economics Archives - Page 22 of 50 - Stable Genius Liberal

Mitt Romney Would Pay 0.82 Percent in Taxes Under Paul Ryan’s Plan

Romney would have paid an effective tax rate of around 0.82 percent under the Ryan plan, rather than the 13.9 percent he actually did. How would someone with more than $21 million in taxable income pay so little? Well, the vast majority of Romney’s income came from capital gains, interest, and dividends. And Ryan wants to eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends. Romney, of course, criticized this idea when Newt Gingrich proposed it back in January by pointing out that zeroing out taxes on savings and investment would mean zeroing out his own taxes.

Basically, the Romney campaign is just the latest Romney tax avoidance scheme.

Paul Ryan used inside info to profit from the financial crisis

Ryan attended a closed meeting with congressional leaders, Bush’s Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on September 18, 2008. The purpose of the meeting was to disclose the coming economic meltdown and beg Congress to pass legislation to help collapsing banks. Instead of doing anything to help, Ryan left the meeting and on that very same day Paul Ryan sold shares of stock he owned in several troubled banks and reinvested the proceeds in Goldman Sachs, a bank that the meeting had disclosed was not in trouble.

Why Romney’s Tax Plan is Mathematically Impossible

A quick analysis based on class shows that the math simply doesn’t add up, particularly for the poor and middle class.

It won’t balance the budget. It isn’t likely to promote growth. And it isn’t likely to cut the growth or size of government. So what exactly is the point?

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we have lots of empirical work on the effects of tax changes at the top — and none of it supports the Romney camp’s claims. What we’ve just learned is that they were faking it all along. There is no plan to offset the tax cuts; Romney is just intending to blow up the deficit… Continue reading Untitled

40 Economists Say The GOP Has Abandoned Economic Reality

A survey of forty economists from across the ideological and partisan spectrum has concluded that on some of its most cherished issues, the Republican Party has simply taken leave of economic reality. For instance, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers noted that one of the results from the survey — run by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which is hardly known for a left-wing slant — is an overwhelming agreement that the 2009 Recovery Act (i.e. the stimulus) brought down unemployment.

And the GOP responded by with a long diatribe about socialism and abortion written in crayon.

Libertarians don’t even know when to gloat

I also favor smaller government, but that doesn’t make big government the cause of every economic problem. If the Spanish and Greek governments shrank enough to balance their budgets, they’d still have 24% unemployment, if not more. Their economies are hopelessly uncompetitive at the current exchange rate. Milton Friedman understood that. What in the world has happened to the modern libertarian movement?

Libertarians are no longer about liberty, they are about blaming government for everything. They are about non-policy, not market based policy. Denialism rather than skepticism. Friedman is so far removed from modern Libertarianism that it isn’t even funny.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world – New Scientist

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations

Take this with a grain of salt. Being connected may not be the same as being in control. And I am not sure what assumptions they made and how true they may be. But the study is an interesting one and might give rise to more.

The World Is Experiencing The Opposite Of A Sovereign Debt Crisis

You might be tempted to say, well, okay but the Fed is manipulating rates, or that the US is just the “cleanest dirty shirt” but both of these explanations fail when you look at the wide sweep of borrowing costs around the world.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening if the Peter Schiff’s and Ron Paul’s of the world were right about a currency crisis causing spikes in inflation and interest rates as they have been predicting for almost a decade now.

Krugman, Say’s Law and the silliness of Going Galt

Now suppose that President Obama has reduced Mr. Wheelerdealer to despair; not only does the president waste money by doing things like feeding children, he says mean things about some rich people, which is just like the Nazis invading Poland, or something. So Wheelerdealer decides to go Galt. Well, actually just one-third Galt, reducing his working time to just 2000 hours a year so he can spend more time with his wife and mistress.
According to marginal productivity theory, this does in fact shrink the economy: Wheelerdealer adds $10,000 worth of production for every hour he works, so his semi-withdrawal reduces GDP by $10 million. Bad!
But what is the impact on the incomes of Americans other than Wheelerdealer? GDP is down by $10 million — but payments to Wheelerdealer are also down by $10 million. So the impact on the incomes of non-Wheelerdealer America is … zero. Enjoy your leisure, John!

At some point we will be forced to admit that the folks who live on the equity side of the ledger are over paid and under taxed and this is a problem for people on the asset side of the ledger. If they all went Galt, no one would miss them and many people, mostly wage workers, would be better off.

What is the Libor scandal?

growing evidence that Libor numbers have been deliberately manipulated by banks for years means that millions of people have been paying the wrong interest rate on all manner of financial products. Vast sums of money have been wrongly snatched from innocent people and created equally vast undeserved windfalls for others. The basic structure of the world’s financial system has once again been exposed as fundamentally broken.

And once again, the right says nothing about it, or claims it isn’t a problem because there is no way to fix the problem via tax cuts and deregulation. And if there is no way to fix it via tax cuts and deregulation, it can’t possibly be a real problem.