economics Archives - Page 10 of 50 - Stable Genius Liberal

The Biggest Robbers In America Are Employers

The amount of money employers had to pay because they were found guilty of wage theft is nearly three times greater than all the money stolen in robberies, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

That $50 billion figure dwarfs the $14 billion taken from victims of robberies, burglaries, larcenies, and car thefts in 2012. That’s less than a third of the cost of wage theft, according to EPI’s estimations.

The NLRB needs to be reformed for the post labour union era. It should be the advocate for those who are robbed by their employers and it isn’t.

When The Economist blamed Irish peasants for starving to death

its extraordinary blindness to how real life economic power relations work is reminiscent of the magazine’s beginnings in the 19th century, when it fulminated at the very idea that the British government should do anything about the Irish famine that was happening on its doorstep. After all, it was the peasants’ own fault that they were starving.

Laissez faire is often used as an excuse to blame victim.

Obama Outperforms Reagan on Jobs, Growth and Investing

Regression toward the mean is the likely explantation. The slowness of the recovery may be due to lack of targeted stimulus but everything else looks like normal growth.

Tax Burden in U.S. Not as Heavy as It Looks, Report Says

We’ve been told repeatedly that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world — 35 percent — which is higher than the nominal tax rates in places like Ireland (12.5 percent), Britain (21 percent) and the Netherlands (25 percent) and the 24.1 percent average rate of all countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

All of that’s true, but Professor Kleinbard contends that most United States multinational companies don’t pay anywhere near 35 percent. Companies paid, on average, 12.6 percent,

Cutting those rates will not get companies to bring more money into the US economy. They would still keep the money were it could be moved more easily. And that is in commonwealth nations that can easily do business with London banks.

Rich Kid, Poor Kid: For 30 Years, Baltimore Study Tracked Who Gets Ahead

a study published in June suggests that the things that really make the difference — between prison and college, success and failure, sometimes even life and death — are money and family.
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They found that a child’s fate is in many ways fixed at birth — determined by family strength and the parents’ financial status. The kids who got a better start — because their parents were married and working — ended up better off. Most of the poor kids from single-parent families stayed poor.

At this point this a typical story about how poverty self perpetuates. Bad options, bad choices leading to bad results.

Then I got to this part:

The researchers found that more affluent white men in the study reported the highest frequency of drug abuse and binge drinking, yet they still had the most upward mobility.

Great options, bad choices, great results. How do you explain that?

Charles Koch: The people I pay agree with me, so should you.

According to George Mason University’s Mercatus Center,

calculated the Competitive Enterprise Institute

Mr. Koch failed to mention that he funds the people he is quoting. I for one am not surprised the people he pays to reach the conclusions he supports are in total agreement with him.

CEO pay for performance: This graph shows why it’s a sham.

I think it’s debatable if stock price is the best way to judge CEO performance, let alone the only way, but this is a response to a really odd claim from Businessweek that attempts to link the two.

Always Inflation Somewhere

And what about Shadowstats, which claims that inflation is much higher than the government lets on? A subscription costs $175 — the same as 8 years ago.

Prices go up? Inflation. Prices go down? Supply and demand.

US states with higher minimum wages gain more jobs

This isn’t a full on knock down argument. We will see once the numbers for Seattle’s $15/hr minimum wage are published. I suspect that Seattle made a mistake and that at the $15/hr rate you are going to see some adverse results. I could be wrong here.

Build We Won’t

We can’t simply write a check to the highway fund, we’re told, because that would increase the deficit. And deficits are evil, at least when there’s a Democrat in the White House, even if the government can borrow at incredibly low interest rates. And we can’t raise gas taxes because that would be a tax increase, and tax increases are even more evil than deficits. So our roads must be allowed to fall into disrepair.