Category Archives: Social values

Bill Black: Why Neo-Liberals Need to Dismiss Latin Americans as “Idiots”

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from Benzinga

Alvaro Vargas Llosa (AVL) co-authored the Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot with two other journalists. He revisited the subject with an article in 2007 entitled “The Return of the Idiot.”

AVL derides young Latin Americans as idiots, claiming that “they suppress the notion that predation and vindictiveness are wrong.” That claim fails because stopping “predation and vindictiveness” is what drives young Latin American progressives.

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Why Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill Matter: We Can Stop Corruption If We Understand It

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Roosevelt institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

Three days ago, Naked Capitalism published a story, Eight Corporate Subsidies in the Fiscal Cliff Bill, From Goldman Sachs to Disney to NASCAR. Basically, when everyone else was focused on taxes for the wealthy or spending cuts, we actually looked at the underlying bill. And loh and behold, the corporate extenders were egregious and included cash for NASCAR, Hollywood, mining companies, GE, Citigroup, and so on. The reaction has been swift, and is useful to understand, because it points to an underlying political dynamic. And that is, change is possible, and “the system” isn’t inherently dirty. We can make a difference, if we try.

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Debunking (Yet Another) Scaremongering New York Times Op Ed on Social Security

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.

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Yes, Virginia, The Rich Did Very Well With the Fiscal Cliff Deal

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.

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Michael Hudson: America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff, Part IV– Why Financial and Tax Reform Should Go Together

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.

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Latvia’s Economic Disaster as a Neoliberal Success Story: A Model for Europe and the US?

By Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson was Professor of Economics and Director of Research at the Riga Graduate School of Law. He is a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City. His latest book is Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents. Jeffrey Sommers is visiting faculty at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. He is an Associate Professor of Political Economy & Public Policy at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. The authors have advised Latvian politicians and government officials up to the Prime Minister level. Both have published extensively in the Latvian press.

A generation ago the Chicago Boys and their financial supporters applauded General Pinochet’s anti-labor Chile as a success story, thanks mainly to its transformation of their Social Security into Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) that almost universally were looted by the employer grupos by the end of the 1970s.

Today’s most highly celebrated anti-labor success story is Latvia. Latvia is portrayed as the country where labor did not fight back, but simply emigrated politely and quietly. Can this really be a model for the United States or Europe’s remaining social democracies? Or is it simply a cruel experiment that cannot readily be emulated in larger countries un-traumatized by Soviet era memories of occupation?

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Philip Pilkington: The New York Times’ Bizarre and Misleading Praise of Austerity Poster Child Latvia

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and research assistant at Kingston University in London. You can follow him on Twitter @pilkingtonphil

Most pieces written and published on economic topics in our newspapers are morality tales rather than economic analysis. Economic analysis is boring and thus only a few people are going to read it. By contrast, morality tales pull at the heartstrings like a Hollywood script.

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Michael Hudson: America’s Deceptive 2012 Fiscal Cliff, Part II – The Financial War Against the Economy at Large

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.”

Today’s economic warfare is not the kind waged a century ago between labor and its industrial employers. Finance has moved to capture the economy at large, industry and mining, public infrastructure (via privatization) and now even the educational system. (At over $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt came to exceed credit-card debt in 2012.) The weapon in this financial warfare is no larger military force. The tactic is to load economies (governments, companies and families) with debt, siphon off their income as debt service and then foreclose when debtors lack the means to pay. Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain. Indebting companies enables creditors to seize employee pension savings.

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Banks Deeply Involved in FBI-Coordinated Suppression of “Terrorist” Occupy Wall Street

If you’ve been following the story of the official response to Occupy Wall Street, it was apparent that the 17 city paramilitary crackdown was coordinated; it came out later that the Department of Homeland Security was the nexus of that operation. The deep FBI involvement is a new and ugly addition to this picture.

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Lynn Parramore: Orcs v. Goblins: Crazed Republicans Turn on Each Other in Ugly Fiscal Cliff Battle

By Lynn Parramore, a senior editor at Alternet. Cross posted from Alternet

Fear gripped Middle Earth. The little people looked nervously toward the horizon, wondering if their few remaining possessions would be snatched away by marauding bands of goblins and orcs.

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Lawmakers Call for Stricter Gun Control Even As They Subsidize Gun Industry

By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller

One of the consequences of the tragedy in Sandy Hook is an ardent debate over gun control laws all over the country. In Massachusetts, for instance, which has an assault weapons ban, Governor Deval Patrick, along with members of the legislature, is now trying to figure out how to close gun loopholes. Rep. David Linsky says he wants to go over “every single line, every single comma of our gun laws” to prevent ownership of the kinds of gun used in Connecticut. These debates are interesting mostly for what they leave out – the economics of the gun industry itself and its subsidization by the state through various tax credits, direct spending, and legal forbearance.

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Bill Black: Kill the “Fiscal Cliff” Instead of the Economy

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

Here’s the short version of why austerity is a self-destructive response to the Great Recession.

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Top Tax Expert Confirms Our Doubts About Occupy Wall Street’s Debt Buying/Forgiveness Scheme

As readers may recall, we expressed serious reservations about the tax consequences of a program launched by Strike Debt, an Occupy Wall Street working group, to buy distressed consumer debt from debt collectors and forgive it. These concerns have been confirmed by a top tax expert, Lee Sheppard. Sheppard not only describes how the scheme has the potential to harm the borrowers that Strike Debt wants to help, but also points out how their initiative runs afoul of IRS rules for not for profits.

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Michael Hoexter: “Deficit” is the Wrong Word and Concept

By Michael Hoexter, a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives

From the MMT account of monetarily sovereign government budget deficits, one can conclude that budget deficits are for the most part a critical, positive driving force in the world economy, at least if one endorses the idea, as is the common assumption of many, that economic growth is a good thing. However, the way the concept of “deficit” is handled by the rest of the economic profession, by the media and by the public, one gets exactly the opposition impression: “deficits” are to be avoided or, alternatively, temporarily indulged in only to be expunged later on.

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