This is not an either/or proposition and the assumption you are making is somehow Chinese products or Japanese ones are superior in quality. As we know from drywall from China to inferior steel to all sorts of problems, that measn nothing for quality.
You also assume it's cheaper and that also is simply not correct.
The political corruption is and what's going on is we have domestic lobbying groups loaded with nationals from India and China lobbying for U.S. jobs and dollars and contracts.
So, all that has happened is political corruption went global.
This does nothing for jobs.
BTW: Folks, spell checker is your friend and Firefox browser has it built right in.
Some of the comments are so bad with spelling one seriously doubts English could possibly be their first language.
and if local and state gov't awarded contracts to "us" firms (which may not have anymore local workers then chinese firms, and which are probably buying as much offshore as the chinese firms) at a higher price,you have in effect
taxpayers subsidizing wealthy US owners
does that make sense ?
maybe it has to do with technology that just isn't available anymore in the us
many years ago, the state gov't in NY, as is typical oflocal gov'ts everywhere, poured huge sums into what was to become the Jacob K Javits Convention center (you may recall that JKJ's last official act was to run as a 3rd party candidate, splittin the vote and allowing the loathsome alfonse d'amato to get elected over liz holtzman)
anyway, as is the wont of local gov'ts they went for a technically ambitious, $$ building, that was sort of a giant tinkertoy - there were these huge metal hubs, and giant metal beams fit into the hubs
ordered some hubs from american vendor, hubs no good,cracked, had to go to japan....
anyway, if local gov't did award contracts to us firms, at a higher price, then can you imagine the howls of outrage from the liberal blogospsher ? cozy pols give away tax dollars to connected biz guys......
I contacted BLS and they don't keep track of whether the job is part- or full-time. I find it rather startling that while they call about the job, they don't ask the type of job. But when you consider the underemployed who want full-time work and the marginal workers, who likely want full-time work, the JOLTS would be closer to 8 to 1 than 4.3 to one. After all, the part-timers are wanting full-time work.
The mortgage lending poorly structured and approved from iregullar manner, then mortgage loan modification helps was denied to collect insurance so that guaranteed all these mortgages backed by treasure department. This is fraud to the nation and in jail should be all the responsibles for this trap long time ago.
I was one of this persons who lost their houses leaving all my dreams and of my family behind for a selfish, miserable and usurious reason.
Krugman really sums up the situation on the problems in Europe, they are glorified shorts, bank runs by large investors. An impeccable disaster.
That's the thing about all of this, global economic malaise is being created by these large institutional investors, such as much as the financial crisis could have been prevented.
This is also what happens when philosophy trumps science.
I fall in line with all that is described in this article. I was screwed by countrywide, and BOA. I got a divorce a year after I bought my house with countrywide, and because my ex was "paying the note" it went into foreclosure. They then did a "modification" tacking well over 13k onto my principal when I was trying to save the home. They would not tell me what the 13k was for, even after I called several times asking for an itemized breakdown. They said that I couldn't have that information. When I said isn't that illegal? they said maybe, but they were not able to get me that information. Then after a few years of on-time payments i became unemployed for a month and a half. I got a job, and paid them consistently for two years, but was a month and a half behind for two years. In that time I had applied for a mortgage modification. I applied in September of 2009, Sent multiple copies of documents that they kept saying were not on file, even though I would receive confirmations that they received the paperwork. It took them over a year of paperwork going back and forth for them to deny my modification for lack of paperwork! The second they denied my modification they put me in foreclosure for being a month and a half behind, even though they could see that I was making consistent monthly payments. I then had to borrow money to reinstate my loan, and appealed the denial for modification, which they approved because they saw that I had all of the paperwork turned in correctly. They finally approved my modification, and put me in a "trial payment plan." In this trial payment plan they have already mis-entered my payment information, and have had to re-do a payment causing them to double charge me in one month, overdrawing my checking account.
Another thing- I found out by sweet-talking one of the customer service agents, that part of the 13k that they tacked-on to my principal for the initial modification, they were charging me $700+ for them to come out and mow my lawn over a period of 3 months when the property was not owner occupied. While the property was not owner occupied, my ex was mowing the lawn. This customer service agent was going to send me an itemized breakdown of the 13k, but I have not received it yet. He has "sent" it twice.
