The Trumpbeat of inequality
Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz writes:
Where the trade agreements failed, it was not because the US was outsmarted by its trading partners; it was because the US trade agenda was shaped by corporate interests….
We need to rewrite the rules of the economy once again, this time to ensure that ordinary citizens benefit. Politicians in the US and elsewhere who ignore this lesson will be held accountable. Change entails risk. But the Trump phenomenon – and more than a few similar political developments in Europe – has revealed the far greater risks entailed by failing to heed this message: societies divided, democracies undermined, and economies weakened.
Read more here.
The deserving rich?
Nancy Folbre takes issue with Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw’s defense of the one percent:
The rich are not like you and me. They contribute far more to society than everybody else, so argues Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw in his essay “Defending the One Percent.” Mankiw’s praise for talented superstars such as Steven Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Steven Spielberg quickly blooms into a more general argument that competitive labor markets pay workers what they deserve. This is music to the ears of high earners, and it sings to a very human desire to believe that the world is fair….
Some of us contribute more than members of the top one percent to the economy, and some of us contribute less. None of us gets exactly what we deserve. One difference between the rich and us is that they have more money. They also enjoy—both as cause and effect—a lot more power.
Read her blog here; read her working paper on “just desserts” here.
Offshore shell games
A new report details how companies duck paying their taxes – and free-ride on those of us who do:
Fortune 500 companies are holding nearly $2.5 trillion in accumulated profits offshore for tax purposes.
Read the report here.
What could a democratized economy look like?
Econ4’s Gar Alperovitz describes a pluralist commonwealth – an alternative to the concentration of wealth and power:
Source: The Democracy Collaborative.
Plutocracy vs. democracy
Bill Moyers on the need for a level playing field and real democracy:
In May, President Obama and I both spoke at the Rutgers University commencement ceremony. He was at his inspirational best as 50,000 people leaned into every word. He lifted the hearts of those young men and women heading out into our troubled world, but I cringed when he said, “Contrary to what we hear sometimes from both the left as well as the right, the system isn’t as rigged as you think…”
Wrong, Mr. President, just plain wrong. The people are way ahead of you on this. In a recent poll, 71% of Americans across lines of ethnicity, class, age, and gender said they believe the U.S. economy is rigged. People reported that they are working harder for financial security. One quarter of the respondents had not taken a vacation in more than five years. Seventy-one percent said that they are afraid of unexpected medical bills; 53% feared not being able to make a mortgage payment; and, among renters, 60% worried that they might not make the monthly rent.
Millions of Americans, in other words, are living on the edge. Yet the country has not confronted the question of how we will continue to prosper without a workforce that can pay for its goods and services….
The religion of inequality — of money and power — has failed us; its gods are false gods. There is something more essential — more profound — in the American experience than the hyena’s appetite. Once we recognize and nurture this, once we honor it, we can reboot democracy and get on with the work of liberating the country we carry in our hearts.
Read his powerful essay, “We, the Plutocrats vs. We, the People,” here.
Selling the free market
A “Grassroots Leadership Academy” bankrolled by the Koch brothers seeks to spread the free-market gospel:
One of the sessions, called the “Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” teaches attendees to argue that “a turn away from fossil fuel use would ultimately be disastrous to humanity — especially the poorest of the poor.”
Read more here.
Wasted: The high cost of laissez-screw finance
What has the flawed financial system cost the U.S. economy? Here’s your receipt:
Read the accounting by Econ4’s Jerry Epstein together with Juan Montecino here. Excerpt follows:
A healthy financial system is one that channels finance to productive investment, helps families save for and finance big expenses such as higher education and retirement, provides products such as insurance to help reduce risk, creates sufficient amounts of useful liquidity, runs an efficient payments mechanism, and generates financial innovations to do all these useful things more cheaply and effectively. All of these functions are crucial to a stable and productive market economy. But after decades of deregulation, the current U.S. financial system has evolved into a highly speculative system that has failed rather spectacularly at performing these critical tasks.
What has this flawed financial system cost the U.S. economy? How much have American families, taxpayers, and businesses been “overcharged” as a result of these questionable financial activities? In this report, we estimate these costs by analyzing three components: (1) rents, or excess profits; (2) misallocation costs, or the price of diverting resources away from non-financial activities; and (3) crisis costs, meaning the cost of the 2008 financial crisis.
Inflation: whose bogeyman?
Why has fighting inflation so often trumped other economic objectives? Econ4’s Jerry Epstein breaks it down:
Source: The Real News Network.
Read an interview with Jerry Epstein on inflation here.
Read second thoughts at the IMF here.
Labor markets: why “flexibility” is not all it’s cracked up to be
For years lamestream economics has touted “labor market flexibility” – a euphemism for making it easier for employers to dismiss workers – as the best recipe for job creation. Guess what? It turns out that countries whose policies make labor markets more supportive for workers – including better wages, better benefits and better job security – are doing better at job creation. The evidence prompts a New York Times reporter to ask:
What if the very thing that is often viewed as one of the United States’ sources of dynamism — flexible labor markets — is the driving force behind the economy’s greatest weakness: millions of people who are neither working nor looking for a job?
Read more here.
The Unequal States of America
A new interactive website from the Economic Policy Institute compares the one percent and everyone else in the U.S. – by state and by county:
Check out the numbers for your state here.
