Working Life

   Last night’s debate, not surprisingly, didn’t finger the real culprit in the economic crisis hitting people everywhere–by the way, an economic crisis that is a far more ancient phenomena than the last few weeks. The real culprit is Market Fundamentalism.    And, so, I offer you this: "The Audacity of Timidity: Where Is The […]

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  The drumbeat has begun: we have to cut spending because there is no money left. You hear it at every level of the political debate, from candidates to pundits. But, it’s a lie. We have plenty of money if we have the political will, to paraphrase the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, to go […]

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   We all know the rich get away with paying virtually no taxes. There is a key way they do that beyond the income tax: capital gains and dividends. As the folks from Citizens For Tax Justice point out: The biggest and most unjustified of these subsidies is the special low tax rate on capital […]

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   Egads…sound familiar…American taxpayers are now on the hook for billions of dollars…this time to bail out Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and try to keep the economy from entering into a deeper tailspin. You can read about this virtually everywhere and there is a palpable fear here–that it may not be enough…    But, […]

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  It’s not a hard intellectual or political lift to say that a President Obama would be leaps and bounds much better for working people than John "Third Bush Term" McCain–partly because the bar has been set so low in the past eight years. But, it’s worth being clear-eyed about what we can expect.   […]

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   Huh. Why worry about cutting corporate taxes when they don’t even bother to pay any?: Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The study, which is likely to […]

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   To the long list of examples of how business rips off the average person–from paying CEOs huge salaries while workers get pay and benefits cuts, to making people work harder and more productive than ever before yet refusing to pass on the fruits of that labor to workers, to lobbying against raising the scandalously […]

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    There will be a lot of chatter about today’s hike in the minimum wage. We should be happy for the people who will get another seventy cents an hour in their gross pay. But, we should keep in mind that, at the grand new sum of $6.55 an hour, the minimum wage is a […]

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    I ended up pondering the issues of taxes this morning–a, finally, fine nice spring morning here in NYC.  The Wall Street Journal reports this morning that the government’s receipts from corporate taxes have fallen. The Journal ascribes this to the "turmoil rocking financial markets and housing woes slowing the economy", just another way that […]

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To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, you haven’t met a real elitist until you consider the life of John Paulson. His salary last year: $3.7 billion. That is not a misprint: three billion, seven hundred million dollars. Now that’s doing elitism in a big way. Welcome to the new Gilded Age.   Today, Institutional Investor Magazine releases […]

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