How can a tax cut (or increase) be permanent? The idiiots who rule us, take us to war, set our tax rates, and debase our currency are not permanent, nor are their policies. Let these "what's mine is mine and what's yours is your tough luck" fools remember that the interstate highway system was built with tax money, and the reason you don't put granny out to die from exposure or get eaten by bears is because we have a social safety net (full of holes thanks to tea bag "thinkers.") I'll pay my taxes, even to the thieves in Washington (and Texas). If only GE and the ultra-rich would do the same.
Romney is notorious to want unlimited guest worker Visas, never met a labor arbitrage he didn't like. Not to say that Obama hasn't been busy doing the exact same thing.
Animist Drive-by is a jabberwocky portmanteau genius! All I can say is that we have no choice but to overcome this snavenish annivadversity that confronts us here in the matrixhiveborg!
I find some hope in my impression that everyday conversation ... also the movies and probably a lot of stuff on pay-teevee and the growing internet download ... whatever has to make money directly from viewers ... somehow reflect a much deeper understanding of real-world USA than mediamavenly truthkillers of corprotaganda like to acknowledge. Realty may be ignored on the news side, but cartoon shows can't do without it.
"It is a wise father that knows his own child ... truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but at the length truth will out." -- Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene II
As this date approached, I thought I'd be feeling...I don't know what. But something bigger than I do. It dawned on me as I sat down to write a letter to a friend in the Midwest who was in Lower Manhattan on 11 Sept 01. In doing so I realized that my main sense was, what made this death of 3,000 people more dramatic than any other? And I had to conclude that it was because people reacted exactly as al-Qaida expected them to: something on TV, the images, and most of all the 24/7 coverage, repetition compulsion, and mythic narrative creation, would capture their minds and cause fear, paralysis, and infighting.
I think of the thousands of people in my waterfront area who died of asbestos and industrial accidents. They haven't even been counted. Nobody cares. Yet they all left families and friends and big holes in our lives and psyches.
It was that use of corporate mass media propagandizing against our own people by al-Qaida that concerns me the most. And what concerned me most today, and what I thought about while caring for various food-growing parcels during a heat wave was this:
Is it possible to wean people from their dependency on mediated information produced by anonymous corporations, whose people don't admit (or often even recognize) what their viewpoints/skews are?
I spent six years in grad school at a highfalutin' communications research and policy department, learning how to turn people into demographics, market segments, and information campaign targets for profit. So I'm a bit more cynical, and concerned, about stuff like this than a lot of people I meet, mostly because I know just how shaped, massaged, planned, and, yes, conspired mass media content is. Sometimes that's done passively, through a kind of profit-seeking inertia rather than active intent to commit mass mind engineering. But it has effects nonetheless. My schooling let me see how that works; I'm a minority in having had that schooling, and a further minority in having dissented from what I was taught I should do with that schooling.
It interests me how liberals in particular are so up in yo grill about obese children and obese adults. They don't seem to recognize that they, just like conservatives, have been on a steady diet of hyper-dense-energy junk content for the brain for a good 50 years now. And the highly portable new communications technologies mean that there is never a time when so many people are away from this matrixhiveborg of corporate content.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s stand on trade issues, if he truly means what he says and goes the full distance with his published proposals, offers America the best shot at a real and sustained economic recovery that any major officeholder or candidate has yet offered.
His proposals aren’t perfect, they aren’t consistent, and I have no interest in endorsing the entirety of his economic philosophy, let alone his candidacy. But they are still an order of magnitude more serious about fixing America’s catastrophic trade mess than what has been proposed elsewhere.
Like it or not, he’s way ahead of Obama on this stuff.
I've been calling myself a protectionist, and I'll continue to support 'protectionism', although what I am doing is simply opposing anti-Americanism. (Especially when such anti-Americanism is by our own elected politicians.)
It really isn't protectionist to push, for example, for Congress to enact a 15% Across-the-Board Tariff (ABT).
Here's why.
'Mo' explains the point in a comment at article currently linked in EP's links to "Trade Reform," as follows:
Actually [you] cannot even call [yourself] a protectionist because these trade agreements allow other countries to retain barriers so pushing for [equalizing barriers] is not protectionist.
Whenever protectionists like myself demand that the U.S. government do something to stand up for America in global trade, we are shouted down with the stern admonition, “You’ll start a trade war.”
I wish.
