Working Life

   Here is one thing that is quite fascinating to me. There is a wave of stories popping up now about taxes being raised on the wealthy, or a fee put on banks, or restrictions put on executive compensation. Today, for example, there is a story in The Wall Street Journal: The grassroots fervor that […]

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   The French should be thrilled that the Republicans do not control the Congress because we would certainly see another landmark "Freedom Fries" bill become law after this: French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said Wednesday that France will slap a one-off 50% tax on bonuses awarded to bank employees next year. "Banks will be taxed […]

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A note to the British: you should thank your lucky stars that the Republicans are not running the Congress because fish and chips would now be renamed Freemarket Delight to protest your government’s decision to levy a tax on bankers’ bonuses. Seriously, here is one small step forward to a rationale response to the obscene […]

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   There has been a lot of handwringing about the long-term debt forecasted by the Administration (a quick observation, in case there is confusion: the fiscal deficit is the annual gap between what comes into the government and what is paid out; the country’s debt is the accumulated gaps from the annual deficits). For example: […]

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   I’m getting increasingly pissed off about the debate about health care, and the larger obscenity that our states are collapsing, services are being cut, millions of people are losing jobs–and the richest Americans just can’t step out and say, "yes, we should pay more to have a decent society". If you want to see […]

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   This is the definition of perversion (the dictionary tells us that something perverted is "deviating from what is considered right or acceptable; wrong , improper, etc. or corrupt, wicked, etc."). The real unemployment rate is around 16 percent, millions of people are struggling partly because of the behavior of the people running the financial […]

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   Regular readers here know that I have been pressing the case to significantly raise the dues paid by the people who have reaped hundreds of billions of dollars in the past decade–an entirely disproportionate haul pocketed by the top one percent of the population. Well, a bit of that idea is starting to creep […]

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   I can’t help but laugh at the transparent crap passed around by the protectors of the financial kingdom. In a column in today’s Wall Street Journal, Roger Altman writes under the headline, "We’ll Need To Raise Taxes Soon". Altman’s tagline for his bio reads: "founder and chairman of Evercore Partners, was deputy secretary of […]

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I have argued that the current crisis we are in now is the product of at least three decades of a bankrupt economic system. Now, looking forward, the same system has set the stages, according to a report just out, for a massive worldwide crisis in retirement security that will last decades. The reason we […]

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   When last seen on the American political scene in 1995, Bob Packwood was forced to resign from the U.S. Senate because of charges of sexual harassment, assault and abuse–charges he continued to deny even though the evidence was pretty compelling (for those of you with political recall, you might remember the endless struggle over […]

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