Category Archives: Social policy

Top Tax Expert Confirms Our Doubts About Occupy Wall Street’s Debt Buying/Forgiveness Scheme

As readers may recall, we expressed serious reservations about the tax consequences of a program launched by Strike Debt, an Occupy Wall Street working group, to buy distressed consumer debt from debt collectors and forgive it. These concerns have been confirmed by a top tax expert, Lee Sheppard. Sheppard not only describes how the scheme has the potential to harm the borrowers that Strike Debt wants to help, but also points out how their initiative runs afoul of IRS rules for not for profits.

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Michael Hoexter: “Deficit” is the Wrong Word and Concept

By Michael Hoexter, a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

From the MMT account of monetarily sovereign government budget deficits, one can conclude that budget deficits are for the most part a critical, positive driving force in the world economy, at least if one endorses the idea, as is the common assumption of many, that economic growth is a good thing. However, the way the concept of “deficit” is handled by the rest of the economic profession, by the media and by the public, one gets exactly the opposition impression: “deficits” are to be avoided or, alternatively, temporarily indulged in only to be expunged later on.

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Externalities and the Dubious Defenses of Gun Enthusiasts

We featured a post earlier this week by Michael Olenick that argued that the time had arrived to charge gun owners for the true cost of gun ownership, which he reckoned to be plenty high. In fact,, it’s not hard to demonstrate the social costs of readily available guns exceed private benefits, and that argues for strict controls rather than taxation as a remedy.

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Bill Black: Let’s Celebrate the Failure of the July 2011 Great Betrayal

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

In July 2011, President Obama and Speaker Boehner reached an agreement in principle on a deal crafted to inflict $4 trillion in austerity by raising taxes modestly, slashing social spending, and beginning to unravel the safety net. The deal would have been a disaster for America. Unemployment was 9.1%. The deal would have thrown us back into a recession and caused unemployment to surge. Recessions and increased unemployment cause tax revenues to fall and increase demand for social services (e.g., for unemployment compensation) – they produce large deficits. Austerity kills jobs and frequently increases deficits. The Eurozone is the latest demonstration of this fact.

We should, therefore, all be celebrating the failure of the July 2011 austerity deal.

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Michael Olenick: The Lesson of Newtown – Time to Charge for the True Cost of Gun Ownership

By Michael Olenick, a regular contributor on Naked Capitalism. You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick

Twenty children the same age as my daughter and her friends, plus another six adults trying to protect them, lie dead, murdered by guns. I understand that a deranged murderer pulled the trigger, and that he could have theoretically gone on a killing rampage with knives, but it is hard to believe so many could or would have been dead before the police arrived. Guns killed these people.

Rather than parsing the Second Amendment one more time there is an easier approach, one typically favored by conservative gun owners for other public policy issues: end cost-shifting. Force those who chose to own guns to bear the full cost of the mayhem their hobby unleashes.

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Your Humble Blogger Discusses the Fiscal Cliff with Bill Moyers and Bruce Bartlett

I had fun in this conversation with conservative Bruce Bartlett, even though he stole some of my best lines (like Obama not being a liberal). Bartlett is in exile from the Republican party for saying things like Keynesian deficits stimulate the economy (after doing research and finding he couldn’t debunk it based on data) and unions help promote higher wages.

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Mirabile Dictu! EU Gets Tough on Banker Pay, Proposes Strict Bonus Limits

Bankers are now hoist on their own austerity petard. The fact that ordinary citizen all across the Eurozone are seeing lower incomes, lower levels of social services, and can expect only more of the same seems to have led to a sudden outburst of resolve to make sure that bankers take the pain along with everyone else.

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How Many People Will Die if We Raise the Medicare Age to 67?

By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

In a 2009 speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, Alan Grayson said that the Republican health care plan consists of two steps. One, don’t get sick. Two, if you do get sick, die quickly. Raising the Medicare age to 67 is the same sort of plan for those who wind up uninsured, and we can take a stab now at how many they will be and how many will die.

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Bill Black:  Why is the Failed Monti a “Technocrat” and the Successful Correa a “Left-Leaning Economist”?

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

The New York Times produces profiles of national leaders like Italy’s Mario Monti and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa. I invite readers to contrast the worshipful treatment accorded Monti with the Correa profile. The next time someone tells you the NYT is a “leftist” paper you can show them how far right it is on financial issues.

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Yanis Varoufakis: Why Europe Needs More Leaders Like Bruno Kreisky, Who Navigated 1970s Upheaval and Stagflation Well

Yanis Varoufakis asked: Why has European social democracy abandoned the legacy of leaders like Bruno Kreisky, falling in line with a toxic economics and politics that thinkers like Kreisky would have dismissed in their sleep as pathetic claptrap? Here he takes a step back to explain why he views Kreisky’s chancellorship in Austria in the 1970s as a success in social and economic terms.

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Fiscal Cliff Propaganda Watch: Business Owner Says the Fiscal Cliff Made Him Fire His Son

The lies told to sell the chump public on the necessity of enduring cuts to the social safety net are already at a breathtaking level. Where would you like to begin? The idea that big reductions in spending (going over the edge of the world off the fiscal cliff would be horrific, while only somewhat big cuts would be salutary? That Social Security “reforms” are necessary to fix the budget? Even former budget chief Peter Orszag ‘fessed up that one was not true. Or the favorite refuge of the Republicans, that raising taxes on the wealthy will hurt job creation. Ahem, we’ve pushed the low taxes model further than any other advanced economy, and the result is crumbling infrastructure, an overpriced and mediocre health care system, and record corporate profits combined with extreme measures to pay less to workers and a lack of new investment (the corporate sector has been a net saver since the early 2000s).

The propagandizing nevertheless has gotten so shameless it appeared to be time to point out particularly egregious examples.

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Bill Black: Note to Italy – Please Send Us More Saracenos

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Austerity has driven unemployment among young Italian adults to over 35%. The result is that Italian university graduates are emigrating. This loss of Italy’s greatest source of future productivity gains is particularly crippling because Italy has far fewer university graduates than most developed nations.

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Citi Cuts 11,000 Jobs Rather Than Lower Pay, Illustrating Rentier Capitalism in Operation

Citi is a particularly blatant example of a way of operating that has become endemic in American business: when things get tough, throw as many employees as possible under the bus, and use that to maintain or even increase the pay of the top echelon.

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