The reality is that nobody in America is going to start a trade war, for the simple reason that we are already in one. Foreign governments understand, as ours does not, that international trade is an arena of national rivalry, and they play the game in their own national interests. Our government is hostage to an outdated 19th-century economic theory of global harmony, and on this basis conducts our trade relations with blissful naiveté.
Am I saying that our policy is determined by a theory? No. It’s quite obviously determined by the campaign contributions of the multinational (aka “who cares about America?”) corporations who profit from it. But it is this theory that makes their demands respectable. All the money in the world couldn’t bribe Congress to pass a law requiring everyone to roller-skate to work; policy always requires some non-laughable justification.
Thanks for nothing, David Ricardo. You’ve made a fine mess. ....
At the end of the day, China cannot force us to do anything economically that we don’t choose to. ... [For example] we might simply restore the tax on the interest on foreign-held bonds that was repealed in 1984 thanks to Treasury Secretary Donald Regan.
Thus a certain amount of back-and-forth token retaliation (and loud squealing) is indeed likely if America starts defending its interests in trade as diligently as our trading partners have been defending theirs, but that’s it. The rest of the world engages in these struggles all the time without doing much harm; it will be no different if we join the party.
Until we do, America’s trade pacifism will simply continue to invite foreign economic aggression.
Excellent article by Ian Fletcher! And thank you to EP for linking to Trade Reform!
Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco.
("Ian's writings do not necessarily represent the views of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.")
Barry Ritholtz brought this to our attention, and it's just a scream, shows how debt is being passed and contagion is increasing, but done with lego illustrations.
I have a hard time "celebrating" just one very ugly tragic day. I don't understand why media is running the same experience, over and over again. It was pretty damn horrific, with myself included, mesmerized by watching those towers collapse, shown over and over and over. I remember financial insanity behaviors, like pumping savings into airline stocks, as a patriotic act by some. But I don't feel like reliving it or celebrating it.
Others may feel differently, but that's why there isn't much about the 10th anniversary published on this site.
Truly David Cay Johnston is a must read. He digs around in databases and the IRS and finds the most amazing stuff and that's because almost no one reads the tax code, at least the corporate tax code. I highly recommend his books, he points out some amazing loopholes. He also turned me onto how Washington D.C. as well as Wall Street, the more something is a rip off, the more complex and obfuscated it will be.
It's truly amazing in the face of overwhelming statistics, correlations and data people like you deny the facts. No, they do not create jobs and either will "rolling back Obamacare", another misinformed, lack of knowledge comment.
If you have any clue, health care costs, before "Obama care", which is what you want to return to and worse, are a significant detriment to businesses, mentioned often.
That's before "Obamacare".
Either you have no ability to add two numbers together or you are a corporate lobbyists troll..
but the stupidity of people not being able to read a single graph or add even two numbers together, such as this comment reflects, is assuredly an element in America's destruction.
No, opting out should not be an option! Ask any actuary!
The only real option we here in the USA have is to throw all corrupt politicians out of the Congress, elect a third-party POTUS (or nominate Buddy Roemer in the GOP and/or Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats), enact a Judicial Reform Act to get rid of the current activist SCOTUS and also enact an Electro-magnetic Spectrum Allocation and Interstate Fiber Optic Reorganization Act to destroy the monopolistic corporate media. Also, American Monetary Reform Act, maybe along with a Gold Confiscation Act, if necessary (if too many of "them that have it" insist on making a nuisance of themselves). Then ... Social Security wouldn't even be discussed as a problem, just as part of a legacy of on-going democratic solutions.
Putting it another way: there are two options for the USA --
CONTINUING LEVERAGED TAKE-OVER OF THE USA BY INTERNATIONALIST (including FOREIGN-BASED) INTERESTS
or
REPLACE CURRENT MANAGEMENT with NEW MANAGEMENT FROM OUTSIDE THE USUAL Dempublicrat APPARATCHIKS
"Won't ever happen, but it's nice to dream." -- 'Seed'
There are ways that capital gains are combined with stock options to amount to a loophole for profiteering tax-evading CEOs and others. That's one level of the discussion of capital gains -- the way it combines with other loopholes in the great ever-evolving loophole system of the IRC, part of the global system for shifting wealth 'upwards' from working families to the super-rich.
I have proposed that when there are gains made in trading derivatives (paper based on paper, even most short plays and futures), then that should be taxed like gambling -- you can't claim losses greater than your gains for the year, so you can't carry losses forward from last year to offset gains this year. In other words, not all winnings (or losses) are eligible for capital gains loopholes. If it looks like gambling and it talks like gambling, it probably IS gambling.
