economy

Charts from Mother Jones Illustrate That the Rich Have Won the Class War

November 19, 2011
Charts from Mother Jones Illustrate That the Rich Have Won the Class War

I came on a set of graphics in Mother Jones, “It’s the Inequality, Stupid: Eleven charts that explain what’s wrong with America” that illustrate what you probably already know. But, a simple refresher course in some of the reasons why the rich are rich. The 99% already have this base covered. Here are some of the charts I liked. Read the whole article at the Mother Jones website. Income (constant dollars) Note that if median family income had simply kept up with inflation over this period it would have grown to $92,000 instead of $50,000.                         Are Corporations Over Taxed? Mother Jones does not make it clear that the Payroll Tax is also a tax on individuals. To add insult to injury the Payroll Tax is not levied beyond the first %106,800 of income.                    ...

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Economics Explained for 6th Graders

September 23, 2011

I ran across this somewhat longish article at NakedCapitalism.com. Even if you are not a 6th grader you will find this interesting. In part, Andrew Dittmer, who in fact has taught 6th graders, our author,  points out that modern economics is based on certain assumptions that render  much of the application of advanced mathematics in economics false, misleading, yet amazingly resistant to criticism by non-economists exactly because of the use of obscurantist fog of mathematics. One of these assumptions is that players in a market have “perfect information” – this is summed up in action by Wikipedia as “Perfect information would practically mean that all consumers know all things, about all products, at all times (including knowing the probabilistic outcome of all future events) , and therefore always make the best decision regarding purchases.”  There has been plenty of criticism of this concept even by economists, yet this concept is still embedded. Another assumption is that people will...

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Job Creation – A Pliable (Fraudulent) Rhetoric in the Current Debate over Debt and Debt Ceilings

July 12, 2011

When it comes to job creation both Democrats and Republicans reflexively trot out small business as the engine of growth. These flights of breathy admiration for plucky small business owners are part of our national myth, right up there with cowboys. There probably is some truth in this myth as long as you accept the other side of the equation which includes the fact that jobs in small businesses are lower paying and less stable than those in the middle and big size companies. But to demonstrate the extent to which today’s political environment has lost any sense of consistency, we now have the Republicans saying that any tax increases on the wealthy and corporations are “job killers”. Since when have wealthy individuals created jobs? They don’t start new entrepreneurial ventures. They do buy extra vacation homes and fly to Vermont and Colorado and Switzerland more frequently in their...

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Where, Oh, Where Did Our National Debt Come From?

July 8, 2011
Where, Oh, Where Did Our National Debt Come From?

The political rhetoric of the current moment, chiefly flowing from Republicans, but barely challenged by the Democrats, describes tales of profligate over-spending by the Federal government matched with burdensome taxation. While it is true that Federal spending is higher proportionately than post-WWII norms, social programs are not the source of this over spending. One only has to look back to George Bush’s two terms to see the true sources of the debt.  War, Wars, More Wars First up are our profligate wars. A recent study at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that since 2001 we have spent between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion on our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.All of these dollars are deficit dollars. George Bush did not ask for increased taxes to fund his wars. Barack Obama has not asked for increased taxes to fund his continuation of the Bush wars and now his new war in Libya....

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More Thinking about the Defence Budget and US “Security” – a letter to the editor

May 6, 2011

Submitted Today to Hudson’s Register Star Letter to the Editor May 6, 2011 As our politicians and the media continue the “debate” about our public budgets, Federal and state, we need to continue to ask that they have a debate that includes all aspects of income and expenditures. I want to focus here on our spending in the Dept. of Defense. Let’s just focus on the more than 750 military bases outside of the US for a moment.  Why do we continue to support military bases throughout Western Europe in nine countries (77,379 personnel in 14,706 buildings with 629 acres of floor space). Germany alone has 167 US military bases. Japan houses 91 US military bases (41,512 personnel in 8,703 buildings with 731 acres of floor space).  The costs are a bit less clear since the Pentagon provides no reports broken down along these lines. But, we can guesstimate....

