Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Neil Irwin highlights the reality that top-heavy economic growth has done nothing to reduce poverty in the U.S. over the past 40 years: In Kennedy’s era, [the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory] had the benefit of being true. From 1959 to 1973,
Continue readingTag: inequality
Accidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – David Graeber writes that unfettered capitalism will never tame itself, but will instead need to be countered by a sufficiently strong counter-movement to seriously question its underpinnings. And Thomas Frank follows up with Graeber about the warped incentives facing workers as matters stand
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
This and that to end your weekend. – Lana Payne challenges the Big Lie that right-wing politics are anything but antithetical to broad economic growth. Dennis Howlett weighs in on the Cons’ choice to make the rich even richer through their tax policy. And Daniel Tencer juxtaposes the boom in
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Joseph Stiglitz offers his suggestions (PDF) for a tax system which would encourage both growth and equality: Tax reform…offers a path toward both resolving budgetary impasses and making the kinds of public investments that will strengthen the fundamentals of the economy. The most
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, expanding on this post about the Cons’ ruthless discipline in keeping the benefits of any tax policy from flowing to those who need it most – and pointing out the need for a strong challenge to that single-minded focus on withholding money from the poor. For further reading…– Again,
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Pension trade-offs and democratic deficits
Forget houses as a source of secondary income – that’s so 2007. After the latest recession, Americans are increasingly dipping into their retirement savings to fund on-going consumer expenses. Many private 401(k) plans have rules that allow workers to withdraw some amount of saved funds before retirement and such early
Continue readingParchment in the Fire: Thomas Piketty’s real challenge was to the FT’s Rolex types | Comment is free | The Guardian
Thomas Piketty’s real challenge was to the FT’s Rolex types | Comment is free | The Guardian. If the FT’s attack on the radical economist’s ‘rising inequality’ thesis is right, then all the gross designer bling in its How To Spend It section can be morally justifiedre The adverts
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your Sunday reading. – James Greiff makes the case against the right’s faith-based reliance on costly high-end tax cuts in place of attracting people through jobs and quality of life: (T)he recent record suggests those U.S. states that cut taxes find themselves with bigger deficits and none
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
This and that for your weekend reading. – Tavis Smiley discusses the need to speak realistically about the causes and effects of poverty, rather than simply dismissing real human costs as somebody else’s fault and problem. And similarly, Tim Stacey comments on the appalling “empathy gap” – which sees upper-class
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week. – Linda McQuaig writes that while the Cons don’t want to bother listening to the public about much of anything, they’ll always make time for a disgraced former advisor lobbying on behalf of oil barons: In…new RCMP allegations,… [Bruce] Carson was working for the
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Political Eh-conomy Radio: Linda McQuaig on Hudak’s imaginary jobs and Canadian inequality
Today, I’m happy to present another extended interview and my guest is Linda McQuaig. Linda is a National Newspaper Award-winning journalist and commentator who has worked for the Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star and many other outlets. She is also a best-selling author of numerous books that have focused on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jared Bernstein discusses how fair and progressive taxes on the rich are a necessary element of any effort to improve the lot of the poor: The rising tide of inequality does more than create great economic distance between income classes. It also produces
Continue readingPolitical Eh-conomy: Forget global superstar, Vancouver’s housing troubles start at home
Vancouver was the star of a recent New Yorker article that shone a light on the city’s lack of housing affordability and linked this lack to an inflow of foreign buyers. Unfortunately, this link is extremely tenuous, as most of the support is anecdotal or based on very limited data.
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Frank Vibert writes that our democratic system includes more than just electoral politics, while recognizing that we all too often neglect the distinct role of regulatory bodies: When one looks more closely at regulation and the interdependencies between systems the more apparent
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week. – Elias Isquith interviews Matt Taibbi about the complete lack of morality underlying Wall Street and the regulators who are supposed to protect the public interest from banksters run amok. Paul Buchheit reviews some compelling evidence that poorer people are more ethical than the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Morning Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Bill Moyers interviews Richard Wolff about inequality – featuring Wolff’s observation that anybody trying to justify inequality as an inevitable byproduct of unregulated markets manages only to make those markets indefensible: Bill Moyers: When you say that there’s no economic argument that people
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, looking at one of Thomas Piketty’s findings about the self-propagation of wealth which has received relatively little attention – and pointing out how the a pattern of greater wealth grabbing higher returns can both be managed in order to reduce undue concentration of wealth, and even turned to the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jared Bernstein takes a look at after-tax inequality, and finds that it fits neatly with Thomas Piketty’s prescription to address the concentration of income and wealth through strong public policy: (W)hile the progressive taxes and transfers that don’t show up in Mr. Piketty’s
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Afternoon Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Doug Saunders interviews Thomas Piketty about the need for checks on the undue accumulation of capital, and the readily available means of achieving that end: To solve the problem of rising inequality, you propose small worldwide taxes on capital transfers and on
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Afternoon Links
Miscellaneous material for your Monday reading. – Alyssa Battistoni writes that a universal basic income could go a long way toward solving environmental and economic problems alike by placing a focus on sustainable quality of life rather than increasing consumer consumption: If overconsumption is actually the problem, we can’t fix
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