Isn't the whole derivatives thing based on the questionable practice of buying with cash you don't have and selling stuff (or even complex intertwined paperwork) that you don't own ... or even nobody, including yourself, knows what it is you own or don't own? It's like fractional reserves banking ... of course there are cycles of boom and bust! But is that the best way for people to live? In today's world of corporate globalization, is there any value placed on social stability? Should there be any penalty on profiteering that contributes to the tendency toward social instability?
We should remember that VC is a very important component of any free enterprise economy. But that doesn't exclude, for example, a rule that some portion of capital gains, if exceeding some limit, must be realistically considered as something like a salary that you pay yourself and therefore subject to FICA. After all, productive investors earn their wages.
What needs to be understood is that we are always talking about a taxation system, and discussion becomes meaningless when particular components are conceptually isolated to be evaluated as "redistribution" (fundamentally evil according to the rationalizations of too-smart-by-half pseudo-libertarians) or as "the way to pay for Medicare" (justification presumably for any tax of any kind).
The need is to think in terms of the entire system, letting the system evolve, fundamentally guided by democratic principles. That's macroeconomics and that's why EP is onto something -- the popularization of systems thinking. Unfortunately, systems-thinking isn't something taught in school in the USA, even in most USA universities -- as close as we get to it is courses in investment, where there is an abstraction to an individual bottom-line that obscures understanding of the systems dynamics, that is, the system tends to be seen as reducing to a minimax problem where there's "the computer" figuring something out and no one has any understanding of it. As Robert Oak points out, computerized HFT is like that. Like when the entire system melts down despite all the computerized systems that are brilliantly assuring investors that everything is safe and insured.
All the issues are complicated by the reality of global capital sloshing around the world without 'barriers' to 'trade' (= barriers to labor arbitrage and related social instability). Brilliant mathematicians and superfast supercomputers do not equate to the necessary human understanding of what the economic system of global capital means in human terms. Similarly, oversimplifications of those most overpaid of all the politicians -- radio talk-show hosts and other 'talking heads' -- do not promote understanding of what the economic system of global capital means in human terms.
To take this beyond the dreaming, to make a reality at least for a tax plank in the platform of a political party ... something potentially very attractive to American working people ... how about this? Reform the income tax such that it no longer discriminates against earned income! I mean, there's always this idea that we have to "encourage investors," and that results -- absent egalitarian principles of taxation -- in discouraging work. And isn't that a big part of the problem? Americans no longer respect work, no longer respect workers. It's all about making smart moves with your money. It's all about when you get to the "financial freedom" point where your work is irrelevant, just a hobby for a rich person.
This idea of taxing all income equally isn't so politically far-fetched as might be thought. It was proposed by Jerry Brown in his presidential campaign in 1992 (campaigning for Democratic nomination, which unfortunately went to the DLC's golden boy, Bill Clinton). BTW: I favor elimination of estate taxes and gift taxes, to be replaced by taxing the recipients on the income received just like wage earners. However, I also support income averaging as an essential part of the reform.
Fundamentally, IMO, there's nothing wrong with self-employment. Lincoln envisioned a nation that was primarily made up of a self-employed middle class. And there's nothing wrong with people whose work is management of investments. What's wrong is demeaning of work itself, replacing the ideal of productivity with the ideal of scamming and profiteering from the productivity of others. What's wrong is the idea that concentration of capital in the hands of a few is, in and of itself, somehow the key to productivity -- the one-and-only "job creation" machine. That fallacy is at the heart of the neo-conservative/neo-liberal delusional system -- the fallacy that defines 'good', per Ludwig von Mises, as the accumulation of capital in private hands regardless of how extreme the concentration of capital may be.
Johnston doesn't even reach, in this particular blog, the egregious loopholes for the uber-rich that he has pointed out elsewhere. This is just about the effects of what corporate media presents as a clever system (of, by and for the shrewd) supposedly designed to encourage certain 'generally accepted] social goals through various preferences.
But the cost of this 'social engineering' through tax policy?
A numerical analysis of who benefits and who doesn't?
And the simplified progressive tax system that could replace the current preference system rigged in favor of the rich against most working families?
