Finance and the Economy

Democrats’ Plans To Make The Wealthy Pay Will Barely Make A Dent

September 24, 2021 Gabriel Zucman And Emmanuel Saez, The Conversation. Educate! AOC, Finance and the Economy, Taxes, Wealth Tax

Demanding tax increases on the rich is back in fashion – both in the corridors of the House of Representatives and on the red carpet of the Met Gala. The House Ways and Means Committee outlined plans on Sept. 13, 2021, to move the top marginal income rate up a couple of notches to 39.6% and to introduce a 3% surtax on incomes above $5 million. That proposal would fall short of calls to really “tax the rich,” as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dress demanded at a glitzy New York bash just hours later. Tax policy is deemed progressive if the chunk of income taken increases with the income of the individual – so wealthy Americans would pay a larger proportion of their income than poorer ones. With a regressive tax policy, lower earners pay a larger percentage of their earnings in tax than wealthier ones.

Covid Funds Spent On Police And Prisons

September 23, 2021 Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report. Educate! COVID-19, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Finance and the Economy, Police Budgets

The health and financial impacts of the covid pandemic have been enormous. More than 42 million people have been infected and 679,000 have died in this country. Individuals, businesses and every level of government have suffered as they lost income and revenue. Many workers are unemployed and certain sectors of the economy still suffer disproportionately. There is an easy case to make in favor of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) which was passed in order to relieve these many crises. The argument is harder to make when those funds are being used for police and prisons, and which is happening across the country. The state of Alabama is poised to use ARP funds to build three new prisons . Philadelphia is paying for police and for jails.

Yimby Movement Is Not The Answer To Housing Crisis

September 21, 2021 Laura Jedeed And M.k. Hawthorne, Truthout. Create! Affordable Housing, Finance and the Economy, Housing

There is a battle raging in U.S. cities around land and who controls it. It is fought with zoning laws and red lines. Its battlefields are neighborhood associations and local elections. Across the country, racist reactionaries square off against capitalist developers in a struggle to determine the future of the housing market. In these types of battles, whoever wins, tenants lose, according to housing organizers working to halt the damage wrought by both developers and racist politicians. The U.S.’s housing crisis began long before COVID eviction moratoria brought the problem into the spotlight. Median rent in the United States has increased 70 percent since 1995, even as real wages remained static. This lack of affordable housing kept millions of people one crisis away from losing their homes.

Solely Because Of The Increasing Disorder

September 10, 2021 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, Poverty, World Bank

A few days ago, I spoke to a senior official at the World Health Organisation (WHO). I asked her if she knew how many people lived their lives on our planet without shoes. The reason I asked her this question is because I was wondering about Tungiasis, an ailment caused by the infection that results from the entry of a female sand flea (Tunga penetrans) into the skin. This problem has a variety of names in many different languages – from jigger or chigoe to niguá (Spanish) or bicho do pé (Portuguese) to funza (Kiswahili) or tukutuku (Zande). It is a terrible problem that disfigures the feet and makes mobility difficult. Shoes prevent these fleas from burrowing into the skin. She was not sure about the number but presumed that at least a billion people must live without shoes.

Salvadorans Reject The Adoption Of Bitcoin As National Currency

September 10, 2021 Tanya Wadhwa, People's Dispatch. Resist! cryptocurrency, El Salvador, Finance and the Economy, Protests

The Popular Resistance and Rebellion Bloc, a platform that brings together 32 social organizations, movements and unions and has been at the forefront of the recent wave of anti-Bitcoin demonstrations, stated that the measure “hit the working class, the peasantry and rural communities the most.” The bloc also highlighted that the majority of the population lack technological tools and high-end telephones to download and operate the government-backed electronic wallet app, known as Chivo. The organization also alleged that the electronic currency could cause an increase corruption and poverty in the country. Many economists warned that the digital currency’s lack of transparency could attract increased criminal activity to the country and make it a haven of money laundering as it does not record the identity of those who handle it.

The Political Economy Of Racial Inequality

September 7, 2021 Touré F. Reed, Dissent Magazine. Educate! Black America, Finance and the Economy, Poverty, Racism

In 1965, in response to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s anemic War on Poverty legislation, the labor and civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin joined with Leon Keyserling, the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, to draft “A Freedom Budget for All Americans.” Their $180 billion proposal ($1.4 trillion adjusted for inflation) would have established a living wage and guaranteed employment through public works projects and urban revitalization initiatives. Randolph and Rustin were socialists who viewed racial inequality through the lens of capitalist labor and housing markets. They correctly anticipated that neither the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s antidiscrimination measures nor the War on Poverty would be capable of eliminating black poverty.

Labor Day 2021: Creeping Austerity Has Arrived

September 6, 2021 Jack Rasmus. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Labor Day, Worker Rights and Jobs

Today, September 6, 2021, Labor Day in the USA, brings nothing to celebrate for American workers. As the most recent Labor Department monthly job report a few days ago revealed, job recovery has hit a wall. After averaging 750,000 jobs over each of the preceding three months, from May to July, job recovery this past August fell by more than two-thirds, to only 235,000. The jobs numbers were particularly weak for job recovery in the service occupations, which were hit hard by Covid resurgence. Jobs in hotels, bars, and restaurants in late July-early August–i.e. the period covered by the latest government jobs reports–began contracting once again following three months of recovery May to mid-July. Moreover, due to the Covid delta variant intensifying during August, the numbers will likely worsen further through August and into September, given that only 53% of Americans are vaccinated.

