(Dan B. here…I think it is still appropriate as it is a lesson yet to be learned.) by Divorced one like Bush (2009) I think it’s time to reread the World Bank report on what creates wealth because it seems that the arguments against the stimulus are from a mind-set of very narrow thinking […]

By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) You Don’t Own That! The Evolution of Ownership Get off my lawn.  (repost) In a recent post on the “evolution of money,” which concentrated heavily on the idea of (balance-sheet) assets, I promised to come back to the fundamental idea behind “assets”: ownership. Herewith, fulfilling that promise. There are a […]

By Steve Roth (2015) Did Money Evolve? You Might (Not) Be Surprised You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions of these traits in capuchin monkeys and chimps (researchers created a “cash economy” […]

Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually […]

By Steve Roth (2016) How Perfect Markets Concentrate Wealth and Strangle Growth and Prosperity The winners have us all playing a loser’s game Capitalism concentrates wealth. Ridicule Marx and his latter-day disciples all you like (I’ll help); he definitely got that right. But capitalism is a big word with lots of meanings, and enough ideological baggage to fill […]

Lindsay Wagner reports on North Carolina’s Biggest Voucher School: When a coach at one of Fayetteville’s top private school basketball programs—a school that also happens to be the state’s top recipient of private school vouchers—pleaded guilty last summer in a Wake County courthouse to embezzling hundreds of thousands of tax withholding dollars he collected over […]

Even though most states have done little to improve access to healthcare, it is ok for states to regulate ACA and Medicaid as states are supposedly closer to their constituent’s needs. If the Federal government steps in and tries to regulate voting registration requiring ID, planned parenthood, ACA, etc. because certain state(s) give a damn […]

What is the GOP goal? A return to the “gilded age” (or worse) When right-wing Roy Moore said that the time when America was great was during slavery, he revealed something key to the current GOP members of Congress and state legislatures–their primary goal is to return to a time when owners of property held […]

by Hale Stewart  (originally published at Bonddad blog) Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low? A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason why business wasn’t investing.  Instead, the data says business investment is weak because […]

GOP Congress: my (wealthy) donors made me do it The GOP’s tax-complicating, deficit-increasing, wealthy-subsidizing, Arctic destroying, Health Care damaging, $1.5 trillion tax “reform” package is unpopular with most Americans, destructive to the government’s ability to fund needed programs from disease prevention to FEMA to basic research to needed infrastructure improvements, and wildly popular with the […]