The Congressional Research Service released a report last week on the causes of the explosion of inequality in the United States. The report analyzes tax policy, wages, capital income, and other factors, then determines to what extent each has contributed to the rising Gini coefficient. Jared Bernstein has the best short breakdown of the results… Continue reading The CRS inequality report and rewarding hard work
Author: Matt Bruenig
How would a “sensible” unemployed person act?
Casey Mulligan blogs about economic issues for the New York Times. He is one of those supply-side economists cut from the University of Chicago cloth (both teaches there and received his Ph.D there). Like the famed Chicago boys, Mulligan almost always toes the simplistic supply-and-demand line, predicting from his armchair how people will behave based… Continue reading How would a “sensible” unemployed person act?
One missed note about Ron Paul
In my long Ron Paul post, I left out a point I wanted to make about Paul’s dog-whistle politics. For those unfamiliar with the idea, dog-whistle politics is “a type of political campaigning or speechmaking which employs coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more… Continue reading One missed note about Ron Paul
The strange and scary candidacy of Ron Paul
Like Kevin Drum, I have a hard time imagining Ron Paul actually winning the GOP nomination. But with Paul’s recent surge in the Iowa polls and Nate Silver projecting a 20% chance of a Ron Paul Iowa victory, it might be worthwhile to actually dedicate a post to his strange and scary candidacy. Some on… Continue reading The strange and scary candidacy of Ron Paul
Revisiting pricing out the poor
Peter Frase had an excellent piece on Thursday discussing the nature of left neoliberal pricing schemes. I wrote about some of the problems with these pricing schemes a little while ago, and I want to highlight one of the arguments Frase and I both made. Frase writes at the very end of his post: There’s… Continue reading Revisiting pricing out the poor