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Let’s Talk About The Defense Budget – a letter to the editor

April 2, 2011

(This was submitted to the Letters to the Editor section of the Register Star here in Hudson. Not clear at the moment whether it will be published.) Discussions of the Federal budget almost never mention the defense department.  Both political parties continue in the thrall of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”. The defense budget is off limits. But, can we afford this military establishment? The US, with just 4.5% of the world’s population, supports almost 50% of the world’s expenditures on war. The US has over 700 military bases outside of the country ( Base Structure Report 2010 – downloads a PDF file). According to a 2010 DOD report there are 369,000 military personnel overseas plus the 140,000 +/- in Iraq and Afghanistan. 52,440 are in Germany, 35,688 in Japan, 28,500 in Republic of Korea, and 9,660 in Italy to name just a few countries. Do you feel safer or more prosperous as a result of this global military presence? Is...

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Corporations as Persons – Freedom of Speech, now Right to Privacy – Bring on Three Strikes!

January 20, 2011

The case of the Federal Communications Commission v. AT&T1 now being heard before the US Supreme Court raises anew the craziness of the thinking that has position corporations to be “persons” in the first place. Noun vs Adjective! First we have several of the justices focusing argument around the difference between “persons” and “personal”. But several justices said it was too much of a leap to go from saying that corporations might be “persons” for some purposes to saying that their “personal privacy” could be invaded. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said he could think of many instances “where the adjective was very different from the root noun.” “You have craft and crafty,” he said. “Totally different. Crafty doesn’t have much to do with craft. Squirrel, squirrelly. Right?” “Pastor and pastoral,” he went on. “Same root, totally different.” Can they be serious that the issue here is the...

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Etsy.com Comes to Hudson

January 18, 2011

The rumors about etsy.com locating a new office in Hudson have been floating about for some time. Yesterday, Rob Kalin, the founder of etsy.com, placed this notice on our local business listserv. Hi all, Please allow me to humbly introduce myself. I know many people here already, and hope to know many more. I’m the founder & CEO of Etsy (www.etsy.com), which I started 6 years ago in my apartment in Brooklyn. My family is from New York (from Tarrytown up to Syracuse), and I’ve spent many a night in a lean-to amongst the Catskills. Etsy currently employs 175 people, most of them in our Brooklyn office. As we continue to grow, it makes a lot of sense to me to open up an office in Hudson. I love the town, we found an incredible building (thank you Chris at the Cannonball Factory, and Theresa at Keystone for helping), and as everyone here knows — better than...

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Religious Doubt Spreads – Free Flows of Capital Seen as Dangerous to Some

November 12, 2010
Religious Doubt Spreads – Free Flows of Capital Seen as Dangerous to Some

There is more evidence that the current run of religious mania about “free markets” is finally giving way to a more fact-based approach to this important human invention, many countries are now applying capital controls on the flow of monies into  their economies. The world flood of money seeking higher rent districts is terrorizing smaller economies like a tsunami. Fears of speculative bubbles burgeoning and then bursting with disastrous consequences for local economies are driving many to control inflows. Recently the NY Times posted an article about this phenomenon, “Countries See Hazards in Free Flow of Capital”1. “The world has learned about the perils of free market finance — global financial liberalization just does not work as advertised,” said Dani Rodrik, a political economy professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “Just as John Maynard Keynes said in 1945 — capital controls are now orthodox.” Despite the obvious lessons of the...

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The Mortgage Debacle – Redux

October 10, 2010

The current tsunami of revelations of misbehavior, if not outright criminality, by the banking industry in their pursuit of mortgages gone bad, is further evidence of how fundamentally corrupt and cynical this industry continues to be. On the front end of this global economic disaster the financial system engaged in misleading sales tactics using financial products that were baroque in their complexities. Aided by governments seduced by the siren songs of free market religion and  floods of money to grease the ways, the industry expanded spreading its load of debt everywhere. Finally the whole Ponzi scheme collapsed under the weight of its own lust. Now, in a further display that the people running these institutions have learned nothing, nor been disciplined by either market forces or governments, we are suffering through another round of their arrogance. Time to call again for these institutions to be broken up. They are not serving the basic purpose of a...

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