoting safe, affordable and environmentally sustainable energy. Learn more about our work. The mission of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch is to ensure that in this era of globalization, a majority have the opportunity to enjoy America's promises: economic security, a clean environment, safe food, medicines and products, access to quality affordable services such as health care and the exercise of democratic decision-making about the matters that affect their lives.
INFORMATION CLEARING HOUSE. NEWS, COMMENTARY & INSIGHT Finance & Development, September 2011 - Equality and Efficiency Finance & Development, September 2011, Vol. 48, No. 3 Andrew G. Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry PDF version Is there a trade-off between the two or do they go hand in hand? IN his influential 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff, Arthur Okun argued that pursuing equality can reduce efficiency (the total output produced with given resources). Do societies inevitably face an invidious choice between efficient production and equitable wealth and income distribution? In a word, no. In recent work (Berg, Ostry, and Zettelmeyer, 2011; and Berg and Ostry, 2011), we discovered that when growth is looked at over the long term, the trade-off between efficiency and equality may not exist. Inequality matters for growth and other macroeconomic outcomes, in all corners of the globe. How do economies grow? The experiences in developing and emerging economies, however, are far more varied (see Chart 2). Income distribution and growth sustainability Hazard to sustained growth Cameroon is typical.
Paying Nothing, Conservative Style By Matthew Yglesias on October 11, 2011 at 4:44 pm "Paying Nothing, Conservative Style" Here’s Matt Labash and the Weekly Standard trying to mislead you about taxation and the income distribution: You’re either part of “us,” the “99 percent” (as all the surrounding signage identifies us), or you’re part of “them” — the rapacious 1 percent, who are purportedly strangling our nation by holding roughly one-third of its wealth, even if they also pay 38 percent of all federal income taxes while the bottom 47 percent of the population pay nothing (a Revolution is no place for facts and figures). You might as well say that the 20 percent of Americans who smoke cigarettes regularly pay 95 percent of federal tobacco excise taxes while 70 percent of the population pays nothing. The genius of the conservative rhetorical move here is that most people think of the taxes that you pay when you “do your taxes” in April as being your income taxes.
Dissent Magazine Is Regulatory Uncertainty a Major Impediment to Job Growth? By: Dr. Jan Eberly Last week at a Senate hearing Secretary Geithner said, “I'm very sympathetic to the argument you want to be careful to get the rules better and smarter, but I don’t think there's good evidence in support of the proposition that it's regulatory burden or uncertainty that's causing the economy to grow more slowly than any of us would like.” Economists from across the political spectrum have also weighed into this debate and reached the same conclusion. Nonetheless, two commonly repeated misconceptions are that uncertainty created by proposed regulations is holding back business investment and hiring and that the overall burden of existing regulations is so high that firms have reduced their hiring. Business Profits If regulation was a significant drag on business today, we would expect to see profits constrained after recent regulatory reforms were passed into law. Trends in Workforce, Capacity Utilization, and Business Investment Financial Indicators A Sensible Path Forward
Underground Industry: Gas Pipelines Are Big Business But Lightly Regulated The gas pipeline industry is hardly glamorous. But it is lucrative and loosely regulated. Last weekend, two oil and gas pipeline companies announced they would combine to create the biggest such firm in the U.S. when Kinder Morgan offered more than $20 billion to buy El Paso. If the deal goes through, the companies say, the behemoth would become the continent’s fourth largest energy corporation. While the pipeline business has operated largely, well, underground, several recent accidents have drawn attention to safety and the web of regulations that governs the nation’s 2.3 million miles of gas pipelines. A growing controversy over a plan to build a major oil pipeline from Canada’s Tar Sands to Texas [1] has also spotlighted industry practices. On Monday, the Senate passed a pipeline safety bill [2] that would increase fines, hire more inspectors and implement stronger safety standards. Here’s a primer on the industry and its regulations. The Regulations The Business Key Pipeline Stats*
Cheat Sheet: What’s Happened to the Big Players in the Financial Crisis Mounted police stop Occupy Wall Street participants trying to break through police barricade in Times Square, Oct. 15, 2011. (EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/Getty Images) Mortgage lenders contributed to the financial crisis by issuing or underwriting loans to people who would have a difficult time paying them back [1], inflating a housing bubble that was bound to pop. Lax regulation [2] allowed banks to stretch their mortgage lending standards and use aggressive tactics to rope borrowers into complex mortgages that were more expensive than they first appeared. Evidence has also surfaced that lenders were filing fraudulent documents to push some of these mortgages through [3], and, in some cases, had been doing so as early as the 1990s. Countrywide, once the nation’s largest mortgage lender, also pushed customers to sign on for complex and costly mortgages that boosted the company’s profits [7]. Where they are now: Few prosecutions have been brought against subprime mortgage lenders. The regulators
EPA Plans to Issue Rules Covering Fracking Wastewater The federal government had left it to states to decide how to regulate wastewater that was discharged from wells to streams, but now says it will develop national standards. The McKeesport Sewage Treatment Plant, one of nine plants on the Monongahela River that has treated wastewater from Marcellus Shale drilling operations. (Joaquin Sapien/ProPublica) The EPA took another step toward tightening oversight of hydraulic fracturing today, announcing it would initiate a process to set national rules for treating wastewater discharged from gas drilling operations. Until now, the agency has largely left it to states to police wastewater discharges. Cynthia Dougherty, EPA's director of ground water and drinking water, told a Senate panel today that the agency has an important role to play in bolstering state standards. "I wouldn't say they're inadequate," she said of states' regulations, "but they could use the help."