Joseph Stiglitz offers perspective on the bankruptcy of Detroit and its wider context: At one level, one might shrug: companies die every day; new ones are born. That is part of the dynamics of capitalism. So, too, for cities. Maybe Detroit and cities like it are just in the wrong location for the goods and […]
Yves Smith gives Angry Bear Edward Lambert a nod in Profitless stocks, Underinvestment, and the cannibalization of labor, and levitating stock prices. As this trend has accelerated, we’ve also seen falling levels of corporate investment. As I noted in a 2005 article, companies were net savers, which was unheard of at any time other than in […]
Paul Krugman points to Angry Bear Robert Waldmann in two separate posts this week here and here. by Robert Waldmann “Ricardo offers us the supreme intellectual achievement, unattainable by weaker spirits, of adopting a hypothetical world remote from experience as though it were the world of experience and then living in it consistently. With most […]
Reader Denis Drew writes (lifted from comments) : The bottom 50% of America’s workforce now takes 12% of overall income. If the federal minimum wage is raised to $15/hr that will add 3.6% direct inflation. $15/hr being today’s median wage, half the workforce, 70 million employees receiving an average $8,000/yr raise would add $560 billion […]
From the Huffington Post comes a note on who else is using NSA data in some fashion: A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans. Although these cases […]
by Linda Beale The Right’s Goal–end the one tax expenditure that truly aids poor working families The Tax Foundation, that propaganda tank that masquerades as a “nonpartisan” “think” tank, is at it again. Now it’s pushing the right-wing agenda of ending any tax expenditures that redistribute resources down to those in the lower-income distributions. It’s […]
Sarah Binder is a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, offers some thoughts on the FED and its changing role ( re-posted with authors permission, for the complete post go to original): Beyond the horse race to lead the FED …As the horse race for […]
For a point of view we don’t see much lately: Mariana Mazzucato, a Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, discusses the role of government in innovation and economic growth. In her latest book The Entrepreneurial State she argues that active state investment has been the secret behind most radical innovations, and that this requires economists […]
by Linda Beale The Right cuts food stamps to pass corporate farm welfare–where’s the sense in that? The House has its priorities firmly in mind. Those priorities involve making sure that the wealthy people and corporations keep their wealth while any and all possible cuts to any welfare or “entitlement” programs are made. All you […]