by Kenneth Thomas Lid Blowing Off Romney Tax Secrecy Gawker (via Eman at Daily Kos) dropped a bombshell yesterday when it released over 950 pages of confidential documents from 21 Bain Capital-related investment vehicles, all of which Mitt or Ann Romney invested in. It made all 48 documents into a single searchable one here so […]
by Kenneth Thomas Most U.S. Trade Agreement Improve Trade Balance, but Effect Overwhelmed by NAFTA and China Trade The U.S. trade deficit figures heavily in the analysis of Jeff Faux’s new book, The Servant Economy. Faux, the founder of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), was one of the most important voices speaking out against NAFTA […]
by Kenneth Thomas It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! (Review) When I saw that James Carville and Stan Greenberg had just published It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! (Blue Rider Press), I knew that I would want to read it. I had always liked Carville’s We’re Right, They’re Wrong and wanted to know his take on approaching […]
by Kenneth Thomas New Estimate of Offshore Wealth Shows Big Increase Since 2004 A new report by the Tax Justice Network, “The Price of Offshore Revisited,” shows that the amount of wealth held in tax havens has increased enormously since 2004, and confirms what I previously wrote about the huge cost to tax coffers of […]
by Kenneth Thomas U.S. Trails at Least 15 OECD Countries in Median Wealth Via @exiledonline, I learned today (July 18) that Canadians are richer than Americans. This is rather surprising, since GDP per capita is higher in the U.S than in Canada.: $48,100 vs. $40,300 (at purchasing power parity or PPP), according to the CIA World […]
by Kenneth Thomas Alabama’s Airbus Subsidy Eerily Reminiscent of Auto “Transplants” The July 2 announcement that Airbus would begin assembly of its A-320 airliner in Mobile, Alabama, may be good for Alabama, but whether it’s good for the country as a whole is dubious. Indeed, it most reminds me of the subsidized arrival of foreign […]
by Kenneth Thomas What is Mitt Romney Hiding? Mitt Romney has so far released only one year of tax returns (2010), plus an estimate for 2011. This stands in stark contrast to his father, Michigan Governor George Romney, who released 12 years of tax returns when he began running for President in 1967. As his […]
There is and will be a lot of conversation about the efficacy of the ACA (Affordable Care Act), whether it is a step to deal with the health care cost juggernaut or mostly a boon to private insurers. What is true is that ‘medical inflation’ has resumed to previous levels of year to year increase […]
by Kenneth Thomas Lost Output Over $3 Trillion And Rising Still traveling, so just a quick post, but this really can’t be emphasized enough. Andrew Fieldhouse at the Economic Policy Institute reports that the Congressional Budget Office now has cumulatively reduced its estimate of 2017 gross domestic product by 6.6% since the beginning of the […]
by Kenneth Thomas Guest post: Why the World Should Care About America’s Middle Class Tim Worstall, in his Forbes blog, attacks my series (here and here) on whether globalization is good for America’s middle class. Not on the basis that he disagrees with my conclusion (though he does), but because, he argues, there are much […]