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Category Archives: Economics

Person of the Year

Sunday, January 3, 2010

While at the Supermarket recently I saw, to my initial surprise, that Time Magazine has named Ben Bernanke person of the year. I had actually read what I thought were rumors that he might win this prestigious award, but I discounted that as being wildly absurd. I haven’t read the article, but upon reflection I […]

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The scam is built into the system

Sunday, December 27, 2009

My younger son is always good for at least one Christmas gift book that is from out of left field. This year it was First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, by Slavoj Zizek. To complete the baseball analogy, Zizek plays just slightly to the fair side of the foul line, leaving most of left field […]

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Good news for corporations, not so good for workers

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

From today’s Globe: In another sign that the economy might be turning around, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services has filled this year’s quota of 65,000 applications for H-1b guest worker visas, which allow companies to hire foreign workers for jobs they say they cannot fill with US-born applicants. Unlike previous years, it took nine […]

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The Europeans are ahead of us again

Sunday, December 13, 2009

It is somewhat heartening that our European friends, they of the socialistic health care systems and reasonably contented populaces, have begun moving toward something I’ve been advocating for years: taxing the income of certain non-productive elements of our society, i.e., the bonuses of the bankers who have been systematically destroying our society. Britain is imposing […]

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A mystery-unsolved, at least by me

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

According to this morning’s Day, McDonald’s sales are slumping. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is a good thing. I don’t expect to die happy, but I will die at least slightly contented if McDonald’s predeceases me. Still, there’s something about this story that mystifies me. Here is the reason McDonald’s is doing poorly: “I […]

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Taxes are for the little people

Friday, November 27, 2009

There are few things more glaringly unfair in this country than the fact that hedge fund managers get taxed at a rate less than half of what most of the rest of us pay. According to this morning’s Globe, (Tax break on profits again in jeopardy) there’s a move afoot in Congress to change the […]

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Rational decision makers

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Via Firedoglake, the right has apparently found an academic prepared to give intellectual respectability to its opposition to the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a George Mason University professor named Todd Zywicki: Zywicki and his fellow Randians think that the FCPA wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in the conditions that led to the great […]

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You just can’t please some people

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Al Gore is being criticized for investing in green technology by the very people who tell the rest of us that conservation will lead us to economic ruin.

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Dismal Science on a Dismal Sunday

Sunday, November 1, 2009

This morning, Gregory Mankiw, one of the economists who got us into this mess and a shill for conservative economic theories, pens a New York Times op-ed piece in which he laments the tax disincetives to work supposedly embedded in the Obama Health Plan. (We are supposed to ignore the fact that the Rube Goldberg […]

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Wall Street’s newest scam

Sunday, September 6, 2009

This morning’s Times headlines the newest Wall Street money grab: the securitization of life insurance settlements: The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to […]

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