The Daily Kos has the article The nineteen new Republican House committee chairmen are all white males.  The closing remark to the  article is:

Remember all the discussions about the Republican Party learning valuable lessons about the need to reach out and broaden their appeal to women and minorities? It doesn’t look like they are getting off to a very good start.

Here is the picture of the committee chairmen.

The Daily SHow with Jon Stewart has this two part interview with Warren Buffet and Carol Loomis about what she collected over 40 years’ worth of Warren Buffett’s stray thoughts for her book, “Tap Dancing to Work.”

The interview is kind of silly, and Stewart walks all over the important points that Buffet tries to make, but it’s probably worth something to capture this on my blog for future reference.

By the way, I don’t revere everything that Buffet has to say. He recently recommended Jamie Dimon for Secretary of the Treasury which is a a perfectly insane idea. The last thing we need is another Secretary of the Treasury blinded by the myths of Wall Street.

The article, Sorry, Warren Buffett, Jamie Dimon probably wouldn’t make a great Treasury Secretary, gets at why I think Warren Buffet is crazy on this particular thought of his. The article describes what the job of Secretary of the Treasury is and why types like Dimon and Geithner are so wrong for the job.

I am not sure I totally agree with the author’s assessment of some previous Secretaries of the Treasury, but it does give to a hint at where else we might find decent Secretaries of the Treaury outside of Wall Street.

Some quite good Treasury secretaries haven’t had particularly deep knowledge of finance or economics, but made up for it with skill navigating the halls of power. Think Lloyd Bentsen under Clinton (a former senator), James Baker under Reagan (previously a lawyer and White House chief of staff), and John Connally under Nixon (a governor of Texas).

The Daily Ticker has the story and interview Taxing Wealth Is the Answer for Boosting Long-Term Growth: Dan Altman.

Economist Daniel Altman is proposing something completely different on the tax front — a system that taxes wealth rather than revenue. It’s not intended to raise more revenues but rather to reduce inequality which, he says, threatens growth.

“Wealth inequality is making the pie smaller for all of us,” Altman tells The Daily Ticker. It limits opportunities, which reduces productivity, and ultimately lowers “living standards for all of us in the long term.”

Altman, an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of four books, says wealth inequality in the U.S. has been rising steadily for the past 20 years.

“It’s at a crazy high level that you only see in very poor countries, and it’s starting to threaten growth,” he says.

I have two previous blog posts in July 2011 about the idea of a wealth tax We Really Need a Wealth Tax and Wealth and Tax Distribution.

The first link just above is a better explanation for why we need a wealth tax than the one provided by Dan Altman in the interview in this post.

The last link above really shows the difference between the distribution of taxes versus the distribution of wealth.

I should also mention my post Time For A Wealth Tax? of August 2010.