Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class

Dylan Ratigan on Get America Working

Dylan Ratigan is leading town hall events in various cities to help spur the establishment of a job creation movement. The goal is to push for policies that foster higher employment than the ones we’ve seen over the last thirty years, which instead promoted financialization, the use of consumer debt to paper over lack of wage growth, asset inflation and speculation, and increasing income and wealth disparity.

Ratigan wants to create a dialogue among key political groups, including ordinary citizens, investors, small business operators, and corporate leaders. His sessions will focus on four issues, as he outlined in in the Huffington Post:

Auerback/Wray: Liberals need not fear Obama’s tax deal: Why a payroll tax holiday actually helps support tomorrow’s retirees

Yves here. As much as Auerback’s and Wray’s argument does describe the reality of government fiscal operations accurately, I see their political reading as wildly optimistic. Given that disproven ideas like “trickle down economics” still hold considerable sway, I think the concerns about how a payroll tax holiday will serve as a wedge to cut Social Security benefit are valid.

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager, and L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.

The commentary in the aftermath of President Obama’s announced tax deal with the GOP has been both predictable and, for the most part, misconceived….

Bill Black: No, Mr. President, you did not negotiate a winning tax deal

By Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former senior financial regulator

This column analyses Obama’s claim that he got the better of the Republicans in the negotiations.

The administration (implicitly) argues that its claim of extraordinary negotiating success represents a miraculous accomplishment given the facts that the Republicans were holding all legislation hostage to their non-negotiable demand that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans be extended and the administration’s irrevocable decision that it could not call the Republican’s bluff because the economy would likely sink back into recession unless tax cuts for the middle class were immediately passed…..

The third problem is that no element of the claimed miracle is true….

Town May Seize Factory to Prevent Dismantling by Vengeful Owner

This story illustrates how far some companies are willing to go to preserve their bottom lines and assert their right to operate in an unfettered manner, even when that includes breaking the law and violating contracts. Huffington Post, via its daily political newsletter Huffington Post Hill, does some additional reporting on the very peculiar case […]

PBS on Corporate Campaign Donations

As one reader noted, “Closest PBS has ever come to telling the truth about the system”. You can view the segment here. Enjoy!

Richard Alford: The Labor Market, the Trade Deficit, And The 800 Pound Gorilla

Yves here. One thing I have noticed on posts that discuss the US labor market and trade is reflexive and frankly somewhat dogmatic defeatism. The position seems to be “China and Bangladesh have such cheap labor, there is no way we can compete.” This view is simplistic. First, in capital intensive industries, direct labor is […]

Mike Konczal: The Stagnating Labor Market – What Can the Employed Tell Us About the Unemployed?

By Mike Konczal, a Roosevelt Institute fellow who posts at New Deal 2.0 Arjun Jayadev and I have another working paper out of Roosevelt Institute, this time focusing on the labor market in the current recession. The paper is: The Stagnating Labor Market (pdf). I hope you check it out; I’m going to talk about […]

Does Income Inequality Help Cause Financial Crises?

New York Times writer Louise Story recaps a bold thesis put forward by David Moss of Harvard Business School, namely, that high levels of income inequality stoke financial crises: The possible connection between economic inequality and financial crises came to Mr. Moss about a year ago… A colleague suggested that he overlay two different graphs […]

So Much for Workers in India Being Cheaper

When I was on C-SPAN the weekend before last, I got a call I didn’t quite know how to field. It was from someone who by his accent was obviously Indian. He claimed that Indians represented 35% of the managers in American companies, and that American visa restrictions meant that they were all going to […]