But my kid’s artwork is in the Brazilian edition of Rolling Stone!
Money (that’s what I want)
The Flying Lizards:
Tamir Rice
I guess you know by now that the city of Cleveland is claiming the 12-year-old is responsible for making those cops shoot him?
The libertarian delusion
Bill Moyers. You should go read the rest:
The free market doesn’t live up to its billing because of several contradictions between what libertarians contend and the way the real world actually works. Fundamentally, the free-market model assumes away inconvenient facts. Libertarians presume no disparities of information between buyer and seller, no serious externalities, no public goods that markets can’t properly price (Joan Fitzgerald’s piece in our special report in the Winter 2015 issue of The American Prospect magazine discusses one — water), and above all no disparities of power. But in today’s substantially deregulated economy, bankers have far more knowledge and power than bank customers (witness the subprime deception); corporations have far more power than employees; insurers have more power than citizens seeking health insurance. Labor markets can’t compensate for disparities of power. The health insurance “markets” created by the Affordable Care Act can’t fully address the deeper problem of misplaced resources and excessive costs in our medical system.
Even Charlie Crist would have been a step up from this putz
Millionaire healthcare fraud Gov. Rick Scott doesn’t give a shit about the uninsured — because he can’t squeeze any profit from them:
In case there’s anyone left who thinks Scott cares if even more Floridians die without health insurance, this quote from Scott in the New York Times should clear that right up for you. When asked what would happen if those insured under the ACA in states who didn’t create a state exchange, like Florida, lost their subsidies because Florida refused to set up such an exchange, Scott simply dismissed those Floridians as if they were excess baggage:
This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case, King v. Burwell, that challenges the legality of the subsidies in more than 30 states, including Florida. The case, developed by conservative legal scholars, argues that only people using state-run marketplaces are entitled to subsidies.
If the court agrees — a decision is expected in June — subsidies will disappear in states that do not have their own online marketplaces, almost all of which have Republican-led governments that oppose the law and have resisted creating state exchanges. No state would be more affected than Florida, where more than 1.6 million people have insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act, the most in the nation, and almost all of them receive subsidies.
Yet there is little talk of a Plan B here, such as creating a state-run exchange where subsidies would still be available, if the Supreme Court strikes down the subsidy program. Asked about the case last month at the American Action Forum, a conservative advocacy group, Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, said, “This is not my program.” He added, “It’s a federal problem.”
Not his problem.
Continue reading “Even Charlie Crist would have been a step up from this putz”
Tom Wolf’s tax plan
Yeah, I can’t figure out what Gov. Tom Wolf’s up to, either. Will Bunch:
The reports say that Wolf wants to cut corporate tax rates but reduce loopholes, lower the property tax burden but increase both the state income tax and sales taxes. That would be a radical change in the way Pennsylvania does business. But it also feels like a betrayal to Wolf’s supposed progressive ideals. The corporate tax plan may be sound — most experts agree the real problem is not the rate but the loopholes that allows many firms not to pay them, so a more equitable system would be an upgrade.
But the leaked details on the income tax and sales tax proposals make no sense. Most experts will tell you that one of the biggest problems in Pennsylvania is income inequality — and our tax policy contributes to that. (The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy ranks Pennsylvania as the 8th most regressive state in the nation.) Our current flat income tax — a conservative wet dream — means that the CEO of Comcast pays state income taxes as the same rate as the janitor that cleans his office. The massive change that’s needed is a move to a progressive tax, so that the wealthy pay a bigger share. And higher sales taxes are a non-starter — especially if the taxes are expanded to more family necessities such as clothing, as some reports have suggested. The sales tax is the most regressive tax in the fiscal toolbox — falling heaviest on the poor who spend a greater share of their income on basic goods.
Of course, the chances of the Republicans who control both houses of the Legislature signing off on this are about equal to the chances that the University of Tampa beats the Phillies the 2014-15 76ers will make the playoffs. That’s understood. But tomorrow’s budget address is a chance for Wolf to present his vision, to go bold. So if you’re going for bold, why not get it right? A tax plan that makes life even harder for Pennsylvania’s middle class and working poor is, to use this week’s buzzword, highly illogical.
If’s fun to have a governor on Viagra, but fixing Pennsylvania’s complicated tax problems don’t need increased blood flow so much as better focus, For this, it might require a governor on Adderall.
I love you Suzanne
Lou Reed:
This house is haunted
Shakey Graves:
Myths and heroes
Fairport Convention:
Oh look
Larry Summers has had an epiphany!
Last month, Larry Summers ripped into those arguing that more education is the answer to the country’s rampant inequality.
“The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs,” said the former Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton and top economics adviser to Barack Obama. “If you help some people, you could help them get the jobs, but then someone else won’t get the jobs. Unless you’re doing things that have things that are affecting the demand for jobs, you’re helping people win a race to get a finite number of jobs.”
He made these comments at a conference at the Brookings Institution put on by the Hamilton Project, the economics think tank funded by Summers’ predecessor at the Clinton Treasury, Robert Rubin.
If the significance of these comments is not clear, the most important economic figure of the Democratic Party mainstream was demolishing one of the party’s central themes over the last two decades. Summers was arguing that the problems of the labor force — weak employment opportunities, stagnant wages and rising inequality — were not going to be addressed by increasing the education and skills of the workforce. Rather, the problem was the overall state of the economy.
The standard education story puts the blame for stagnant wages on workers. The key to getting ahead is education. On the contrary, Summers argued at Brookings: The blame for the economic malaise goes to the people who design economic policy. It is their fault that workers aren’t able to secure decent-paying jobs.
Summers was responding to evidence that can’t be reconciled with the education story. As my friends and colleagues Larry Mishel, John Schmitt and Heidi Shierholz have shown, inequality has continued to grow since 2000 even though demand for workers in highly skilled occupations has not increased. Similarly, there has been little change in the wage premium that college-educated workers enjoy relative to less-educated workers, as pay for the typical college grad has barely risen since the turn of the century.
Continue reading “Oh look”