Economics
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Growth Idolaltry
Just saw Douthat's Sunday column on the causes of inequality, so I thought I'd comment on it in the light of my last post. Here's his set up: The latest census figures show the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else widening — rather than shrinking, as some economists expected — during the crash
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Now We’re Getting Serious
I was wondering what was taking so long for this kind of approach to be tried: Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell What's been lacking is imagination and creative thinking in promoting most Progressive initiatives. Where's the Uncle Tom's Cabin for healthcare reform?
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Quote of the Day: Michael Lind
On who really creates wealth: the true creator of wealth is, ultimately, the commonwealth – not only the political community, but the civilization that it shares with other nations. No technical invention or business innovation is a creation of something from nothing. All depend on the intellectual capital that the human race has accumulated since
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Good Luck with That (Updated)
From today's WaPo: Roger T. Cole, the central bank's head of banking supervision, told Congress two weeks ago that one lesson among many is that regulators must no longer be lulled by good times or put off by industry arguments. "When bankers are particularly confident, when the industry and others are especially vocal about the
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If Not Geithner, Who?
What can be realistically expected in a society as complex as ours run by elites, including most Democrats, who since Reagan, if not before, have lost any vestigial sense of what the common good is? What can be expected of a class of people who have got to the positions that they hold by caring
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Missing It and Battlestar Gallactica Farewell
I've not been writing because I've been busy with other things, and I am very much in this slack water mode. It seems as though events outrace anything I or anyone else has to say about them with any hope of writing anything truly insightful or helpful. Almost everything I read seems idiotic or at
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The Rich Are Different from You and Me
Because they have the resources to live in a bubble world of their own creation. Frank Rich today: The once-lionized lifestyles of the rich and infamous were appallingly tacky. John Thain’s parchment trash can was merely the tip of the kitschy iceberg. The level of taste flaunted by America’s upper caste at the bubble’s height
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Web of Interest
"It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."– Henry Ford Simon Johnson has been getting a lot of exposure lately. In addition to the TPM blog posts from which I quote in
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What’s Going On? (Updated)
Michael Cohen at TPM Cafe: Republicans seem to be basing their political aspirations on the hope that the stimulus package fails and the economy worsens. But there is an obvious flip side: what if it works? What if widespread deficit spending is seen as the solution to America's economic woes? Not only will Obama have
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Quote of the Day: Douthat
Now fiscal responsibility is generally a good thing, and so a centrism mindlessly focused on tweaking legislation away from deficit spending has its uses. But what Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn't a new kind of politics. It's the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there's a reasonable argument