According to Bruce Bartlett, “Generally, the higher up you are in the economic pecking order the more flexibility you have to arrange your affairs to make the form of your income fit the tax rules.” And, as we’ve seen, it works, especially when the rules themselves are changed to favor those who receive distributions of [...]
Archive for October, 2009
Capital has lots of different options when things don’t go its way. One of them is to go on strike, by decreasing investment expenditures. The result is a decline in economic activity and an increase in unemployment, which—via lower wages and government stimulus programs—(perhaps) restore the conditions of profitability. (The chart is from the Cato’s [...]
What promises to be an intellectually stimulating and politically invigorating event—a variety of new Marxian perspectives on the current crises of capitalism—at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, next Thursday, 5 November, at 8 pm. . .
This is serious business. In this country, we used to manufacture things — skyscrapers, the V-8 engine. Now we’re No. 1 one for toilet paper and bacon. We do have the best toilet paper in the world. And bacon — you go to France and they think they know what they’re doing. . .It’s a [...]
Connecting the dots
Posted: 29 October 2009 in UncategorizedTags: capitalism, crisis, inequality, wages
Angry Bear’s Spencer notes that, during the so-called Great Moderation, labor’s share of the economic pie (i.e., nonfarm business output) fell ten percentage points. If you really want to raise a stink you could look at this as a great example of the Marxist immiseration of labor that Marx believed was one of the internal [...]
I’ve been meaning to write about a superb study of media coverage of the current crises, “Covering the Great Recession,” conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Among the major findings: Three storylines have dominated: efforts to help revive the banking sector, the battle over the stimulus package and the struggles [...]
It seems we have an answer to the question I posed yesterday, about whether or not Marxian economists will be invited to the table in Soros’s Initiative for New Economic Thinking.* First, there’s Anatole Kaletsky’s essay [ht: sw] offering “Three Cheers for the Death of Old Economics”: A good test of whether this venture proves [...]
Catholic of the year
Posted: 28 October 2009 in UncategorizedTags: capitalism, catholicism, Michael Moore
Anthony Stevens-Arroyo has nominated Michael Moore Catholic of the Year for his latest film, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” The reasons? First, Moore places a favorable light on his lived Catholic experience and the trust he places in Catholic priests. . . Second, Moore puts a human face on the suffering caused by economic hardship. . [...]
