Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevent institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.
Throughout much of the United States, cell phone service is terrible, just like broadband and banking services. This is a result of a lack of competition and increasingly poor regulatory policies.
Read more...Some readers were decidedly unhappy about a New York Times op-ed over the weekend by Gary King and Samir Soneji that argued the need to reform Social Security was even more urgent than the catfood futures sellers thought because people are going to live longer than the budget mavens assume. Given the op-ed space limits, the authors couldn’t supply much in the way of backup for their views, but the argument was that improvements in longevity due to the decline in smoking and improved cardiovascular health were not adequately reflected in the data.
It’s not clear that we should take this forecast all that seriously.
Read more...An SEC action that appears likely to do considerable harm to companies and individuals in the US and abroad appears to have gone completely unnoticed, save for an important piece in The New Republic by Linda Khan.
Read more...If the media was licensed, the New York Times story, “After Fiscal Cliff Deal, Tax Code May Be the Most Progressive Since 1979,” would be grounds for disbarment. I flagged the piece as a Big Lie in comments yesterday, and figured that since anyone who was either old enough to have been paying taxes in the 1980s or had minimal Google skills could ascertain its claims were nonsense, that it would be debunked elsewhere. Instead, it was apparently tweeted actively by soi-disant liberals on Saturday.
Read more...By Eric Zuesse, an investigative historian and the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
In order to be able to understand the current debt-limit battle in Washington, here is the essential historical background….
Read more...Now it is narrowly true that the filing of a criminal suit by US prosecutors did force the closure of a bank. But as one might suspect, there is vastly less here than meets the eye. And that isn’t simply because the institution in question was a Swiss bank I am pretty certain you never heard of.
Read more...By Hugh, who is a long-time commenter at Naked Capitalism. Originally published at Corrente.
The current BLS jobs report covering December 2012 states, without qualification, that the official or U-3 unemployment rate remained unchanged at 7.8%. It is only on page 5 of the pdf in a table that you find that the November rate was originally reported (a few days before the election) as a more favorable 7.7% down from 7.9%. This revision is part of the BLS’ yearly revision of its numbers in the Household (people) survey. This complicates matters because revisions to the Establishment (jobs) survey will not happen until next month. There is also the further wrinkle that in the February report covering January Household data will reflect updated estimates from the Census going forward but not backward, meaning that the Household data for January 2013 cannot be directly compared with data from December 2012 and before. The way the BLS stretches its yearly revisions out over 2-3 months means that about a quarter of the time, its reports have even more problems than they usually have.
Read more...The Real News Network has conducted a series of interviews on the fiscal cliff deal, and the two most recent are worthwhile in and of themselves, and are also good tools for persuading those who fallen for the idea that Obama got a good deal to reexamine their view. With the Vichy Left now trying to soften up the public for Social Security and Medicare “reform,” it’s particularly important to keep an accurate scorecard on what has already gone down.
Read more...This may sound quite bizarre, but this evening I went through the envelopes containing checks sent in the fundraiser and processed and deposited most right before midnight (the rest were processed after I got back and will go to the bank tomorrow).
So it was really gratifying to see checks from readers whose names in many cases I recognized, as well as read the kind notes and cards (and some sent animal pix). Thanks so much for your vote of confidence in our work!
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”
Taxes pay for the cost of government by withdrawing income from the parties being taxed. From Adam Smith through John Stuart Mill to the Progressive Era, general agreement emerged that the most appropriate taxes should not fall on labor, capital or on sales of basic consumer needs. Such taxes raise the break-even cost of employing labor. In today’s world, FICA wage withholding for Social Security raises the price that employers must pay their work force to maintain living standards and buy the products they produce.
However, these economists singled out one kind of tax that does not increase prices: taxes on the land’s rental value, natural resource rents and monopoly rents.
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
I’ve commented numerous times over the the last 3 years that I considered the IMF’s position on Europe dangerously misguided as I felt it was based more on ideology than evidential analysis (see more here). The results have been so bad that the IMF is being forced to admit to the errors of its ways.
Read more...You simply must read this post if you care at all about the rule of law or can stand to see the gory mechanisms by which “regulation” has now become a fig leaf for criminal corporate conduct.
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