by Linda Beale The Tea Party’s Disruptive Anti-Government (and anti-tax) Politics The New York Times ran an interesting piece by Kim Messick on the Tea Party’s psyche yesterday: Messick, The Tea Party’s Paranoid Aesthetic, New York Times (Aug. 10, 2013). It’s worth trying to understand this political group’s understanding of itself, since it ” is […]
Brad DeLong adds his voice to the people addressing the retirement woes of many: Edward Filene’s idea from the 1920s of having companies run employer-sponsored defined-benefit plans has, by and large, come a-crashing down. Companies turn out not to be long-lived enough to run pensions with a high enough probability. And when they are there […]
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 […]
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 […]
Jared Bernstein writes about the EITC today (Earned Income Tax Credit), which is a program to help lift people out of poverty when they fall into low-paying jobs. I just want to add another wrinkle to the story. When a student defaults on their student loans, which is something that will happen more and more […]
It can be tough to articulate a cogent argument against high-frequency trading in the context of highly liquid, efficiently functioning securities markets, but I think Rajiv Sethi has done so (riffing off Michael Lewis’s typically scathing and revealing article on Goldman’s recent bad behavior). In brief, in my words: 1. Value investors are trying to buy shares in […]
People see that corporate profits are up, way up. So they wonder, How can there be zombie companies out there if corporate profits are up so much? The answer is in the “rate” of profit, which had been growing since the crisis. But now we see profit rates slowing down. Robert Lenzner of Forbes wrote […]
by Linda Beale Ways and Means–still distracting with false scandals GOP representatives Camp and Boustany are continuing to beat the dead horse of an IRS “scandal” connected with the way the IRS has attempted to efficiently filter new applications for 501(c)(4) status to provide extra scrutiny to the most likely groups to be engaged in […]
by Linda Beale David Sirota Agrees with me on the Tax Reform “Secrecy” Scandal As I mentioned in an earlier post, Max Baucus has established a secret submission process for Senators to let him know what pet tax loopholes they want to retain (probably the ones that high-paid lobbyists representing corporations with operations in their […]