Yves here. I must confess I find it difficult to counter the simple-minded and inaccurate arguments of the deficit scaremongers. Joe Firestone offers some pointers
Read more...For the last 30 years, neoliberals have fixated on a simple program: “Get government out of the way,” which meant reduce taxes and regulations. Business will invest more, which will produce a higher growth rate and greater prosperity for all. The belief was that unfettered capitalism could solve all ills.
That’s not how this children’s story is turning out.
Read more...You have to give credit where credit is due. Technology leaders like acting on a grand scale, and that apparently includes when they engage in criminal conspiracies.
Read more...Economists Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson discuss how oligarchs and the Russians will be the true beneficiaries of an IMF bailout of Ukraine.
Read more...Few have it quite as bad as the tenants of a growing number of social housing projects in Spain who are finding out their new dodgy landlords hail from Wall Street.
Read more...On the increased reliance on short term, out of state labor.
Read more...All this talk about the 99% versus the 1%? I say the easiest—and likely the most useful—thing to do is just forget the 1%.
Read more...Peculiarly, despite the importance of tax havens, a pathbreaking paper published in 2013 by Gabriel Zucman of the Paris School of Economics, The Missing Wealth of Nations: Are Europe and the U.S. Net Debtors or Net Creditors? (hat tip Dikaios Logos) has received perilous little attention. Perhaps that’s because, among other things, it undercuts the Bernanke-flattering claim that “global imbalances” were a major driver of the financial crisis.
Read more...Why Obama’s budget is yet another economic policy failure.
Read more...Yves here. Among other things, this post shows what passes for analysis among elite technocrats.
Read more...Are austerity-promoting Democrats stupid or evil?
Read more...Yves here. I’ve written from time to time how openly partisan the Congressional Budget Office is, not in the traditional sense of favoring one party over the other, but as serving as an key enforcer of neoliberal ideology. For instance, its projections of government debt to GDP ratios were highly misleading by virtue of failing to net out financial assets. And after being called out for that error in paper, what did the CBO do? Make it even harder to find the data to prove the magnitude of their misdirection.
Read more...Yves here. Trust me, you must read this post. In its entirety. Varoufakis discusses the operation of “liberal democracy” as opposed to “classical democracy,”. and argues that voter apathy is a feature, not a bug. But the real meat is in his discussion of how the economic rights of laborers has changed over time and how that has had profound implications for democracy.
Read more...Yves here. This Real News Network segment discusses what many readers know all too well, that even a $10 minimum wage fails to provide an adequate standard of living, particularly for parents.
Read more...Yves here. It’s obvious that student debt is a train wreck. Yet the severity of this problem is barely acknowledged as a problem among policy classes. Is that because the looting must continue? But even if so, why do colleges and universities have such privileged status?
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