Kash Mansouri at The Street Light has an excellent post, “Income Inequality, International Comparisons,” which goes a long way towards debunking the myth that income inequality is the result of education, or technology, or globalization. Note how the debate over inequality has evolved. We’ve (largely) gone from the denial phase to the “we have to […]
Read more...From Credit Slips: At the end of 2006, there was $12,588,200,000,000 outstanding in household debt — defined as consumer debt and mortgage debt combined. But there was only $11,065,500,000,000 in personal income for 2006. (Those are trillions of dollars.) If the United States spent none of its personal income for one year on “trivial” things […]
Read more...Many consumers can’t afford to trade up to new cars. The years and years of Detroit providing heavy financial subsidies has stopped creating incremental sales. And Ford called its sales in April “terrible.” With that as a starting point, how far down can things go? One reason I imagine this is underreported is New York, […]
Read more...Normally I steer clear of politics, but this post by Australian Guy Rundle on Blair’s legacy makes some trenchant observations about what happens when you start dismantling a liberal social order: For the fact is that, under Tony Blair, Labour cut all ties not only with anything resembling democratic socialism, but also with social democracy, […]
Read more...Dani Rodrik’s blog features a paper by MIT economists Frank Levy and Peter Temin that argues that rising income inequality in the US isn’t simply the result of market forces, but also institutional behavior and prevailing social values: Many economists attribute the average worker’s declining bargaining power to skill-biased technical change: technology, augmented by globalization, […]
Read more...According Robert Cringely at PBS, IBM is cutting at least 150,000 US jobs in its Global Services Division, and each US worker is to be replaced by a new overseas hire. This headcount cut, called Project Lean, bears out the populist view that corporate executives are greedy and outsourcing damages the American economy. As we […]
Read more...Dani Rodrik, if he thought it wasn’t beneath him, deserves an op-ed column at a well respected paper. He has managed to foment a good deal of lively debate among Serious Economists (the blogs involved include his, Brad DeLong’s, Mark Thoma’s, and Greg Mankiw’s) on the question of trade economics. For the most part, Dani […]
Read more...Paul Krugman’s Monday op-ed piece, “Another Economic Disconnect,” attracted the normal amount of attention in the blogsphere (which is to say quite a bit) with less enthusiasm than usual. And I must say I understand why. This piece was a little flat, and managed to miss some key issues. Disclosure: I am a fan of […]
Read more...The Housing Bubble Blog today features “YKYAAFB When….” which stands for “you know you are a fucked borrower”. And many are insightful as well as revealing: Some readers suggested a topic about how a borrower might know they are overextended. “On a thread yesterday somebody made a: ‘You know you’re a redneck when…’ joke. It […]
Read more...Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Progress has focused on the issue of productivity, both in the current business cycle (he sees its decline as an underreported negative indicator) and longer term. A post on his blog Beat the Press points to a recent paper of his on productivity and reaches some […]
Read more...Anyone who doubts that the top 1% is getting wealthier needs to consider the factoids from this CNN Money story, “Richest hedge fund managers get richer.” John Arnold earned $1.5 to $2 billion for having bet correctly on oil prices. Four other hedge fund managers were estimated to have earned over $1 billion. The average […]
Read more...A Ministry of Defense team has been envisioning what the world might look like in 30 years (as an aside, no one in the private sector takes such a long view), and what it sees is not pretty. Terrorism will remain an ongoing threat, with intermittent, possibly coordinated attacks of greater intensity than now. Other […]
Read more...For the benefit of non-US readers, AMT stands for alternative minimum tax. When individuals take itemized deductions, they must also run an AMT calculation to see if the taxes due under that framework are higher than they’d get using income – (deductions + exemptions). The idea behind AMT originally was that high income individuals who […]
Read more...You can’t make this stuff up. The link in the story from Washington Monthly, “‘It’s the Fox Designing the Henhouse’,” points to a New York Times article, “I.R.S. Letting Tax Lawyers Write Rules.” David Cay Johnston reports today that the IRS is outsourcing its writing of tax rules to the very lawyers and accountants who […]
Read more...For those of you who like having the facts, rather than asserting the obvious and hoping you are right, Linda Beale of ataxingmatter has a good post, “The Bush Tax Cuts–good for whom?,” which has a clear presentation of who got the bennies, and why that might not be so good from an economic standpoint. […]
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