Oh no! .... corporate media, the RNC, the DNC, most likely your friendly local representative in the U.S. House, the so-called 'tax revolt' of the so-called 'Tea Party', Grover Norquist's so-called 'Americans for Tax Reform', the so-called 'Americans for Fair Taxation', the various 'highly respected' think-tanks .... wouldn't want to discuss facts showing that --
We could, instead, have a country where 98% of working people pay no income tax at all, yet with a tax system not rigged in favor of the rich and international corporate interests!
If you want real information, go to Citizens for Tax Justice --
This is not an either/or proposition and the assumption you are making is somehow Chinese products or Japanese ones are superior in quality. As we know from drywall from China to inferior steel to all sorts of problems, that measn nothing for quality.
You also assume it's cheaper and that also is simply not correct.
The political corruption is and what's going on is we have domestic lobbying groups loaded with nationals from India and China lobbying for U.S. jobs and dollars and contracts.
So, all that has happened is political corruption went global.
This does nothing for jobs.
BTW: Folks, spell checker is your friend and Firefox browser has it built right in.
Some of the comments are so bad with spelling one seriously doubts English could possibly be their first language.
and if local and state gov't awarded contracts to "us" firms (which may not have anymore local workers then chinese firms, and which are probably buying as much offshore as the chinese firms) at a higher price,you have in effect
taxpayers subsidizing wealthy US owners
does that make sense ?
maybe it has to do with technology that just isn't available anymore in the us
many years ago, the state gov't in NY, as is typical oflocal gov'ts everywhere, poured huge sums into what was to become the Jacob K Javits Convention center (you may recall that JKJ's last official act was to run as a 3rd party candidate, splittin the vote and allowing the loathsome alfonse d'amato to get elected over liz holtzman)
anyway, as is the wont of local gov'ts they went for a technically ambitious, $$ building, that was sort of a giant tinkertoy - there were these huge metal hubs, and giant metal beams fit into the hubs
ordered some hubs from american vendor, hubs no good,cracked, had to go to japan....
anyway, if local gov't did award contracts to us firms, at a higher price, then can you imagine the howls of outrage from the liberal blogospsher ? cozy pols give away tax dollars to connected biz guys......
I contacted BLS and they don't keep track of whether the job is part- or full-time. I find it rather startling that while they call about the job, they don't ask the type of job. But when you consider the underemployed who want full-time work and the marginal workers, who likely want full-time work, the JOLTS would be closer to 8 to 1 than 4.3 to one. After all, the part-timers are wanting full-time work.
The mortgage lending poorly structured and approved from iregullar manner, then mortgage loan modification helps was denied to collect insurance so that guaranteed all these mortgages backed by treasure department. This is fraud to the nation and in jail should be all the responsibles for this trap long time ago.
I was one of this persons who lost their houses leaving all my dreams and of my family behind for a selfish, miserable and usurious reason.
Krugman really sums up the situation on the problems in Europe, they are glorified shorts, bank runs by large investors. An impeccable disaster.
That's the thing about all of this, global economic malaise is being created by these large institutional investors, such as much as the financial crisis could have been prevented.
This is also what happens when philosophy trumps science.
I fall in line with all that is described in this article. I was screwed by countrywide, and BOA. I got a divorce a year after I bought my house with countrywide, and because my ex was "paying the note" it went into foreclosure. They then did a "modification" tacking well over 13k onto my principal when I was trying to save the home. They would not tell me what the 13k was for, even after I called several times asking for an itemized breakdown. They said that I couldn't have that information. When I said isn't that illegal? they said maybe, but they were not able to get me that information. Then after a few years of on-time payments i became unemployed for a month and a half. I got a job, and paid them consistently for two years, but was a month and a half behind for two years. In that time I had applied for a mortgage modification. I applied in September of 2009, Sent multiple copies of documents that they kept saying were not on file, even though I would receive confirmations that they received the paperwork. It took them over a year of paperwork going back and forth for them to deny my modification for lack of paperwork! The second they denied my modification they put me in foreclosure for being a month and a half behind, even though they could see that I was making consistent monthly payments. I then had to borrow money to reinstate my loan, and appealed the denial for modification, which they approved because they saw that I had all of the paperwork turned in correctly. They finally approved my modification, and put me in a "trial payment plan." In this trial payment plan they have already mis-entered my payment information, and have had to re-do a payment causing them to double charge me in one month, overdrawing my checking account.
