Bob Lord

Posted by Bob Lord

Some political bloggers treat commenters from the opposing viewpoint with disdain. I get why they do so, but I try to refrain from that practice. I like a spirited debate. I think my fellow bloggers do as well. But we don't care much for mindless talking point repetition. 

Here's a case in point. I wrote a recent post regarding a Fed Board Governor's recent epiphany on inequality. One of our conservative friends wrote a lengthy dissertation on how lower tax rates were the way to address inequality. In other words, supply side economics would shrink the gap between the few and the many by putting more dollars in the pockets of the few. 

Really? How can that possibly be? The whole point of supply side economics is to justify inequality as necessary for the greater good. That's why it also is referred to as "trickle-down" economics. The theory is that if you allow those at the top to increase their wealth and income, some of it will trickle-down to the rest of us. Thus, supply siders argue, we need to allow the "job creator" class to be very wealthy in order to grow the economy.

Posted by Bob Lord

I always see it as a breath of intellectual honesty when a progressive takes on a tax policy position adopted by progressive politicians.

Along those lines, Polly Cleveland has an interesting post at inequaity.org, Grover Norquist Is Right to Oppose Internet Sales Taxes, in which she takes on the conventional progressive wisdom that we should tax internet sales. I'm not sure I agree with her. The essence of her argument is that sales taxes are so insidious that we should put aside concerns regarding fairness and oppose any proposal to increase sales taxes. She argues that the effect of taxing internet sales could be to make state legislators more brazen in increasing sales tax rates across the board. She may very well be right.

But whether she's right or not, her analysis is stellar. She explains how sales taxes not only are regressive in their impact on consumers, but also unfair in their impact on small businesses, and why taxing internest sales could open the floodgates to further sales tax increases:

Posted by Bob Lord

I rarely miss Chris Hedges' Monday columns at Truthdig. They're always informative and Hedges' skills as a writer are awesome. 

Once in a while, though, he spins out a column that rises above even Hedges' own great work. Such was the case yesterday with Rise Up or Die. On our blind faith in free markets:

There is nothing in 5,000 years of economic history to justify the belief that human societies should structure their behavior around the demands of the marketplace. This is an absurd, utopian ideology. The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind, as Joe Sacco and I saw in the sacrifice zones we wrote about, horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

And what we must do:

Posted by Bob Lord

If you write for a local blog, the best you can hope for is to have our views echoed by those with larger platforms. So it was gratifying to read George Packer's op-ed in today's NY Times, Celebrating Inequality. Packer picked up on two themes I've mentioned in previous posts. But he drew a connection between them that I had not noticed. And that connection is quite significant. It may explain why his work is on the opinion pages of the NY Times and mine is posted here. 

A few months ago, in a post entitled Trillionaires, I noted how we foolishly celebrate the achievements of the super rich as we do the accomplishments of athletes on steroids:

Remarkably, as we pass the milestones, $10 Billion, $50 Billion, soon $100 Billion, no alarm bells ring. Instead, we celebrate the expanding fortunes of the super-rich as we do athletes breaking sports records. Reaching $1 Trillion will be treated like hitting 73 home runs was before we knew Barry cheated to get there. With any luck, our first Trillion Dollar fortune also will be tainted by misdeeds of the achiever. Perhaps that will wake us from our slumber.

Packer focuses on this phenomenon, how we worship celebrities as demi-gods in times of inequality:

Posted by Bob Lord Imagine that? Huff Po reports that a Fed Board Governor, Sarah Bloom Raskin, has "raised the possibility that rising inequality may restrain economic growth for several years." I suppose we should be encouraged that someone in a position of modest power is starting to see inequality as a negative. But at … Read more