Category Archives: Taxes

Diagrams and Dollars: Modern Money Illustrated (Part 1)

Yves here. I continue to get requests to explain Modern Monetary Theory. It isn’t easily done in a few words, but fortunately, the academics and writers associated with the New Economics Perspectives blog keep publishing primers of various sorts. This one takes a different approach in using visuals to help illustrate the difference between how most people believe the money system operates versus how it really works.

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Slate Tries Presenting Amazon’s Abusive Warehouse Jobs as Great Opportunities

A mere day after strikes at Amazon warehouses in Germany, which caught the attention of the media in the US, Slate ran as its lead piece in Moneybox an article that bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant: Amazon Warehouses Are the New Factories.

I suspect the author, Emma Roller, wouldn’t recognize a factory if it fell on her.

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Bill Moyers and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times Discuss Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship, Coming Budget Talks

The latest Bill Moyers broadcast features the widely-respected lead editorial writer of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, who discusses the Federal shutdown/debt default negotiations and the prospects for the coming budget talks.

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Who Should Young People Throw Under the Bus: Granny or Billionaire Hedgie Stan Druckenmiller?

Without attempting to wade too deeply into the goo of Friedman’s latest column, let’s limit ourselves to the the fact that Friedman is running PR for former Soros Fund Management lead investor Stan Druckenmiller. The column also serves to illustrate how Serious People like Friedman were ready to jump on the deficit cutting bandwagon once the shutdown/debt ceiling drama was put to rest for a bit.

Druckemiller’s latest cause is to foment generational warfare.

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Obamacare Rollout: Will Insurers Be Hoist on the Enrollment Petard?

The Wall Street Journal looks to have used an interview by Ezra Klein on Obamacare tech woes as the basis for a reported piece on how insurers were having so much trouble with the Federal marketplaces that they were having to check and in some cases process enrollments manually. That’s clearly unworkable at anything resembling the scale of expected participation. But not only does the Journal article corroborate and add more color to an ugly story, but it also mentions a different type of problem, that of eligibility, in passing. That’s actually a hugely important and presumably separate subroutine in the system, and if that is also broken or buggy, it has serious implications of its own.

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