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How Much Tax Should The Rich Pay? | ThinkProgress

22 Aug

Close the loopholes in the tax system!

But the biggest takeaway that I’d like to see people take from this paper is that fans of progressive taxation should be fans of tax reform. As you see in the text, the optimal marginal tax rate for high income people soars if you first (or simultaneously) enact loophole-closing measures to broaden the tax base. In a tax code with many loopholes, higher rates is largely an incentive to exploit loopholes. Close the loopholes, and you can soak the rich with much more efficacy.

via How Much Tax Should The Rich Pay? | ThinkProgress.

Soaking the rich — Crooked Timber

22 Aug

As has been pointed out many times, the Great Compression in income distribution during the 1950s and 1960s, driven in part by policies designed quite explicitly to “stick it to the rich”, was also a time of full employment and steadily growing economic growth. And, while the success of those policies made it sensible to focus on other issues, such as civil rights, rather than seeking to push economic redistribution even further, the situation is exactly the opposite today.

When the top 1 per cent have 25 per cent of all income and this share is steadily growing, a government that doesn’t soak the rich can’t do much more than spread the pain a bit more evenly, whether this means cutting services to balance the budget without higher taxes on the bottom 99 per cent, or squeezing out a bit of extra revenue to preserve essential parts of the welfare state.

via Soaking the rich — Crooked Timber.

Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare – NYTimes.com

22 Aug

Protect children,  but not the rights of corporations to exploit children for profit.

A clash between these two newly created legal entities — children and corporations — was, perhaps, inevitable. Century-of-the-child reformers sought to resolve conflicts in favor of children. But over the last 30 years there has been a dramatic reversal: corporate interests now prevail. Deregulation, privatization, weak enforcement of existing regulations and legal and political resistance to new regulations have eroded our ability, as a society, to protect children.

Childhood obesity mounts as junk food purveyors bombard children with advertising, even at school. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation study reports that children spend more hours engaging with various electronic media — TV, games, videos and other online entertainments — than they spend in school. Much of what children watch involves violent, sexual imagery, and yet children’s media remain largely unregulated. Attempts to curb excesses — like California’s ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors — have been struck down by courts as free speech violations.

Another area of concern: we medicate increasing numbers of children with potentially harmful psychotropic drugs, a trend fueled in part by questionable and under-regulated pharmaceutical industry practices.

via Corporate Interests Threaten Children’s Welfare – NYTimes.com.

Little Resistance as Rebels Enter Tripoli – NYTimes.com

21 Aug

What does this continuation of the “Arab Spring” portend for us in America? When will we get our Spring? When will we DEMAND it? When will we CREATE it?

The rebel leadership announced that insurgents had captured two of Colonel Qaddafi’s sons, including Seif al-Islam, his heir apparent. The leadership also announced that the elite presidential guard protecting the Libyan leader had surrendered.

via Little Resistance as Rebels Enter Tripoli – NYTimes.com.

NB: A personal friend of mine has worked with Seif. It’s complicated. I wish the man well. He’s faced and, I assume, will continue to face extremely difficult choices.

Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet – NYTimes.com

21 Aug

Can’t read anything with your eyes closed and your brain draining out into the ether.

This is not the time for the usual demands by business for fewer regulations and lower taxes. The economy is too fragile and the deficit too high — in no small part because the George W. Bush administration spent eight years giving business and the wealthy exactly what they asked for.

Instead, business leaders should be pushing Washington for what is needed to avoid another recession: more near-term spending to stimulate the economy, more revenue to help pay for it, and a balanced approach to the long-term deficit by reducing health care costs and strengthening the tax base.

via Surely They Can Read a Spreadsheet – NYTimes.com.

The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food  – Technology Review

21 Aug

But what’s interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don’t necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. “These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest,” say Lagi and co.

In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.

On 13 December last year, the group wrote to the US government pointing out that global food prices were about to cross the threshold they had identified. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that triggered a wave of social unrest that continues to spread throughout the middle east today.

One of two factors in the rise of food prices “is the con version of corn into ethanol, a practiced directly encouraged by subsidies.” The other factor is speculating in food prices.

via The Cause Of Riots And The Price of Food  – Technology Review.

Report gives tar sands pipeline opposition ammunition – KYTX CBS 19 Tyler Longview News Weather Sports

19 Aug

From five months ago:

Now, for the first time, four major groups have come together to issue a joint report. The Natural Resources Defense Council joined forces with the National Wildlife Federation, the Pipeline Safety Trust and the Sierra Club. … It says tar sands, also called dil-bit, is 3 to 13 times more acidic than conventional crude with six to 10 times the sulfur content.

via New report gives tar sands pipeline opposition ammunition – KYTX CBS 19 Tyler Longview News Weather Sports.

“Let them eat cake!”: Summer edition – Let Them Eat Cake – Salon.com

17 Aug

Today, no income above $106,800 is eligible to be taxed, meaning Warren Buffet pays the same amount of payroll taxes as someone making $106,800. At a time when politicians like Romney are sowing hysteria about Social Security going bankrupt, the question about raising the cap to make the tax slightly less regressive and generate more revenue for the system is perfectly logical. And yet, Romney used it as a rationale to lash out.

As if grasped by a moment of yearning nostalgia, Romney responded to the tax-cap question with a seemingly heartfelt lament, saying, “You know, there was a time in this country that we didn’t celebrate attacking people based on their success, and we didn’t go after people because they were successful.”

The Myth of the Persecuted Billionaire is one of the favorite monikers of the larger “Let Them Eat Cake” movement.

via “Let them eat cake!”: Summer edition – Let Them Eat Cake – Salon.com.

Striking Verizon Workers Are an Example to Us All | The Nation

17 Aug

The Verizon Corporation is asking its workforce to accept wage and benefit reductions—despite being a very profitable company. Morgan Stanley’s recent analysis shows Verizon’s net income from ongoing operations was $13.9 billion in 2010, up more than 16 percent from 2007. No wonder Verizon’s stock has outpaced that of the S & P index and other telecommunication’s firms, something Verizon itself brags about in its last annual report. How, then, can Verizon freeze current workers’ pensions and eliminate pensions for new workers? Ask their workers to accept reductions in holidays (to seven), reduced sick pay and the substitution of the current health plan with one having high deductibles and contributions? The unions involved estimate that benefit and wage reductions would total $20,000 per worker each year.

Meanwhile corporate profits are doing just fine. Those artificial persons, remember them? Heck, we don’t need robots from the future to wage war on us. Corporate robots are doing it right now.

What we have is  an economy in which businesses and highest-income households do very well even when the vast majority is deeply hurting. Over the last four quarters only 73.7% of the income generated in the corporate sector went to employees in wages and benefits, the lowest share since during World War 2, when wages were deliberately suppressed. Correspondingly, the 26.3% share of corporate output going to profits is the highest since the World Was 2 years.

via Striking Verizon Workers Are an Example to Us All | The Nation.

Liberty Rising

17 Aug

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And she’s NOT happy.

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