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 [...]

I will be on Mark Thompson’s Make It Plain show on Sirius/XM – I’m actually on every Friday – and we tape early, so I can tell you that one of the things I’ll talk about is how Social Security’s long-term funding is an artifact of rampant US inequality. See, we have a payroll tax [...]

Senate Democrats have liberated a report from the Congressional Research Service which Senate Republicans successfully got the nonpartisan research arm of Congress to retract. The report argued that there is no evidence that tax cuts for high-income earners boosts economic growth, which Republicans didn’t want out in the public sphere. Here’s what Senate Democrats said [...]

This week, ex-banker Charles Morris, who was featured in the documentary Inside Job, brings us compelling evidence that countries with a large financial sector create lesser economic growth than countries that have restrained that sector. While a well-functioning financial system is key to growth, there’s a balance that needs to be struck, Morris writes: Once [...]

The Federal Reserve stood pat today, determining that they would continue with QE3 despite the relative improvement in economic performance. This clears one hurdle lingering in the minds of some observers: would the Fed have the resolve to stay the course, even if the economy strengthened, which would probably lead to an uptick in inflation? [...]

France has announced a massive redistributive tax program which would send the top tax rate soaring and increase taxes broadly on the top 10% of society. French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault has said that nine out of 10 citizens will not see their income taxes rise in the new budget. He has confirmed that there [...]

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 [...]

Trying to deflect from Mitt Romney’s comments on those dastardly parasites who make up 47% of America, conservatives have trotted out an “exclusive” secret tape from 1998 with then State Senator Barack Obama making utterly banal mainstream Democratic comments about redistribution: And my suggestion, I guess, would be that the trick—and this is one of [...]

The great middle class, the group lauded in campaign ads by every politician in the country, is wasting away according to a Pew study. Using the broadest possible figures (between 67% and 200% of the national median income), the study shows that the middle class has declined to a bare majority of the population. Furthermore, [...]

I had the opportunity to see Tim Noah speak last night about his new book The Great Divergence. It’s a book-length version of his Slate series on the rise of income inequality since 1979, and I’m not sure that there’s a whole lot different in the book, other than it’s in print rather than on [...]

I don’t have a huge problem with the Buffett rule, which will get a vote in the Senate and fail on Monday. But I do have a problem with the concept of a minimum tax based on adjusted gross income as a killer app in tax policy, rather than just raising rates and closing loopholes. [...]