Tag Archives | Gini

Recent Letter to The Editor in Michigan

By on April 29, 2012 in Economics, General Discussion

“Sleight of Hand” Vince Kasprzak in his editorial comment uses sleight of hand when he quotes from the Tax Policy Center and adds his own comment: “This year households that make more than $1 million will pay 29.1% of their income in federal taxes.” and then Vince adds: “Forty-seven percent of households pay no income [...]

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The Challenge of the Productivity Revolution

By on March 2, 2012 in Economics, General Discussion

Here’s a great piece by Robert Reich:   http://www.salon.com/2012/03/02/the_forgotten_american_worker/   It focuses on a fundamental, big-picture economic issue that you almost never hear economists talking about these days.  As technology advances, fewer people can produce more value, and the question is how we, as a society are going to distribute that value.   In terms [...]

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Krugman in action

By on February 17, 2012 in General Discussion, Human Behavior, Politics

Arkady is on record saying that Paul Krugman is his favorite pundit (or at least social commentator). Leroy also likes Krugman and tows the Krugman line on stimulus and monetary easing (that if anything Obama didn’t spend enough on his stimulus and Bernanke’s ZIRP has been good medicine for what ails the economy). I am [...]

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Inviting corruption

By on January 30, 2012 in Economics, General Discussion, Human Behavior

I’ve recently read several stories about run-of-the-mill corruption in businesses and governments… small-dollar kickback and bribery schemes, generally involving fairly low-level employees or small-time politicians padding their incomes through crooked deal-making, embezzlement, etc.  I think we should expect more of this, thanks to growing income inequality in this country.   If you ever look at [...]

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A sociological artifact.

By on January 30, 2012 in General Discussion, Human Behavior, Politics

I was reading a piece from a book called New York Stories, which is a collection of essays from New York magazine from the past 40 years. I found this one quite interesting. It deals with rising anger amongst the white working class of New York in 1969, a lot of the points dealt with are regional, [...]

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The problem with productivity gains.

By on January 26, 2012 in Economics, General Discussion

Issues surrounding productivity have come up on occasion in discussions with this group and so I have given it some thought and would like to offer what I think the problem with productivity gains may be. This stuff is purely stream of consciousness type stuff. In economics productivity gains are the goose that lays the [...]

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Net wealth grows exponentially

By on January 20, 2012 in Economics, General Discussion, Politics

APM Marketplace on TMC’s sidebar http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/daily-pulse/how-net-wealth-widens-gap?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+APM_Marketplace+%28APM%3A+Marketplace%29 has an article showing that while the top 1% earns on average 8 times the median income, it has 64 (8 squared) times the net worth of the median American. (These figures are from 2007). The article says that if anything, the figures for 2011 would be even more [...]

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Sticking it in the eye of greed.

By on January 3, 2012 in Economics, Human Behavior

The nonprofit economy. If you can do business with a nonprofit supplier of something you need, do so. If not do what you can to encourage a start-up of a nonprofit source of what you need. There is a long and good history of nonprofit organizations in this country, it isn’t unusual or bizarre for [...]

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Keeping things in perspective.

By on December 27, 2011 in Economics, General Discussion

On Bloomberg they now have a opinion piece by Andrew Puzder CEO of CKE Restaurants Inc. the corporation that runs such restaurants as Hardy’s. In this piece he talks about how the implementation of “obamacare” will cost CKE 18 million dollars a year meaning that it will hurt CKE’s ability to hire and re-invest. Here’s the thing though,if [...]

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Fiddling around with numbers.

By on December 10, 2011 in Economics, General Discussion

In 2010, real GDP (I will ignore the issue of how real it is) was $14.5 trillion. In that same year, mean (not median) family wage income was approximately $40 thousand. There are about 115 million families, so the total wage income was around $4.6 trillion. If you recognize that GDP represents, if change in [...]

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