income inequality

The Trump tax cut bill was as bad as everyone predicted it would be

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Last week the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) issued a report that makes it official: the “Trump tax cut bill,” the only legislative achievement of the previous Republican Congress, has not generated any meaningful new economic growth that was not already underway. And the crooks who passed it (above) are laughing all the way to their … Read more

We’ve seen this movie before

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Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles recently did a post he titled “It’s Back to The Future with Trump’s 2020 campaign.” Actually, I think the more accurate movie analogy for Trump and his MAGA supporters is the political allegory Pleasantville (1998). As Roger Ebert described it: The movie opens in today’s America, which we have been taught … Read more

We need to talk about marginal tax rates

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Earlier this month, freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. One brief comment she made about taxes has the billionaire plutocrats of the New Gilded Age clutching their pearls and attacking her as a proxy for attacking progressive tax policy in general:

Anderson Cooper: This would require, though, raising taxes.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: There’s an element where— yeah. There— people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes.

Anderson Cooper: Do you have a specific on the tax rate?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: You know, it— you look at our tax rates back in the ’60s and when you have a progressive tax rate system. Your tax rate, you know, let’s say, from zero to $75,000 may be ten percent or 15 percent, et cetera. But once you get to, like, the tippy tops— on your 10 millionth dollar— sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn’t mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb up this ladder you should be contributing more.

Anderson Cooper: What you are talking about, just big picture, is a radical agenda — compared to the way politics is done right now.

Really Anderson? High marginal tax rates were the norm in American tax policy for many years, when America still had a progressive tax system that built a vibrant American middle class.

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The GOP tax cut scam was even worse than you imagined

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MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did a brief segment on Monday night’s episode of All In with Chris Hayes about a new economics report that got lost in all the noise of the corporate media’s fixation this week with Billionaire plutocrats of the New Gilded Age dismissing progressive proposals to increase taxes on the super-wealthy to address extreme wealth inequality (i.e., Michael Bloomberg and Howard Schultz).

See Oxfam’s new report, “Public Good or Private Wealth,” which shows how the growing gap between rich and poor is undermining the fight against poverty, damaging our economies and fueling public anger across the globe. Last year, billionaires saw their wealth grow by $2.5 billion a day while the poorest saw their wealth fall:

The 2017 US tax bill is super-charging the worldwide tax race to the bottom and exacerbating the trend of governments dramatically cutting tax rates for wealthy individuals and corporations around the world. In the US, 30 people hold as much wealth as the poorest half of the population. Cutting wealth and corporate taxes predominantly benefits men who own 50 percent more wealth than women globally, and control over 86 percent of corporations.

“The recent US tax law is a master class on how to favor massive corporations and the richest citizens,”said Paul O’Brien, Oxfam America’s Vice President for Policy and Campaigns.

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September jobs report well below expectations, real earnings decline

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Steve Benen has the September jobs report. Job growth cooled in September, falling short of expectations:

Though there were some concerns about the effects Hurricane Florence may have had on the U.S. job market, most projections pointed to monthly job growth in September around 194,000. The initial data suggests we fell short by a significant amount.

The September results are 25 percent below what economists had forecast.

SeptemberJobs

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this morning that the economy added 134,000 jobs in September, while the unemployment rate dropped further to 3.7%. The 134,000 is the lowest of the year to date.

On a more encouraging note, the revisions for the two previous months – July and August – were quite good, with a combined net gain of 87,000 jobs as compared to previous BLS reports.

In terms of the larger context, this morning’s data points to 1.875 million jobs created so far in 2018, which is quite good, and which is an improvement on the totals from the first nine months of 2017 (1.53 million). It’s also roughly identical to the numbers from 2015 (1.84 million) and 2016 (1.85 million).

That said, this year’s tally is still short of the totals from the first nine months of 2014 (2.19 million).

When the White House says this is the best growth “ever,” it apparently means “since 2014.”

As for the political implications, Donald Trump has now been in office for 20 full months – February 2017 through September 2018 – and in that time, the economy has created 3.8 million jobs. In the 20 full months preceding Trump’s presidency – June 2015 to January 2017 – the economy created 4.15 million jobs.

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