Inequality is currently a prominent topic of debate in Western democracies. In democratic countries, we might expect rising inequality to be partially offset by an increase in political support for redistribution. A new paper argues that the relationship between democracy, redistribution, and inequality is more complicated than that.
Read more...Yet another private equity tax swindle has come to light.
Read more...Obama is looking more and more like an ideal Republican president with every passing day.
Read more...So many of the assertions made about “maximizing shareholder value” are false that they should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.
Read more...Chile is often a social laboratory that gives an advance view of what is coming……
Read more...As we discussed earlier, even though there’s abundant evidence that the Administration’s plans to push through its trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership and the Transstlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, are in trouble, the official messaging has been to keep pretending that the pacts are still moving forward smartly.
Read more...Yves here. I continue to get requests to explain Modern Monetary Theory. It isn’t easily done in a few words, but fortunately, the academics and writers associated with the New Economics Perspectives blog keep publishing primers of various sorts. This one takes a different approach in using visuals to help illustrate the difference between how most people believe the money system operates versus how it really works.
Read more...A mere day after strikes at Amazon warehouses in Germany, which caught the attention of the media in the US, Slate ran as its lead piece in Moneybox an article that bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Factories.
I suspect the author, Emma Roller, wouldn’t recognize a factory if it fell on her.
Read more...Yves here. This Real News Network segment provides an overview of the budget deal, cutting through the hype to lay bare its impact on ordinary Americans. It’s not a pretty picture.
Read more...orporate executives love to peddle the notion that they need to have their low tax payments reduced even further, even as the share of GDP represented by company profits is at unprecedentedly high levels.
Read more...The best political system that money can buy is doing a great job for its customers and a lousy job for the rest of us.
Read more...Yves here. The headline is hardly news, at least if you’ve been paying attention, but this post does a great job of debunking arguments against Social Security, particularly ones designed to stoke generational warfare.
Read more...If I were a still a Wall Street type, I don’t think I could have done a better job of sabotaging an effort to impose transaction taxes on big financial firms than the left has managed to do itself with lousy branding.
Read more...I’m normally not big on “one chart says it all” posts, but this one is so striking I made an exception.
Read more...Yves here. This article focuses on the critically important of how the real danger to the economic welfare of young people is not the cost of retirement programs like Social Security and Medicare but the failure to generate enough jobs now and invest in infrastructure and education.
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