Rethinking the Economy

OK, so I’m really not 21 years old anymore: I pushed my hands too hard, and now I need to give them a serious break. I’ll be back in about two weeks.

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Here’s the latest attempt to sum up my framework:
Question:
If our economy isn’t “natural” and wasn’t inevitable, then what? What is the alternative that would actually work?
Answer:
We have more power to create a just economy than we think we do – but only if we embrace the limits of our power.
OR
We have more power than [...]

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At the end of 2011, the Congressional Research Service put out a report on whether the gap between the rich and everyone else was shrinking or growing. The bottom line:
Inflation-adjusted average after-tax income grew by 25% between 1996 and 2006 (the last year for which individual income tax data is publicly available). This [...]

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In his speech about making poor kids work as janitors, Newt Gingrich also said,
“You’re going to see from me extraordinarily radical proposals to fundamentally change the culture of poverty in America and give people a chance to rise very rapidly.”
If Newt needs another inspiration for “extraordinarily radical proposals” to fix what’s broken in [...]

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One more thought about Solyndra, the solar energy startup that was the poster child of the Obama administration and just went belly up. A lot of folks saying this is why the government should stay out of the market — it’s not smart enough to pick winners and losers. Now, the US may have made [...]

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Eschaton nails it:
Floating around out there is the basic idea that the presidential bully pulpit isn’t very powerful. I can accept that no amount of presidential jibber jabber can force through policy (might be true, might not, but a reasonable argument). So, then, the entire point of presidential jibber jabber is simply the politics. [...]

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So the debt ceiling deal may be a really, really bad for a lot of folks, but it least it will reduce the long-term deficit, right? Don’t plan on it, says Larry Summers:
Objective observers would forecast larger U.S. budget deficits in the out-years than would have been predicted a few months ago. The [...]

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Big government is Socialism, government bureaucrats never do anything right, keep the government out of the market – all that goes out the window when we start talking about the price of gas at the pump. So when Democrats from Kucinich to Obama suggest we end some of the subsidies oil companies – who are [...]

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In the past few months, right wingers have been arguing that we shouldn’t tax rich folks more because they earned their money all by themselves. British writer Johann Hari has a nice, quick smackdown:
They said that [Topshop CEO and billionaire Philip] Green “earns all his money on his own,” so why [...]

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I finally got a chance today to take a look at the progressive plan for balancing the budget that EPI, Demos, and The Century Foundation put out on Monday. There are a lot of smart ideas in the proposal, and it shows that we can deal with long-term budget issues without beating the crap [...]

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