I have long been annoyed by the Wall Street Journal/Larry Ribstein party line that takes issue with long prison sentences for high profile white collar criminals. The argument boils down to “They weren’t violent.” That has always offended me, because it’s a class argument. As political philosopher Rodney Dangerfield said: If you steal $10,000 from […]
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...Paul Krugman’s current offering in the New York Times, “Distract and Disenfranchise,” seeks to connect the dots between the Bush Administration’s very successful (until recently) fear-mongering, voter disenfranchisement, and income inequality. He argues that the fact that the Republicans are captive to interests that won’t permit them to address income inequality requires that they make […]
Read more...Those of you who have been following the income inequality debates (see here and here and here, for a sample) know that Thomas Piketty of École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, whose studies on income distribution are generally considered the most thorough in this field, are […]
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...A good story by George Anders, “After Rejecting Pay, Some CEOs Find Less Can Be More,” on how CEOs of troubled companies have taken pay cuts, and sometimes forgone salaries entirely. It’s remarkable that this story appeared at all, in that the Journal has to explain to its readership (particularly any top managers and board […]
Read more...This is a fascinating little bit of analysis in, of all place, Mother Jones, where James Galbraith gives us “Bush’s Beltway Boom.” In it, he describes how the people at the top of the food chain (the top 1% that everyone is getting so upset about) has changed in the Bush years from the Clinton […]
Read more...An interesting report in the weekend Wall Street Journal, “A Risky Profile,” by Robert Frank, argues that the very wealthy (ah, our favorite top 1%) have taken on more risk and therefore were likely, as a group, to have taken a bigger hit last weak than the wealthy of the past. Now in a way, […]
Read more...The back-and-forth between Alan Reynolds, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and Mark Thoma, professor of economics at the University of Oregon, continues at the Cato Unbound site. Alan Reyolds, who has been arguing both at Cato and on the pages of the Wall Street Journal that income inequality has not been rising, posted a […]
Read more...Well, it’s not quite that bad, but the debate between Alan Reynolds, senior fellow at Cato Institute (among other things, author of two recent Wall Street Journal op ed pieces disputing the widely-held view that income disparity is on the rise) and Mark Thoma, professor of economics at the State of Oregon, continues. We had […]
Read more...An excellent column by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, where he is the lead economics editor. Starting with principles put forward by Ben Bernanke in his recent speech on income inequality, Wolf concludes that America cannot do without some form of a welfare state, specifically improved training, education, and universal health care. The section […]
Read more...Last week, the Wall Street Journal featured the second opinion piece in two months by Alan Reynolds, a senior research fellow at Cato Institute, disputing the widely-held and reported belief that income inequality in America has increased. We’ve discussed his December WSJ article, “The Top 1%….of What?,” which critiqued of the work of Thomas Piketty […]
Read more...Yesterday, in TCS Daily, Tim Worstall argued that income inequality (if it exists, he wasn’t quite willing to concede that) should in fact be caused by globalization. (Note that this post was featured on Harvard economics professor Greg Mankiw’s blog, which is where we came across it). It goes on to say, “Further, I’ll argue […]
Read more...Brad DeLong may seem to be hyperventilating in this post, but he is on to something. Second Gilded Age Cultural Studies Watch, or O Michael Berube! Thou Shouldst Be Blogging in This Hour! In a Super Bowl commercial–a commercial that I thought was astonishing for a company that is in the process of a slow-motion […]
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