Our New Piece at Aljazeera: “The shutdown is over, but the austerity fight continues”
I hope Naked Capitalism readers will check out our new article at Aljazeera, The shutdown is over, but the austerity fight continues.
Read more...Category Archives: Taxes
Bill Moyers and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times Discuss Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship, Coming Budget Talks
The latest Bill Moyers broadcast features the widely-respected lead editorial writer of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, who discusses the Federal shutdown/debt default negotiations and the prospects for the coming budget talks.
Read more...Who Should Young People Throw Under the Bus: Granny or Billionaire Hedgie Stan Druckenmiller?
Without attempting to wade too deeply into the goo of Friedman’s latest column, let’s limit ourselves to the the fact that Friedman is running PR for former Soros Fund Management lead investor Stan Druckenmiller. The column also serves to illustrate how Serious People like Friedman were ready to jump on the deficit cutting bandwagon once the shutdown/debt ceiling drama was put to rest for a bit.
Druckemiller’s latest cause is to foment generational warfare.
Read more...Obamacare Rollout: Will Insurers Be Hoist on the Enrollment Petard?
The Wall Street Journal looks to have used an interview by Ezra Klein on Obamacare tech woes as the basis for a reported piece on how insurers were having so much trouble with the Federal marketplaces that they were having to check and in some cases process enrollments manually. That’s clearly unworkable at anything resembling the scale of expected participation. But not only does the Journal article corroborate and add more color to an ugly story, but it also mentions a different type of problem, that of eligibility, in passing. That’s actually a hugely important and presumably separate subroutine in the system, and if that is also broken or buggy, it has serious implications of its own.
Read more...McDonalds, Taco Bell as Welfare Queens: Over Half Their Workers Use Public Assistance
Like Walmart, the fast food industry has taxpayers as a silent partner. But sadly, we don’t get shares or dividends.
Read more...Debt Deal Back on Track and Why the Wheels Came off Yesterday
Bloomberg and other news services are reporting that a “stop the default meteor from hitting the planet” deal is back on.
Read more...IRS Wakes Up to Private Equity Scam
For decades, the IRS has been oblivious to the tax dollars that private equity firms have been stealing from the U.S. Treasury via this abusive fee waiver tax shelter. But NC readers in the tax world have alerted us to recent IRS pronouncements indicating that both the Service, as well as influential tax commentators, have woken up to the scam and don’t like what they see in terms of its compliance with tax law.
Read more...As Budget Stalemate Hostilities Escalate, Obama Starts to Brandish Default Threat
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 419 donors have already invested in our efforts to shed light on the dark and seamy corners of finance. Join us and participate via our Tip Jar or another credit card portal, WePay in the right column, or read about why we’re doing this fundraiser and other ways to donate, such as by check, as well as our current goal, on our kickoff post. And read about our current target here
The confrontation underway in Washington DC isn’t as deadly as the Cuban Missile crisis. But in many ways, a misstep could be would produce collateral damage is hard to estimate but would unquestionably be large. So given the stakes, it’s remarkable to see Obama prove his manhood by telling those Republicans he is not intimidated by the possibility of default.
Read more...Democrats and Republicans Pedal to the Metal in Debt Ceiling/Shutdown Game of Chicken
You know it’s bad when Grover Norquist is playing elder statesman.
Read more...Debt Ceiling Chicken and Trench Warfare
From time to time, I remarked that the summer had a 1914 feeling about it in the context of military action against Syria. It may turn out the feeling was still correct but I was looking in the wrong place.
Read more...Robert Reich, Inequality’s Intellectual Fraudster
Now it may seem churlish to take on a prominent former government official making a star turn to publicize one of the most pressing social and political problems in America, namely, our ever widening levels of inequality. But in fact, Reich is not only selling the equivalent of patent medicine as the remedy but he’s even getting commissions from some of the snake-oil manufacturers.
Read more...The G20 St. Petersburg Summit: Bubbles, Casinos, and Inactivity
By Sameer Dossani, an advocacy coordinator at ActionAid International, a development NGO dedicated to ending poverty. Cross posted from Triple Crisis
While much of the media coverage around the G20 leaders summit has been about the failure of international diplomacy in Syria, the formal agenda was around one issue: growth. But focusing on growth is a bit like treating strep throat with asprin. You may alleviate some of the symptoms, but you’re not treating the source of the problem.
Read more...Why You Should Learn to Love the Brave New World of Low Liquidity
The Financial Times reported earlier this week (hat tip Scott) how banks are cutting the size of corporate bond trading desks and reducing the size of trading inventories, all as a result of big bad regulations. As a result, the banks would like us to know, investors might be hurt by a lack of liquidity! Horrors!
Read more...Bill Black: Zero Prosecutions of Elite Banksters is Too Many for the Wall Street Journal
Yves here. Although Bill Black’s post starts with how the Republicans have linked their attacks on the IRS to a broad-brush effort to depict any and all government oversight as an evil plot to destroy the profitability of upstanding businesses, he includes how the Clinton-Gore “Reinvent Government” initiative set out to cripple the IRS, and how that has hurt enforcement generally. Readers may recall one example discussed regularly on this blog: how the IRS refused to penalize clear violations of REMIC (Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit) rules that resulted from the failure to convey borrower notes to securitization trusts as stipulated in the 1986 Tax Reform Act.
In general, as tax maven Lee Sheppard has pointed out, the US does little in the way of tax law enforcement. As if you believe in the broken glass theory of lawbreaking (that failing to prosecute minor violations of the law, like petty vandalism, broadcasts that policing is lax, which encourages more serious crimes), it’s not hard to see that having a barely-on-the-job IRS would tell the moneyed classes that they can push the envelope in other areas and probably get away with it there too.
Read more...Why Progressives Are Lame
Yesterday, we ran a post by Bill McKibben on leadership in social change movements. McKibben argued for a “small l” leader model versus a “big L” leader, which readers debated. Some argued that the Leader model was really code for “Great Man” that was a less viable approach than it once was due to assassinations. Others were struck by the emphasis on distributed leadership, which is an obvious analogy to modern computer and communications networks, and how political commentators to frame their ideas of social order in terms of the technology of the day. Some pointed out that the idea of minimal oversight and control of communities was a long-stading Utopian line of thought, often espoused by people who wound up implementing the exact opposite.
However, I was particularly struck by Dan Kervick’s remark, which came late in the thread:
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