This piece by Ezra Klein shows some of the ways people who don’t think of themselves as being on government assistance are assisted by the government. I don’t really have anything to add to it. You should read it.
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The Planet Money blog linked to this from an outfit called Third Way, which came up with a “taxpayer receipt” showing where your federal tax money goes. I agree with the Third Way people that this is a very good idea, and would be very easy for government to implement. Fact is, anything that […] Tom the Dancing Bug is one of the best comics out there; I was going through the archives and came across this one that I’d somehow missed. It’s actually an excellent explanation of how bond traders (who never seem to object to tax cuts for the rich) pretend to freak out when the government […] Michael Moore’s doc Capitalism: A Love Story spends some time at a company called Republic Windows and Doors, where laid-off workers were holding what I think was the first big sit-in strike since the 1930s. The strike garnered widespread support, and it succeeded—the workers got money they were owed. Which was a limited goal, […] Our quote of the day comes from John Stuart Mill: “I know not why it should be a matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as a representative of wealth; or […] So someone on Reddit linked to this, a survey of college professors on who the best and worst presidents were. Okay, it’s just college professors in central Pennsylvania. But still: Ronald Reagan, the best president on the economy? Jimmy Carter, the worst? These are the opinions of one Sanjay Paul, professor of economics at […] I’m not the first person to point out that choosing between consumer products is not at all the same thing as having control of your life in any real sense. Or that meaningless consumer choices are used as a distraction from real choices, even a substitute for democracy. For instance, we can get a […] I created the quiz here. Check your Mussolini IQ! The piece began as a discussion about how surprising it is that a Mussolini hasn’t arisen in the US yet. After all, we have the two necessary ingredients: broken politics and an angry, desperate population. All you need is a politician who directs that anger […] The NYT economix blog has a post about how people view their jobs. Specifically, whether they think their job is making the world a worse place. Speaking as a guy who’s spent years in drug advertising, which ranges from (in my opinion) occasionally useful to sometimes harmful (mostly it’s just a waste of resources […] So Love2Learn on Reddit pointed out a silly video giving the economics of Valentine’s day. It’s a fun little piece, done in a dry deadpan that the presenter must know is hysterical. It’s also wrong, most especially when he says that Valentine’s day spending doesn’t stimulate the economy because, after all, the money would […] |
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