Category: economics
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Bowles-Simpson truth destroys “conservative” lies
The US tax system is supposed to work so that hedge fund managers earning fees of $10,000,000 a year should pay about 30% and have to somehow to scrape by on only $7,000,000. Imagine what people would say if they learned that the government was then also giving these people…
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Romneys Ripoff Capitalism
In 1992, Bain Capital bought American Pad & Paper by financing 87 percent of the purchase price. In the next three years, Ampad borrowed to make acquisitions, repay existing debt and pay Bain Capital and its investors $60 million in dividends. As a result, the company’s debt swelled from $11…
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Trickle-Down Keynesianism
According to Professor Krugman and his many internet acolytes, cutting any government spending in our poorly performing economy would be a disaster because all government spending is stimulative. If that’s the case, the near doubling of the Federal budget under George W. Bush and the parallel rise in state spending…
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The mysterious capture of US “left” economics by the John Birch Society
(from 2011) The lesson of the finance crisis is that the finance sector doesn’t work well, but to hear the “liberal/left” on the blogs and on TV, you’d think the problem was Tim Geithner and the Federal Reserve. Which is strange for a number of reasons. During the financial crisis,…
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The Nation: condescension watch
Mike Konzcal’s contribution to the world of Obama condescension appears (where else?) in The Nation and takes the standard form of a finger wagging lecture as if from an exasperated teaching assistant to a particularly dim undergraduate. There’s an implicit presumption in these lectures that Barack Obama stumbled into the…
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Karl Marx versus the immature American System
Marx considered himself to be carrying on the work of economists like Says and Ricardo – the founders of what has developed into the dominant “neoclassical” economics. It’s customary to think of Ricardo and his “bourgeois” successors as being the antagonists of Marx and his followers but there was a…
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Marx, Opium, Zetas.
In 1840 the Chinese government tried to block English drug kingpins who were selling opium in Chinese coastal cities. In response, British Naval warships bombarded Canton and went up the Yangtze river into the heart of China, burning, looting on a grand scale and shelling defenseless towns while killing many…
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Replacing 401Ks
(from 2011) 401k’s are the biggest rip-off of the public in US history. Basically, workers are provided with an opportunity to help the government fund the retirement of financial sector managers who use workers tax free savings both as sources of fees and to be the base of the “dumb…
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Bare knuckle politics
[From 2011] Previously published on The People’s View. If you read the Wall Street Journal or right wing blogs, you know who Ron Bloom is. He is special advisor to Tim Geithner and White House director of manufacturing policy. He’s a former official at the United Steel Workers Union who…
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Pseudo-progressive economics
Duncan Black (Atrios) had pitch perfect note up at his Eschaton blog which illustrates several key problems in the kind of economics analysis that dominates “progressive” blogs. Maybe Bill Gross Reads This Humble Blog As I have been saying for some time . As a profession we have failed miserably…
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