Who’s afraid of the T-word?
Jeffrey Sachs writes that investing in our future will require new tax revenues, along with reined-in war spending and real health care reform:
Much as conservatives hate to admit it, the landslide election of Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York City may prefigure the start of a new swing of the national political pendulum as well. He won a resounding victory, in part by calling for a small rise in taxes to fund preschool education, a major reform that would help relieve the disadvantages faced by poorer children. The recent meeting of mayors at the White House may give a hint of possible local pressures for increased public investments and public services. We’ve been on a thirty-year course of diminished public investments in our future. The dismal results are plain to see.
Read his piece here.
Big farm tribute
James Stewart writes in The Times about the latest economic travesty to come out of the U.S. House of Representatives:
It’s hard to imagine a more widely reviled piece of legislation than the nearly $1 trillion farm bill. Its widely ridiculed handouts to wealthy farmers and perverse incentives have long united liberals concerned about the environment, conservatives upset about the deficit and market-distorting subsidies, and just about everyone concerned about basic fairness.
Just about everyone, that is, except the powerful farm lobby and its allies in Congress, which every five years or so since the Depression has managed to fight off any meaningful reforms and actually increase farm subsidies.
And now they’re doing it again…. many of the same legislators up in arms about government spending and welfare abuse nonetheless voted for an increase in federal subsidies to wealthy farm interests.
Read more here.
Austerity’s emperors have no clothes
Stephen Colbert skewers the Harvard economists whose flawed research underpins austerity politics:
Check out Colbert’s interview with UMass-Amherst economics graduate student Thomas Herndon, who showed that austerity’s emperors have no clothes:
Opportunity cost
Quiz 4 the day: Who said this?
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
Answer: President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953.
Bonus question: What was his political party?
Quoted in Jill Lepore’s short history of the military-industrial complex in this week’s New Yorker. Read it here.
What a deal
The fiscal cliff deal was a “crony capitalist blowout,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. Bill Moyers explains why:
Source: http://billmoyers.com/segment/bill-moyers-essay-the-crony-capitalist-blowout/.
People’s Guide to the Federal Budget
New from the National Priorities Project:
The only thing stronger than money in politics is an informed electorate.
Find the report here.
