Finally More than 500 arrested in Wall Street protest makes it to the lame stream media.
400 ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters arrested on Brooklyn Bridge shows how Raw Story covered this.
Protesters claimed that New York police officers had purposefully led them onto the bridge roadway so that they could arrest them en masse.
Robert Reich has written the post, The American Jobs Depression, And How to Get Out of It. After explaining why any economic stimulus to prime the economic pump won’t be lasting until we have some structural changes, he goes on to explain what those changes are.
Any long-term strategy for rescuing the American economy must therefore seek to reverse the widening gap in income and wealth. One place to start is tax reform. The earned income tax credit – a wage subsidy for lower-income workers – should be enlarged and expanded. Taxes on the middle class should be reduced – including social security payroll taxes (80% of Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes).
Taxes on the wealthy, on the other hand, should be increased. The president has proposed closing some tax loopholes that allow the super-rich to reduce their tax liability, and to end the tax cut on the rich put in place by George W Bush in 2001 (thereby increasing the top marginal tax rate to what it was under Bill Clinton – 39%).
But the nation should go much further, particularly in light of the large budget deficit projected several years from now. We need more tax brackets at the top, with higher marginal rates. The capital-gains tax (now at 15%) should be raised to match the income tax rate. And a wealth surtax of 2% should be applied to all wealth in excess of $7 million.
I left a comment on his post:
You are now catching up to where I was on August 26, 2010 (Time For A Wealth Tax?), when I blogged about the need for a wealth tax. On July of this year, I reblogged (We Really Need a Wealth Tax) after reading your book, Aftershock.
Other taxes we could consider in addition or as alternatives are taxes on unrealized capital gains. The IRS could just insist on a mark to market evaluation of your net worth and tax any increase on a yearly basis.
What about the zero taxes the wealthy pay on their government bond interest?
I am sure we can come up with enough ways to tax the wealthy that they might just accept a reasonable tax level to quiet down the restless natives.
You’ve heard this story a lot on this blog. Here is yet another attempt to explain this. Maybe this author and her graphics can make the point to the few who have not been convinced yet.
Watch full multipart Rich Getting Richer in Ontario
See the video of the debate at my later post, Warren shines in debate debut.
We plan to be at the debate on Tuesday night. See you there.
RichardH provided the link Democratic Senate candidates to debate Oct. 4 which describes the debate format.
For those unfamiliar with the location, below is a map:
RichardH tells me he called the UMass Lowell Police Department who recommended the Riverside Lot at the corner of Broadway St and Pawtucket St. I am having trouble remembering just where the hills are on Wilder St, so I think walking along Pawtucket St to Durgin Hall may be the best route. Certainly walking along the Merrimac River will be scenic. It’s been so long, I don’t know how the sidewalks are. The university has done a lot of building there since my days in Lowell.
Before RichardH’s call, I had noticed that there is parking in what is called the Wilder Lot. I don’t know if it will specifically be open for people attending the debate. When I drive 90 minutes to get there, I am assuming that this is where I will park. DYOD (better known as do your own due dilligance)
The interview is split up into a 30 minute video clip and a 12 minute concluding video clip.
An explosive new book that draws a searing portrait of the Obama administration’s failings, and early management of the economic crisis, has been met with sharp objections from officials within and outside of the White House. We speak with veteran journalist Ron Suskind, author of “Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President.” He writes that U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner ignored an order from President Obama to consider dissolving the debt-ridden banking giant Citigroup as part of a reconstruction of major banks in March 2009. Suskind argues that Citigroup was one of several incidents where President Obama’s authority was “systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.” In the book based on interviews with more than 200 people, including former and current members of the Obama administration, as well as the President himself, Suskind also says the White House is a hostile workplace for women.
In part two of our interview with veteran journalist Ron Suskind about his explosive new book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, Suskind discusses the challenges faced by President Obama and his evolution as a leader. “You see the President grappling…to try to get his arms around what is often an untenable situation,” says Suskind. “He has a team around him with long Washington experience and long histories with one another. The President, meanwhile, is ramping up at Mach speed on very difficult, and often very complex, national issues, economic issues, for which there is no recent precedent.” According to Suskind, Obama muses he has “policy wonk’s disease” and now aims to be more dynamic in telling the American people “who we are and where we’re going.”
It looks like I may have to slog through this book. Economist Brad DeLong seems to like the factual content of the book, but thinks Suskind has drawn the wrong conclusions. I am particularly focused on the view that Obama had that the high level of unemployment is caused by the rapid growth in productivity and there is nothing the government can or should do about this, He specifically rejects the advice of Romer and Summers on this issue. None of this comes up in this interview.
My previous posts Errors Dealing With Economic Recovery Originate With Obama and Riffing on Obama’s Economic Follies cover Brad DeLong’s take on the book.
The video below discusses Admiral Mullen’s recent testimony before Congress.
I was looking for an explanation of why the Obama administration is now pulling back from the Admiral’s testimony. That was not discussed in the video.
How could the administration send the head of the Joint Chiefs and the Secretary of Defense to testify before Congress if that testimony had not been very carefully vetted? They claim that Mullen deviated from what the White House cleared. That is just not a credible claim. The Secretary of Defense was sitting right beside him when Mullen gave his testimony.
In researching an idea to post, I found the CNN story Analysis: Model planes as weapons of terror.
Ferdaus was arrested Wednesday in Ashland, a small town just to the west of Boston “in connection with his plot to damage or destroy the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, using large remote controlled aircraft filled with C-4 plastic explosives,” according to a press statement from the Massachusetts U.S. District Attorney’s Office.
For the point I want to make, it doesn’t really matter that Ferdaus was arrested in Framingham although he lives in Ashland.
On WBZ News, I saw an expert in radio controlled planes say that lifting 5 pounds of explosives with the planes Ferdaus had might be pretty difficult.
That was small comfort when I started to think about the possibility of someone buying U.S. military drones on the black market.
The above CNN article does all the analysis for me.
The above budget doesn’t show that in addition to this budget I suggest the following:
Jack Bogle on how the “game” is rigged.
But the stock market is the place to be for an investor.
The article What Is Hugo Chávez Up To? by Joshua Kucera appears in The Wilson Quarterly. The sub-headline is:
Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has set alarms ringing with his efforts to create a global anti-American coalition.
I may be naive, but the article does seem to be fairly even handed. It can talk about the pluses and minuses of Hugo Chávez without getting overly hyper in either direction.
I wouldn’t say that there is any startling or breaking news in the article. However, there is useful information for keeping track of Hugo Chávez and what is happening in South America that you probably won’t see in the lame stream media. Unless Chávez does something startlingly anti-U.S., you aren’t likely to read anything about him.