Another thing- I found out by sweet-talking one of the customer service agents, that part of the 13k that they tacked-on to my principal for the initial modification, they were charging me $700+ for them to come out and mow my lawn over a period of 3 months when the property was not owner occupied. While the property was not owner occupied, my ex was mowing the lawn. This customer service agent was going to send me an itemized breakdown of the 13k, but I have not received it yet. He has "sent" it twice.
How can a tax cut (or increase) be permanent? The idiiots who rule us, take us to war, set our tax rates, and debase our currency are not permanent, nor are their policies. Let these "what's mine is mine and what's yours is your tough luck" fools remember that the interstate highway system was built with tax money, and the reason you don't put granny out to die from exposure or get eaten by bears is because we have a social safety net (full of holes thanks to tea bag "thinkers.") I'll pay my taxes, even to the thieves in Washington (and Texas). If only GE and the ultra-rich would do the same.
Romney is notorious to want unlimited guest worker Visas, never met a labor arbitrage he didn't like. Not to say that Obama hasn't been busy doing the exact same thing.
Animist Drive-by is a jabberwocky portmanteau genius! All I can say is that we have no choice but to overcome this snavenish annivadversity that confronts us here in the matrixhiveborg!
I find some hope in my impression that everyday conversation ... also the movies and probably a lot of stuff on pay-teevee and the growing internet download ... whatever has to make money directly from viewers ... somehow reflect a much deeper understanding of real-world USA than mediamavenly truthkillers of corprotaganda like to acknowledge. Realty may be ignored on the news side, but cartoon shows can't do without it.
"It is a wise father that knows his own child ... truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but at the length truth will out." -- Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene II
As this date approached, I thought I'd be feeling...I don't know what. But something bigger than I do. It dawned on me as I sat down to write a letter to a friend in the Midwest who was in Lower Manhattan on 11 Sept 01. In doing so I realized that my main sense was, what made this death of 3,000 people more dramatic than any other? And I had to conclude that it was because people reacted exactly as al-Qaida expected them to: something on TV, the images, and most of all the 24/7 coverage, repetition compulsion, and mythic narrative creation, would capture their minds and cause fear, paralysis, and infighting.
I think of the thousands of people in my waterfront area who died of asbestos and industrial accidents. They haven't even been counted. Nobody cares. Yet they all left families and friends and big holes in our lives and psyches.
It was that use of corporate mass media propagandizing against our own people by al-Qaida that concerns me the most. And what concerned me most today, and what I thought about while caring for various food-growing parcels during a heat wave was this:
Is it possible to wean people from their dependency on mediated information produced by anonymous corporations, whose people don't admit (or often even recognize) what their viewpoints/skews are?
I spent six years in grad school at a highfalutin' communications research and policy department, learning how to turn people into demographics, market segments, and information campaign targets for profit. So I'm a bit more cynical, and concerned, about stuff like this than a lot of people I meet, mostly because I know just how shaped, massaged, planned, and, yes, conspired mass media content is. Sometimes that's done passively, through a kind of profit-seeking inertia rather than active intent to commit mass mind engineering. But it has effects nonetheless. My schooling let me see how that works; I'm a minority in having had that schooling, and a further minority in having dissented from what I was taught I should do with that schooling.
It interests me how liberals in particular are so up in yo grill about obese children and obese adults. They don't seem to recognize that they, just like conservatives, have been on a steady diet of hyper-dense-energy junk content for the brain for a good 50 years now. And the highly portable new communications technologies mean that there is never a time when so many people are away from this matrixhiveborg of corporate content.
See, Ian Fletcher's Is Romney for Real on Trade? (9 September 2011)
I've been calling myself a protectionist, and I'll continue to support 'protectionism', although what I am doing is simply opposing anti-Americanism. (Especially when such anti-Americanism is by our own elected politicians.)
It really isn't protectionist to push, for example, for Congress to enact a 15% Across-the-Board Tariff (ABT).
Here's why.
'Mo' explains the point in a comment at article currently linked in EP's links to "Trade Reform," as follows:
'Mo' is commenting at Avoid Trade War? We’re Already in One! (Ian Fletcher, www.TradeReform.org, 29 August 2011)
Ian Fletcher:
Excellent article by Ian Fletcher! And thank you to EP for linking to Trade Reform!
Fletcher is Senior Economist of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a nationwide grass-roots organization dedicated to fixing America’s trade policies and comprising representatives from business, agriculture, and labor. He was previously Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council, a Washington think tank founded in 1933 and before that, an economist in private practice serving mainly hedge funds and private equity firms. Educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, he lives in San Francisco.
