This is more or less relevant to Beverly’s post from earlier today. How many times have you heard Boehner, McConnell, Ryan or one of the legion of right-wing talking heads say, “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem?” I refuted that lie repeatedly in this AB post and at the included […]
Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports this morning that Republicans believe the GDP report showing the economy is shrinking gives them political “leverage” over Obama, since bad economic news is terrible for the President. But Thrush notes that this shouldn’t be the case, since the contraction was the result of spending cuts, which in theory should undermine […]
There were three big political stories that came out of David Gregory’s fabulously interesting interview of Paul Ryan aired last Sunday on Meet the Press. One was that Ryan said: Well, we can debate the efficacy of Keynesian economics or not. And I don’t obviously believe– I think the debt is pretty clear it doesn’t […]
This coming weekend is the annual Jon Swift Memorial Blogroll Amnesty, the reasoned, proportionate response to some of the Bigger Names suddenly deciding that they needed to cull their recommendations. Swift’s brilliant (and certainly modest) proposal was that you should instead find five blogs with lower hits than you and recommend (i.e., promote) them, not […]
The American Future Fund is an Iowa based 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization affiliated with the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which in turn has reported ties to billionaires Charles G. Koch andDavid H. Koch. American Future Fund was founded by individuals who worked for Mitt Romney‘s 2008 bid for the Republican U.S. Presidential nomination. Nick Ryan, […]
If I could put my Vulgat Marxist hat on for a second another major difference between an invested pension fund and Social Security is that the fiormer fattens its balance by maximizing the extraction of value from labor productivity (and so increases ROI on capital) where SS thrives when labor retains as large a share […]
Krugman changes his mind Naked Capitalism In a recent post Krugman says the following Paul Krugman is Wrong about the Rise of the Robots Wapo Reminds me of conscious capitalism from Tyler Cowen’s review Conscious Capitalism Mish Shedlock Robotic surgeons
by Linda Beale Dell restructuring–all for a tax advantage? David Cay Johnston writes for Tax Analysts, in Dell’s Multiple Restructurings Aid It in Tax Avoidance (2013), about a global reorganization disclosed by Dell in its January 2007 Form 8-K filed with the SEC: “just before the end of 2006, [Dell] issued more than 475 million […]
According to Center on Budget and Policy Priority data cited by Louise Story, in 2011 the states enacted $156 billion of austerity measures, between budget cuts and tax hikes. Despite their budgetary woes, however, this did not stop them from throwing billions of dollars a year into the worst kind of corporate subsidy, relocation incentives […]
The final problem is that, in an effort to reduce the economic concentration of power, the administration is concentrating political power in Washington. If the problem is that talent is fleeing blighted localities, it’s hard to see how you make that better if decision-making and resources are concentrated faraway in the nation’s capital. This is […]