US Labor’s Future May Depend On Monetary And Fiscal Policy

September 6, 2021 Mark Weisbrot, Counter Punch. Educate! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, Labor, Worker Rights and Jobs

Labor Day is a good time to reflect upon how American workers have been doing — especially the majority who have been left behind for most of the past 40 years. From 1979 to 2018, the median wage has grown by just 11.6 percent. If we compare this to prior decades, e.g., 1948 to 1979, that increase was 93.2 percent. These two facts tell a big part of the story of a social transformation that is both inexcusable and historically unusual: a high-income country becoming vastly more unequal, as most workers’ pay fails to rise with most of the gains in productivity that has accompanied their work. Then came COVID, which has disproportionately harmed and killed lower-wage and Black workers. Hopefully, the current wave will subside and pass soon, as more people are vaccinated.

The Productivity–Pay Gap Has Been Growing Since 1979

September 6, 2021 Lawrence Mishel, Economic Policy Institute. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Productivity, Wages, Worker Rights and Jobs

The growth of inequalities is the central driver of the widening gap between the hourly compensation of a typical (median) worker and productivity—the income generated per hour of work—in recent decades. Specifically, this growing divergence has been driven by the growth of two distinct dimensions of inequality: the surge of compensation received by the top 10%—particularly the top 1.0% and top 0.1%—and the erosion of labor’s share of income and the corresponding growth of capital’s share. This post documents these trends by presenting an updated account of the U.S. productivity-pay divergence originally analyzed in both Mishel and Gee 2012 and Bivens and Mishel 2015. The key metric, as explained below, is the lag between the growth of net productivity (taking into account depreciation and evaluated using consumer prices) and hourly compensation (wages and benefits) of a typical or median worker.

It’s A Wage And Workers Rights Shortage

September 6, 2021 Lane Windham, The Hill. Resist! Finance and the Economy, Pandemic, Unemployment, Worker Rights and Jobs

As we approach Labor Day, America’s working people are deep into a protracted general strike. Millions are refusing to go back into low-wage, no-benefits jobs that require they abandon dignity and rights at the workplace door. Their struggle has brewed for 40 years as wages stagnated, benefits vanished and public policy offered working families little reprieve. Employers complain that too few people are returning to work, but America’s “labor shortage” is really a shortage of good wages and workers rights on the job. Recent jobs reports show an uptick in the numbers of workers returning to work, but payroll tallies are still more than 5 million shy of pre-pandemic levels.

Higher Pay Undercut By Years Of Wage Stagnation And Rising Inflation

September 5, 2021 Marcus Baram, Capital & Main. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Worker Rights and Jobs

And the recent wage growth at the low end has not helped reduce income inequality, which actually increased during the pandemic since the highest paid Americans saw sky high raises. In 2020, the earnings of CEOs at the largest public companies were on average 351 times as much as that of the typical worker in their industry, the biggest disparity since the first tech boom in 2000, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Ordinary Nicaraguans Should Guide Progressive Left’s Stance

August 30, 2021 John Perry, LA Progressive. Strategize! Elections, Finance and the Economy, Nicaragua, Sandinista Revolution

Rather than acclaiming a country that is lifting itself out of poverty, it is apparently much more important to judge it against hypocritical Western standards about “democracy” and “human rights” while disregarding the government’s need to defend the country’s gains against attacks from Washington and elsewhere.

How Central Banks Are Fueling The Climate Crisis

August 25, 2021 Oil Change International. Educate! Banks, Climate Change, Energy, Finance and the Economy

Central banks could play a critical role in catalyzing the rapid shift of financial flows away from oil, fossil gas, and coal. However, to date, central banks have instead tinkered at the edges. With a few isolated exceptions – such as decisions by the French and Swiss central banks to partially exclude coal from their asset portfolios – central bank activity on carbon pollution and the climate crisis has been limited primarily to measures to increase financial market transparency.

Unemployment Cuts Made People Poorer Without Increasing Employment

August 23, 2021 Matt Bruenig, Jacobin. Educate! Finance and the Economy, Unemployment, Worker Rights and Jobs

Six academics, including Arin Dube and Suresh Naidu, released a paper last week estimating the impact of the massive unemployment benefit cuts that occurred in twenty-two states in June. The team was able to use bank transaction data and comparisons to unemployment benefit recipients in states that did not cut benefits to get precise estimates of both the employment and income effects of the policy change.

Big Business Loves The Housing Crisis

August 22, 2021 Nick Bano, Tribune Magazine. Educate! COVID-19, Finance and the Economy, Gentrification, Housing

What’s your favourite type of landlord? It’s an odd question, but it’s one that commentators keep asking as housing crises of various types continue to take shape across the world. In a recent series of articles, economist Brett Christophers analysed the workings of Blackstone, a New York-based asset management firm which has become a phenomenally successful (and deeply harmful) institutional player in American housing markets. At the moment, the picture in the UK is very different—small-scale individuals vastly outnumber institutions in the buy-to-let market—but there are signs that this is starting to change. Last week, Lloyds Bank announced its plans to become one of the UK’s biggest landlords by buying 50,000 homes over the next four years – roughly equivalent to buying every dwelling in Exeter.

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