You may have noticed an interesting frame the plutocrats and their spokespeople are using in the debate over reducing social security and medicare benefits – pitting the young against the old.  The campaign is relentless, smearing the elderly as parasitic and stealing from the young. For example take National Review Editor Jonah Goldberg’s recent USA [...]

A couple months ago, under pressure from Republicans, the Congressional Research Service, basically the think tank of Congress, took down a study on tax rates for the rich and the economy that rebutted a key GOP argument, that tax cuts at the top spurred economic growth. It didn’t matter that the Congressional Budget Office found [...]

Ryan Grim has some backstory on the White House’s aggressive opening bid last night. It turns out that President Obama offered this same deal to Republicans earlier this month at the White House. Republicans expected that Tim Geithner would bring a softer offer with him, part of the trend verified by recent history of the [...]

As we wake up to the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, it appears clear that the most lasting damage is to the New York City transit system. The MTA describes it as the biggest disaster in the 108-year history of the system. Seven subway tunnels are flooded, and system power has been either turned off or [...]

Poor people don’t vote. At least, they don’t vote in proportion with their share of the population. And they certainly don’t “vote” in the sense that politicians would notice, by attending thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners and contributing to their campaigns.

For the second time in a week, workers at Walmart stores, this time in five states, have walked out on the job. While Walmart does not allow unions, and the strikes are relatively time-limited, this surge of worker activism at the nation’s largest employer is one of the biggest stories in US labor relations. This [...]

The fallout from Paul Ryan’s hand waving on specifics for the tax package he and Mitt Romney are running on continues. A woman at a town hall event in Iowa pressed him for specifics, and Ryan again basically demurred. He said how hard it would be to deliver the math in the confines of a [...]

Chrystia Freeland, who has been hanging around billionaires and relaying some of their most embarrassing commentary for a while, does this again for the New Yorker, and basically we hear the same thing we always hear; the fee-fees of the rich and powerful were vewwy vewwy hurt by that mean old Mr. Barack, who called [...]

A new study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out today probably won’t get as much notice as their other report showing the US gained 386,000 jobs more than expected. However, this one shows a persistent problem in America, that it’s actually expensive to be poor. The average individual in the lowest 20% of the [...]

Mitt Romney has had a policy problem in this Presidential race for some time. He has promised a 20% across-the-board cut to individual income tax rates. Yet he has also promised that the the overall plan would remain revenue-neutral, particularly for the rich, because he will eliminate deductions and loopholes. The problem, aside from Romney [...]

After Mitt Romney released his tax returns, there was a minor debate on the left over capital gains taxes. Clearly Romney’s low tax rate was a function of the reduced 15% rate on investment taxes like capital gains and dividends. And some made arguments about how this merely reflected classical economic thinking, that investment should [...]