Bob Lord Posted by Bob Lord I've placed Thucky on double secret probation. It seems he's taken to just making stuff up (i.e., lying) in his comments. In a recent comment, he tried to pass this off as accurate: You ought to be concerned, we now have three years without any increase in government revenues in the … Read more
Posted by Bob Lord
I don't know whether to wait until Thomas Pikkety's new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comes out in English in March or brush up on my French so I can read it now. According to this review by Thomas Edsall in today's NY Times, Capitalism vs. Democracy, Pikkety's book has the potential to be a game changer in economic thinking on inequality.
I sure hope so, because based on Edsall's review Pikkety has shone a light on some inconvenient truths about capitalism, inequality and taxation.
I'll get to the substance after the jump, but here's how Branco Milanovic of the World Bank described the book:
I am hesitant to call Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the 21st Century one of the best books in economics written in the past several decades. Not that I do not believe it is, but I am careful because of the inflation of positive book reviews and because contemporaries are often poor judges of what may ultimately prove to be influential. With these two caveats, let me state that we are in the presence of one of the watershed books in economic thinking.
According to another review, Pikkety's book defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism."
The centerpiece of Edsall's argument appears to be based on the relationship between the return on capital and the rate of economic growth:
Posted by Bob Lord
Great piece by Sean McElwee in Salon yesterday, Listen up, talking heads: Upward mobiity isn't the answer. McElwee identifies and exposes the latest ruse of the rich, implemented through their proxies in the punditocracy and Congress: It's not inequality, but upward mobility, that we need to address. In other words, if we can just improve the odds of going from rags to riches, it would be just fine if most Americans were in rags. McElwee:
A new “bipartisan consensus” is brewing: 2014 will be the year in which Very Serious People argue that America’s primary economic goal should be increasing social mobility, not decreasing inequality. “Shame on Obama and De Blasio for talking about class, and trying to divide us,” they’ll smarm. “Let’s focus on something everyone can agree on: upward mobility.”
It’s already happening. At the Brookings Institution, Richard Reeves argues that while inequality is important, the defining issue of our era is “the shocking, illiberal, immoral transmission of poverty and affluence from one generation to the next.” Social mobility is the new deficit reduction, and luminaries from the left (Kirsten Gillibrand) and right (Paul Ryan) can both agree it’s a problem. Even David Brooks is concerned. Marco Rubio has already sketched out the battle lines: “It is this lack of mobility, not just income inequality, that we should be focused on.” At the core, the question about whether our society should focus on inequality or mobility gets to a significant schism built around one central question: Is inequality fundamentally immoral?
McElwee's piece is thought provoking, to say the least. He demolishes the underlying premise of those promoting the "it's not inequality, but upward mobility" position, that markets are inherently just and a society where property is distributed according to merit is optimal.
Posted by Bob Lord Very interesting development in the Snowden case. From Huff Po: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday he would "engage in conversation" with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden in search of some sort of resolution for his case. But he stopped short of considering clemency, telling MSNBCthat "would be going too … Read more
Posted by Bob Lord
Still getting blowback for not being on board with Obama and Feinstein, so, what the heck, here's Robert Scheer from No Place To Hide: We're All Suspects in Barack Obama's America:
Barack Obama’s speech Friday on surveillance was his worst performance, not as a matter of theatrical skill, though he clearly did not embrace his lines, but in its stark betrayal of his oft proclaimed respect for constitutional safeguards and civil liberty.
His unbridled defense of the surveillance state opened the door to the new McCarthyism of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who on Sunday talk shows were branding Edward Snowden as a possible Russian spy.
[snip]
Some will read my criticism of Obama and Feinstein and say trust these good liberal Democrats, who would never condone misusing government power to undermine individual freedom. It is a rationalization difficult to accept on a day when we celebrate the memory of Martin Luther King Jr., a man blackmailed with information collected by the FBI and the NSA when Democrat Lyndon Johnson was president.
“In the 1960s, the government spied on civil rights leaders and the critics of the Vietnam War,” Obama noted in his speech, before quickly abandoning that caution and falling back on the lame “trust us” refrain of every overreaching government.
Apparently, some have the impression I'm siding with Republicans here. That's laughable, but I'll address it after the jump.