Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Trans Pacific Partnership Bad for the Middle Class, but How Bad? UPDATED

What you don’t know can hurt you. I think that’s a clear lesson of some so-called trade agreements the United States has signed over the last 20 years, and illustrated further by the few that have been defeated, most notably the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from1995 […]

EU proposes tighter rules on investment incentives

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition is the EU equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice Anti-trust Division plus units for controlling domestic subsidies to industry. According to a new policy briefing from the European Policies Research Centre at the University of Strathclyde, DG-Competition has released a draft of new regulations on “regional aid” (subsidies […]

Speaking of inequality

Travis Waldron at Think Progress pointed out this excellent article by David Cay Johnston. It dovetails well with my last post, which showed the fall of individual real wages and their failure to regain their peak fully 40 years after it was reached. Johnston writes: Incomes and tax revenues have grown from 2009 to 2011 […]

Real wages decline; literally no one notices

Cross-posted from Middle Class Political Economist. Your read it here first: Real wages fell 0.2% in 2012, down from $295.49 (1982-84 dollars) to $294.83 per week, according to the 2013 Economic Report of the President. Thus, a 1.9% increase in nominal wages was  more than wiped out by inflation, marking the 40th consecutive year that […]

EU Chooses Bank Runs Over Fighting Tax Haven Cyprus

NPR’s “Marketplace” reported Monday that the European Union planned to impose a tax on bank deposits in Cyprus of up to 10% to bail out the country’s banks. This unprecedented action threatens to undermine confidence in banks throughout the eurozone periphery, Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. As Louise Cooper told Marketplace, “(This move) says […]

Job Piracy Marches on in Alabama

Unmentioned in the recent Good Jobs First report on job piracy, it turns out that both relocation subsidies and retention subsidies are commonplace in Alabama. Greg Varner (@varnergreg) directs me to this report on how a Birmingham auto dealership, Serra Automotive, is demanding a multimillion incentive deal to keep it from relocating to another municipality […]

Europeans, Republicans Dreaming Up New Ways to Destroy Global Economy

While we are busy paying attention to the 550th edition of Republican-caused fake crises (aka the sequester), a much more real crisis is brewing in the Eurozone. Richard Field at Trust Your Instincts flags a Reuters report that that Eurozone regulators are strongly considering a proposal to make not just investors in Cyprus banks pay […]

Minimum Wage a Winner Both Politically and Economically

President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9.00 per hour puts the Republicans between a rock and a hard place politically. Paul Krugman echoes the point that a big majority of the population supports a minimum wage increase, including a majority of Republicans (his linking to the original poll source appears to have […]

Solutions to the Middle Class Retirement Crisis

As I have noted in three recent posts, retirement security for those currently or recently in the middle class is no sure thing. 49% of the private work force has neither defined benefit (traditional pensions) or defined contribution (401(k)) retirement plans, while public sector pensions are coming under increasing attack. The United States has the […]

Billions for job piracy even as states cut budgets

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 […]