There has been an interesting lack of commentary on an effort underway by Newt Gingrich and his allies to enable state governments to declare bankruptcy as a way to slash pension obligations, and given the lack of mention of other creditors, perhaps only pension obligations.
The latest sighting was via an article today in Pensions & Investments:
Read more...If you live in the world according to the mainstream media, the row between state executives and unions is all about (by implication) greedy unions trying to preserve their perquisites when budget “realities” demand that they suffer. Consider this excerpt from a recent article New York Times article about the fight in New Jersey:
Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy.
And how exactly did the crisis “reveal” that some pension funds were close seriously under water? A more accurate rendition would be that, at least in New Jersey, the state has been raiding the pension kitty for over 15 years.
Read more...Gloom, doom, and apocalyptic musings seem to be a permanent feature of modern society. But we’ve had more in the way of dystopian movies and talk of imperial decline in the last ten years than in the preceding ten.
Quite a few readers have taken to mentioning Joseph Tainter’s classic, The Collapse of Complex Societies, in comments, a sign it might be worth discussing formally.
Read more...Even though most people face some form of financial stress in their lifetime, and the financial crisis upended the affairs of many who had been comfortable, the poor and near poor contend with ongoing difficulties.
Read more...One of the post-bubble era trends in Japan that has caused consternation within the island nation is the rise of an employed underclass. The old economic model was lifetime employment, even though that was a reality observed more at large companies than in the economy overall. Nevertheless, college graduates could expect to find a job without much difficulty and look forward to a stable career if they performed reasonably well.
In the new economic paradigm, wages are compressed among full-time salaried workers (meaning seniority/managerial based pay differentials, which were not all that great in Japan to begin with, have narrowed). And even worse from a societal standpoint is the rise of “freeters” or workers hired into temporary jobs.
Read more...A newly released report, “Grow Together or Pull Further Apart? Income Concentration Trends in New York,” by the Fiscal Policy Institute (hat tip reader Thomas R) gives a picture of how New York City is now at Latin American levels of income disparity.
Read more...Dylan Ratigan is leading town hall events in various cities to help spur the establishment of a job creation movement. The goal is to push for policies that foster higher employment than the ones we’ve seen over the last thirty years, which instead promoted financialization, the use of consumer debt to paper over lack of wage growth, asset inflation and speculation, and increasing income and wealth disparity.
Ratigan wants to create a dialogue among key political groups, including ordinary citizens, investors, small business operators, and corporate leaders. His sessions will focus on four issues, as he outlined in in the Huffington Post:
Read more...Yves here. As much as Auerback’s and Wray’s argument does describe the reality of government fiscal operations accurately, I see their political reading as wildly optimistic. Given that disproven ideas like “trickle down economics” still hold considerable sway, I think the concerns about how a payroll tax holiday will serve as a wedge to cut Social Security benefit are valid.
By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager, and L. Randall Wray, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
The commentary in the aftermath of President Obama’s announced tax deal with the GOP has been both predictable and, for the most part, misconceived….
Read more...By Bill Black, Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and a former senior financial regulator
This column analyses Obama’s claim that he got the better of the Republicans in the negotiations.
The administration (implicitly) argues that its claim of extraordinary negotiating success represents a miraculous accomplishment given the facts that the Republicans were holding all legislation hostage to their non-negotiable demand that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of Americans be extended and the administration’s irrevocable decision that it could not call the Republican’s bluff because the economy would likely sink back into recession unless tax cuts for the middle class were immediately passed…..
The third problem is that no element of the claimed miracle is true….
Read more...This story illustrates how far some companies are willing to go to preserve their bottom lines and assert their right to operate in an unfettered manner, even when that includes breaking the law and violating contracts. Huffington Post, via its daily political newsletter Huffington Post Hill, does some additional reporting on the very peculiar case […]
Read more...Grit TV interviews Chris Hedges about his new book, The Death of the Liberal Class: “We have a choice,” says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. “You can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning.” Hedges argues for moral responsibility […]
Read more...As one reader noted, “Closest PBS has ever come to telling the truth about the system”. You can view the segment here. Enjoy!
Read more...The Alice Through the Looking Glass practices, of at best adherence to the mere appearance of legality, increasingly appears to pervade the nether world where financial players go in search of money they think might be due to them. And the big problem is the word “might”. Banks proceed as if there right to collect […]
Read more...It’s astonishing to see how Americans have been conditioned to think that political action and engagement is futile. I’m old enough to have witnessed the reverse, how activism in the 1960s produced significant advances in civil rights blacks and women, and eventually led the US to exit the Vietnam War. I’m reminded of this sense […]
Read more...Yves here. One thing I have noticed on posts that discuss the US labor market and trade is reflexive and frankly somewhat dogmatic defeatism. The position seems to be “China and Bangladesh have such cheap labor, there is no way we can compete.” This view is simplistic. First, in capital intensive industries, direct labor is […]
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