Not that this will be a surprise but via Kevin Drum, I learned that the Federal Reserve has released a set of economic data that among other things shows that the gap between the rich and the poor has indeed been getting bigger at an astonishing rate within the last 25 years, with the top 3% making enormous gains at the expense of the bottom 90%, with the balance 7% remaining relatively stable.
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It is true that these companies extort money from the needy and get them trapped in a cycle of debt. The problem is that they also serve a need. Many people live paycheck-to-paycheck, just barely getting by, and any sudden emergency (car repair, medical bill, broken furnace) can throw their delicately balanced finances out of whack and they often feel they have nowhere else to turn to at short notice.
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The latest gambit by American corporations to lower their taxes even more is to take advantage of what is known as ‘corporate inversion’. The way it works is for a big US company to buy a small company in a country that has favorable tax laws, Ireland being the current favored nation. They then ‘invert’ the relationship, claiming that the foreign company is the parent one while the US one is the subsidiary, even though nothing else has changed. This enables them to pay the lower taxes of the other nation while enjoying all the benefits of being in the US.
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When I drive along the highway, I frequently pass campers and recreational vehicles driven by older people. I used to think of them as well-to-do retirees, enjoying a life of leisure wandering around the country and seeing the sights. But it turns out that in many cases, I would be wrong. The people in these vehicles could well be migrant workers.
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People may recall in the 2008 presidential election the huge fuss that occurred when in a casual conversation with a voter, candidate Barack Obama made a vague statement to the effect we need to share the wealth. That voter was the infamous ‘Joe the Plumber’ who then had his fifteen minutes of fame as he became a right wing hero, a so-called common man who opposed socialistic policies, although Obama is far from being a socialist as any rational person would concede.
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On Thursday, May 15, fast food workers in 150 US cities and in 33 countries are going on strike. In the US, they are calling for a minimum wage of $15 per hour and to be able to form unions without retaliation.
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One of the big issues that has been driving policy discussions is the impact of America’s aging population. As the Baby Boomers age into retirement, this puts some strain on the Social Security system (since there will fewer young people paying into the fund and more people drawing money out) and increased health care costs.
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The two authors of the study that looked at a large amount of data that enabled them to test various hypotheses about who runs America and came to the conclusion that the middle class and lower have no influence on policy had an extended interviewed on The Daily Show two days ago. They are careful to say that they themselves did not use the word oligarchy, which to them implies control by a very tiny group, say they top 0.1%. They think control here is by about the top 10%.
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It seems to be almost axiomatic these days to think of economic growth as an unfettered good. But must it always be so? Johann Hari in the April 2010 of The Progressive magazine wrote in a review of a book about John Maynard Keynes, whose influential work has been used to fuel growth, about what that famous economist thought about when we might know that it might be time to call a halt to growth.
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