("Ian's writings do not necessarily represent the views of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.")
Link to TradeReform's webpage for Fletcher
This is going to be a classic. FT Alphaville put up a parody on the European Central Bank press conference, here.
Paul Krugman is the h/t.
Oh, it's a thankless job!
Barry Ritholtz brought this to our attention, and it's just a scream, shows how debt is being passed and contagion is increasing, but done with lego illustrations.
I have a hard time "celebrating" just one very ugly tragic day. I don't understand why media is running the same experience, over and over again. It was pretty damn horrific, with myself included, mesmerized by watching those towers collapse, shown over and over and over. I remember financial insanity behaviors, like pumping savings into airline stocks, as a patriotic act by some. But I don't feel like reliving it or celebrating it.
Others may feel differently, but that's why there isn't much about the 10th anniversary published on this site.
Truly David Cay Johnston is a must read. He digs around in databases and the IRS and finds the most amazing stuff and that's because almost no one reads the tax code, at least the corporate tax code. I highly recommend his books, he points out some amazing loopholes. He also turned me onto how Washington D.C. as well as Wall Street, the more something is a rip off, the more complex and obfuscated it will be.
It's truly amazing in the face of overwhelming statistics, correlations and data people like you deny the facts. No, they do not create jobs and either will "rolling back Obamacare", another misinformed, lack of knowledge comment.
If you have any clue, health care costs, before "Obama care", which is what you want to return to and worse, are a significant detriment to businesses, mentioned often.
That's before "Obamacare".
Either you have no ability to add two numbers together or you are a corporate lobbyists troll..
but the stupidity of people not being able to read a single graph or add even two numbers together, such as this comment reflects, is assuredly an element in America's destruction.
"Opting out should be an option." -- Odin
No, opting out should not be an option! Ask any actuary!
The only real option we here in the USA have is to throw all corrupt politicians out of the Congress, elect a third-party POTUS (or nominate Buddy Roemer in the GOP and/or Dennis Kucinich for the Democrats), enact a Judicial Reform Act to get rid of the current activist SCOTUS and also enact an Electro-magnetic Spectrum Allocation and Interstate Fiber Optic Reorganization Act to destroy the monopolistic corporate media. Also, American Monetary Reform Act, maybe along with a Gold Confiscation Act, if necessary (if too many of "them that have it" insist on making a nuisance of themselves). Then ... Social Security wouldn't even be discussed as a problem, just as part of a legacy of on-going democratic solutions.
Putting it another way: there are two options for the USA --
CONTINUING LEVERAGED TAKE-OVER OF THE USA BY INTERNATIONALIST (including FOREIGN-BASED) INTERESTS
or
REPLACE CURRENT MANAGEMENT with NEW MANAGEMENT FROM OUTSIDE THE USUAL Dempublicrat APPARATCHIKS
Freedom - use it or lose it!
Economics 101 - Reform Party
Don't short Third Party stock
"Won't ever happen, but it's nice to dream." -- 'Seed'
There are ways that capital gains are combined with stock options to amount to a loophole for profiteering tax-evading CEOs and others. That's one level of the discussion of capital gains -- the way it combines with other loopholes in the great ever-evolving loophole system of the IRC, part of the global system for shifting wealth 'upwards' from working families to the super-rich.
I have proposed that when there are gains made in trading derivatives (paper based on paper, even most short plays and futures), then that should be taxed like gambling -- you can't claim losses greater than your gains for the year, so you can't carry losses forward from last year to offset gains this year. In other words, not all winnings (or losses) are eligible for capital gains loopholes. If it looks like gambling and it talks like gambling, it probably IS gambling.
Isn't the whole derivatives thing based on the questionable practice of buying with cash you don't have and selling stuff (or even complex intertwined paperwork) that you don't own ... or even nobody, including yourself, knows what it is you own or don't own? It's like fractional reserves banking ... of course there are cycles of boom and bust! But is that the best way for people to live? In today's world of corporate globalization, is there any value placed on social stability? Should there be any penalty on profiteering that contributes to the tendency toward social instability?
We should remember that VC is a very important component of any free enterprise economy. But that doesn't exclude, for example, a rule that some portion of capital gains, if exceeding some limit, must be realistically considered as something like a salary that you pay yourself and therefore subject to FICA. After all, productive investors earn their wages.
