America: Europe and Canada’s Willing Chump
How America facilitates a labor and environmental race to the bottom, helping companies based in Europe, Canada, and Mexico.
Read more...Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class
Is the Piketty Enthusiasm Bubble Subsiding?
Although Piketty’s Capital has garnered a great deal of praise, the criticisms were initially overlooked. They are finally getting the attention they warrant.
Read more...Randy Wray: Forget Taxes for Redistribution – What to do About Inequality
Yves here. A lot of people argue for redistributive taxes, contending that they were very successful in the golden age of the American middle class, from the end of World War II through the Reagan era, in constraining the concentration of income and wealth at the top. However, that tax structure reflected a broad social consensus in favor of fostering prosperity for ordinary Americans, in no small measure to keep Communist impulses at bay.
In Yankee terms, Wray’s argument against using taxes to create a more egalitarian distribution of income is “You can’t get there from here”.
Read more...UK Survey Finds High Levels of Depression and Desperation Among the Young
High levels of un- and underemployment among the young are undermining their mental health. And the damage might be lasting.
Read more...How the Democrats Are Using Piketty’s Book on Inequality
How Democrats are using Thomas Piketty’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, to bolster the party’s flagging fortunes.
Read more...Piketty’s Wealth Tax is Real, and It Works
Most economists deride Thomas Piketty’s recommendation of a wealth tax as the remedy to inequality. It might help if they did some empirical research.
Read more...Rhode Island Senate Considering “Maximum Wage” Legislation
Why Rhode Island’s maximum wage proposal is a potential big step toward reducing income inequality.
Read more...Is the Strong Dollar the Real Cause of the Collapse of US Manufacturing and Secular Stagnation?
Yves here. I managed to miss this VoxEU post from last month, and it is still timely. It argues that economists have generally been using the wrong measure of relative dollar strength to assess how the level of the currency played into the loss of manufacturing jobs and insufficient internal demand, now better known as “secular stagnation”.
Read more...Michael Hudson: Stockholm Syndrome in the Baltics – Latvia’s Neoliberal War against Labor and Industry
How Latvia, a test case for neoliberal colonialism, has proven to be a test case of how finance-serving policies crush labor and enterprise.
Read more...Americans Raid 401(k)s, Replacing Home Equity Withdrawals as Way to Make Ends Meet
It’s been creepy to see economists and the financial media cheering the re-levering by American households as a sign that they economy is on the mend and consumers are regaining their will to shop. The number of Americans who are tapping into their 401 (k) accounts is proof that the financial health of ordinary Americans is far from robust.
Read more...Blackstone Unit Sued Over Slum-Like Condition of Single Family Home Rental
How Blackstone’ single family home rental business, Invitation Homes, is proving to be more slumlord than landlord.
Read more...How Milton Friedman Fomented the Barmy “Corporations Exist to Maximize Shareholder Value” Myth
One of my pet peeves is the degree to which the notion that corporations exist only to serve the interests of shareholders is accepted as dogma and recited uncritically by the business press
Read more...Yanis Varoufakis: Europe’s Slide into Deflation, and What to do About It
By Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at the University of Athens. Cross posted from his website. From an interview for Jornal de Negócios by Jorge N. Rodrigues Europe is in the clasp of the deflationary forces that resulted directly from its inane handling of the Eurozone crisis. In this interview, I discuss deflation and […]
Read more...An Empire in Decline, City by City, Town by Town
By Peter Van Buren, who blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People. He writes at his blog, We Meant Well and has a new book Ghosts of Tom […]
Read more...J.D. Alt: GROAF & CONTRAKSHUN
Why “groaf” is the new “growth” and Naked Capitalism readers are duly skeptical of it, along with its young cousin, “jawbs”.
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