Recent quotes:
the results were even worse than in 1996: A majority of those who replied said the deficit has gone up, with more than 40 percent saying that it has gone up a lot. Only 12 percent answered correctly that it has gone down a lot.
AMERICAN companies are more profitable than ever — and more profitable than we thought they were before the government revised the national income accounts last week. Wage earners are making less than we thought, in part because the government now thinks it was overestimating the amount of income not reported by taxpayers.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in June found that the No. 1 reason people gave for our continuing poverty crisis was: “Too much welfare that prevents initiative.”
trickle-down economics reduces nakedly to a rent-seeking, self-serving agenda by the very rich to extract wealth from the poor and middle class
rich businesspeople don’t create jobs; middle-class customers do
we must promote middle-out economics not just as a nice-sounding idea, but as the direct alternative to trickle-down economics
Being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.
How is that even possible? What keeps consumption so low, and how have the Chinese been able to invest so much without (until now) running into sharply diminishing returns? The answers are the subject of intense controversy. The story that makes the most sense to me, however, rests on an old insight by the economist W. Arthur Lewis, who argued that countries in the early stages of economic development typically have a small modern sector alongside a large traditional sector containing huge amounts of “surplus labor” — underemployed peasants making at best a marginal contribution to overall economic output.
The existence of this surplus labor, in turn, has two effects. First, for a while such countries can invest heavily in new factories, construction, and so on without running into diminishing returns, because they can keep drawing in new labor from the countryside. Second, competition from this reserve army of surplus labor keeps wages low even as the economy grows richer. Indeed, the main thing holding down Chinese consumption seems to be that Chinese families never see much of the income being generated by the country’s economic growth. Some of that income flows to a politically connected elite; but much of it simply stays bottled up in businesses, many of them state-owned enterprises.
It’s all very peculiar by our standards, but it worked for several decades. Now, however, China has hit the “Lewis point” — to put it crudely, it’s running out of surplus peasants.
European new-car sales have fallen to the lowest level in more than a decade while American new-car sales have been recovering. Over the last year, sales have increased in only three of the 20 largest countries in the European Union — Britain, Hungary and Denmark. In none of them have sales risen as rapidly as in the United States.
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation has a backlog of some $3.6 trillion in overdue infrastructure maintenance. No one in Congress seriously proposes that we just abandon our crumbling roads and bridges, and everyone agrees that the repair cost will grow sharply the longer we wait.
We have entered the New Abnormal, a period in which every market assumption must be questioned
19.2 million people in the euro area were jobless in May, an increase of 67,000 from April
The chief economist at the International Energy Agency recommends leaving two-thirds of all fossil fuels in the ground
The people out to punish the unemployed won’t be dissuaded by rational argument; they know what they know
The cumulative costs of approximately four million annual births is well over $50 billion
77 percent of the mortgages being made in America are guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie
three-quarters of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, with little to no emergency savings
Globally, there are about 200 million — 200 million — unemployed people
In 2009, security guards of a train company that services the Rio metropolitan area used whips on passengers during rush hour crowding.
Et tu, Ben?