What needs to be understood is that we are always talking about a taxation system, and discussion becomes meaningless when particular components are conceptually isolated to be evaluated as "redistribution" (fundamentally evil according to the rationalizations of too-smart-by-half pseudo-libertarians) or as "the way to pay for Medicare" (justification presumably for any tax of any kind).
The need is to think in terms of the entire system, letting the system evolve, fundamentally guided by democratic principles. That's macroeconomics and that's why EP is onto something -- the popularization of systems thinking. Unfortunately, systems-thinking isn't something taught in school in the USA, even in most USA universities -- as close as we get to it is courses in investment, where there is an abstraction to an individual bottom-line that obscures understanding of the systems dynamics, that is, the system tends to be seen as reducing to a minimax problem where there's "the computer" figuring something out and no one has any understanding of it. As Robert Oak points out, computerized HFT is like that. Like when the entire system melts down despite all the computerized systems that are brilliantly assuring investors that everything is safe and insured.
All the issues are complicated by the reality of global capital sloshing around the world without 'barriers' to 'trade' (= barriers to labor arbitrage and related social instability). Brilliant mathematicians and superfast supercomputers do not equate to the necessary human understanding of what the economic system of global capital means in human terms. Similarly, oversimplifications of those most overpaid of all the politicians -- radio talk-show hosts and other 'talking heads' -- do not promote understanding of what the economic system of global capital means in human terms.
To take this beyond the dreaming, to make a reality at least for a tax plank in the platform of a political party ... something potentially very attractive to American working people ... how about this? Reform the income tax such that it no longer discriminates against earned income! I mean, there's always this idea that we have to "encourage investors," and that results -- absent egalitarian principles of taxation -- in discouraging work. And isn't that a big part of the problem? Americans no longer respect work, no longer respect workers. It's all about making smart moves with your money. It's all about when you get to the "financial freedom" point where your work is irrelevant, just a hobby for a rich person.
This idea of taxing all income equally isn't so politically far-fetched as might be thought. It was proposed by Jerry Brown in his presidential campaign in 1992 (campaigning for Democratic nomination, which unfortunately went to the DLC's golden boy, Bill Clinton). BTW: I favor elimination of estate taxes and gift taxes, to be replaced by taxing the recipients on the income received just like wage earners. However, I also support income averaging as an essential part of the reform.
Fundamentally, IMO, there's nothing wrong with self-employment. Lincoln envisioned a nation that was primarily made up of a self-employed middle class. And there's nothing wrong with people whose work is management of investments. What's wrong is demeaning of work itself, replacing the ideal of productivity with the ideal of scamming and profiteering from the productivity of others. What's wrong is the idea that concentration of capital in the hands of a few is, in and of itself, somehow the key to productivity -- the one-and-only "job creation" machine. That fallacy is at the heart of the neo-conservative/neo-liberal delusional system -- the fallacy that defines 'good', per Ludwig von Mises, as the accumulation of capital in private hands regardless of how extreme the concentration of capital may be.
Johnston doesn't even reach, in this particular blog, the egregious loopholes for the uber-rich that he has pointed out elsewhere. This is just about the effects of what corporate media presents as a clever system (of, by and for the shrewd) supposedly designed to encourage certain 'generally accepted] social goals through various preferences.
But the cost of this 'social engineering' through tax policy?
A numerical analysis of who benefits and who doesn't?
And the simplified progressive tax system that could replace the current preference system rigged in favor of the rich against most working families?
Oh no! .... corporate media, the RNC, the DNC, most likely your friendly local representative in the U.S. House, the so-called 'tax revolt' of the so-called 'Tea Party', Grover Norquist's so-called 'Americans for Tax Reform', the so-called 'Americans for Fair Taxation', the various 'highly respected' think-tanks .... wouldn't want to discuss facts showing that --
We could, instead, have a country where 98% of working people pay no income tax at all, yet with a tax system not rigged in favor of the rich and international corporate interests!
If you want real information, go to Citizens for Tax Justice --
http://www.ctj.org/
Also --
Fair, progressive tax reform would be good policy, good politics by John S. Irons and Robert Gordon (Center for American Progress)
People happier with progressive tax system (UPI.com, 10 September 2011)
THE PROGRESSIVE INCOME TAX: Theoretical Foundations by Robert H. Frank
Pages