This article, Obama to Propose Tougher Tax Regime for Wealthy, comes from of all places, The Wall Street Journal. Of course, they mention that initial reports of this may have started with The New York Times.

Form The Wall Street Journal version we have the following paragrapsh:

The general goal would be to prevent people earning more than a million dollars to pay taxes at a lower effective rate than people who earn under $250,000. That’s often the case because investment income, or capital gains, is taxed at a lower rate than regular wages.

…

On taxes, he’ll call for lower, flatter tax rates, while also pushing for some tax increases. The White House has already proposed limits on the amount of tax deductions wealthy Americans can claim, and administration officials want tax rates to increase for families making more than $250,000 a year.

The first paragraph seems to be the kind of change that is sorely needed.

The only way for me to keep calm when I hear that Obama is calling for “lower, flatter tax rates”, as in the second quoted paragraph, is to also pay attention to the words “effective rate” in the first quoted paragraph. I could only agree that “lower, flatter tax rates” could be a good idea if this applies only to the “nominal rates”, which the wealthy do not pay, while the “effective rates” of what the wealthy actually paid were made steeper and higher.

The article Obama Co-Opts the Labor Movement is on the Truth Out web site.

I’ll quote two of the incendiary paragraphs in the hope that you will be enticed to read the article.

Before Obama’s so-called big job speech, the AFL-CIO was demanding – as part of their America Wants to Work Action Plan – a job program that would put to work the “… 25 million people in America who need full-time work …” This was to be done by investing “… at least $2.2 trillion in repairing our crumbling 20th century infrastructure and another $2 trillion building a modern clean energy infrastructure for the 21st century.” These numbers accurately reflect the needs of millions of working people while taking into consideration the gigantic shift in our economy necessary to help prevent future environmental disasters.
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Without substantially raising taxes on the rich – not simply eliminating the Bush tax cuts – enough jobs cannot be created for all who need them. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid cannot be salvaged either, without raising taxes on the rich, not to mention dealing with the federal, state and local budget deficits. Massive demonstrations must be organized to demand these actions; pleading with Democrats has failed miserably and consequently has weakened the labor movement at a time when there is no time to waste. The only way to bypass the “bi-partisan bickering” in Washington, DC, is to hit the streets with solid demands; politicians will either follow suit or be trampled on.

The article Five Biggest Right-Wing Lies about Solyndra is on the Nation Of Change web site. You’ll have to read the article to see the justification for calling the following items big lies:

5. The biggest investor in Solyndra was an Obama donor.
4. Green energy is a bad investment.
3. The government lost money “picking winners and losers.”
2. The Solyndra loan was rushed or pushed.
1. Something bad happened.

Here are the beginning and ending paragraphs of Matt Taibbi’s story, The $2 Billion UBS Incident: ‘Rogue Trader’ My Ass.

The news that a “rogue trader” (I hate that term – more on that in a moment) has soaked the Swiss banking giant UBS for $2 billion has rocked the international financial community and threatened to drive a stake through any chance Europe had of averting economic disaster. There is much hand-wringing in the financial press today as the UBS incident has reminded the whole world that all of the banks were almost certainly lying their asses off over the last three years, when they all pledged to pull back from risky prop trading.
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Sooner or later, this is going to blow up in our faces, and it won’t be one lower-level guy with a $2 billion loss we’ll be swallowing. It’ll be the CEO of another rogue firm like Lehman Brothers, and it’ll cost us trillions, not billions.

I have read a few headlines on the “rogue trader” story, and figured that it was a story I could safely ignore. Now this wake-up call of a story is giving me second thoughts.

Some of the reader comments on the story are scarier than the story itself.  Here is the comment from a poster named Matt Dubuque:

Matt, I USED TO BE A MARKET MAKER IN DERIVATIVES>>> Please contact me at onehundredtrees@gmail.com.

THE REAL SCANDAL behind this story is “synthetic ETFS” which are going to be the next big thing to blow up on our faces after the “synthetic CDOs” blew up.

Tens of millions of Americans have invested in exchange traded funds (ETFs) WHICH THEY THINK represent purchase of baskets of securities to track a given economic trend such as the price of gold or technology stocks.

That USED TO BE THE CASE.

But now with “synthetic” ETFs, traders like this fellow are NOT investing in gold futures or tech indices. FAR FROM IT.

WHAT THEY are doing is investing in “proxy” indicators for those indicators in the form of NAKED credit default swaps (oh no, not AGAIN), whose CORRELATION to the underlying asset is CHOCK FULL of stupid assumptions.

CDOs based on subprime mortgages were clearly harmful to the financial system; what made that whole experience CATASTROPHIC was when “synthetic” CDOs exploded on to the scene and into the value of our mortgages.

Same thing with synthetic ETFs, which is what this guy was trading in.

This is just the first tiny explosion.

For some corroboration of what Matt Taibbi and Matt Dubuque wrote, I found the UK Guardian story UBS, the big bank that can’t stay out of trouble, shakes the City again.

It was the investment bank that plunged UBS into multibillion-pound losses during the credit crunch because of its exposure to toxic US sub-prime mortgages and related derivatives. Today, the same unit is at the centre of an inquiry on opaque exchange traded funds (ETFs). These complex financial products allow speculators to bet on price rises or falls in a vast range of indices, currencies and commodities, from the FTSE 100 to gold and even “leveraged live cattle”, without having to buy shares or commodities directly themselves.

…
Commentators said it was remarkable that the scandal had been uncovered in the same week as the publication of the Vickers report on UK banking reform, which proposes that banks’ high street operations should be ringfenced from riskier “casino” investment banking. “It could have been written with UBS in mind,” says one analyst.

If I were a science fiction writer, I would write a story about a future world where almost all manufacturing and service work were automated.  I would imagine a world in which the little amount of human labor to make civilization run would be widely shared and the rewards for that work were also widely shared.  There would be so little difference between work and retirement that there would not be any issue of having enough workers to support the people who were retired.

If you can just imagine the possibility of such a world, then you might also imagine that one of the widely touted issues for Social Security funding would naturally disappear.  People talk about the diminishing number of the employed compared to the rising number of the retired.  They cannot imagine how so few workers will be able to fund the benefits of so many retirees. You can see from the above science fiction story that this falling ratio need not be a problem at all.

Wouldn’t it be great if the people were to elect politicians who could try to figure out how to work toward such a future instead of one in which the impoverished workers were heavily burdened to support the impoverished retirees while the wealthy few claimed all the benefits of increased productivity?

How about we start a national or international conversation about this future?

What prompted me to write this post was the thinking behind a comment I wrote on another article.  The reply to my post furthers the concept a little bit.

A hint as to how this utopian situation could play out is in the October 08, 2011 post – Norway: Lighting up Europe. One way to distribute the fruits of such an automated production system would be for the government to make certain essential services free to the citizens of the society. The greater the excess of wealth, the more services that the government could provide for free. (If I am not being clear, the government would pay for the services to be free to the recipients.)