Report from Economic Innovation Group shows that US economy is becoming less dynamic and more focused around a few geographic regions. Recovery from Great 2008-09 Recession accelerated this process.
The impact of globalization on the US economy has been mostly cast by the media and politicians in light of the disappearance of many manufacturing jobs and the swarms of cheap products imported to fill our stores. We should not think that just because we invented the internet and most of its prominent toys that…
It is widely known that the bottom 80% of the US population has been stuck in neutral or gone backwards in terms of income and wealth over the last 45 years. But even this woeful state of affairs is not distributed evenly across the country. A new analysis of the vitality of US communities by…
Trickle-down economics has never worked, yet once again it is being used to justify tax cuts for the rich and corporations. Trump and Republicans are once again using this thoroughly debunked theory to justify tax cuts.
Capitalism, Monopoly, Oligopoly and John Oliver Capitalism does a number of things very well. Concentrating power, wealth and income is one of them. Though we naturally focus our attention on wealthy individuals, fat cats, tycoons, money bags, but corporations, the legal entities with personhood (at least in the US) are also recipients of this concentrating…
In the US four airlines control over 80% of the seats and in many regional markets the competition veers towards a state of monopoly. There is simply no effective competitive controls on what the airlines can charge and under what conditions.This has lead to persistent high fares and a seemingly endless series of innovations in how many people can be jammed into a plane with as many extra charges tacked on for fewer and fewer amenities.
The title of this short book, only 130 pages, Building the New American Economy: smart, fair, & sustainable by Jeffrey D. Sachs with a foreword by Bernie Sanders (Columbia University Press, 2017) is unfortunately misleading. There is much here about the new economy. The misleading part is that there is very little about its construction,…
Ever since Ronald Reagan told us in his 1981 Inaugural Address, “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” government bashing by right-wingers, Republicans and many Democrats has been a constant drumbeat of political rhetoric. Now we have Trump with his “Kill 2 regulations for every new one” and a government…
My friend Joe Keenan recently sent me an article by Vicki Boykis, “Fix the internet by writing good stuff and being nice to people” from her blog Woman.Legend.Blog. Today’s internet is mean. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when everyone online became a jerk, but to me it seems that the tipping point occurred right when…
This 2013 article “How Much Money Would It Take to Eliminate Poverty” (http://prospect.org/article/how-much-money-would-it-take-eliminate-poverty-america) addresses this question. The answer then was $175 billion. This is a ridiculously small number in the context of a $16 trillion GDP. As someone who is on the homeowners gravy train I was stuck by this part of the article: “The utterly…
