In this country

Still not a decent wage.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Inflation isn't the real problem

I won't excerpt this Robert Reich article, because I think it's all worth reading.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

The rich get richer...

Raw Story has uncovered a secret IRS tax favor for the super-rich—authorized when Donald Trump was president—that will take effect on Thursday, July 1. President Biden can stop it with one phone call. Will he?

The Biden White House was unaware of this Trump tax favor—disguised as a crackdown on wealthy tax cheaters—when Raw Story asked about it on Friday.

That's not surprising because the IRS remains under the control of Charles Rettig, a holdover from the Trump era. Before Trump named him IRS commissioner, Rettig was a Beverly Hills tax lawyer who helped the super-wealthy escape taxes and—if they got caught cheating—negotiated secret settlements that avoided public humiliation while minimizing taxes and penalties.

[...]

What makes this Trumpian scheme diabolical is that on the surface, it appears to be a 50% increase in enforcement of gift and estate tax law, areas where cheating is rampant. Actually, it's the opposite.

[...]

Detecting these tax avoidance tricks and then figuring out how much tax is due requires sophisticated skills, especially in understanding legal doctrines and court decisions. The new hires need only minimal training, none of it in contract law.

So, while it appears the IRS is beefing up its auditing power, it is simultaneously moving to assign the work to employees less likely to detect cheating and when they do much easier to dupe. Imagine your local police department announcing it would no longer hire homicide detectives but instead assign future murder cases to patrol cops.

  Raw Story

Continue reading.

Tax cuts for the wealthy have long drawn support from conservative lawmakers and economists who argue that such measures will "trickle down" and eventually boost jobs and incomes for everyone else. But a new study from the London School of Economics says 50 years of such tax cuts have only helped one group — the rich.

  CBS

The whole idea was bullshit from the start. Surely nobody ever thought otherwise.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Speaking of Missouri

Research Medical Center, Kansas City

Should be interesting

Hell yes

A little good news

And I do mean little.

Twenty states and dozens of localities increased their minimum wage on Friday, giving a financial boost to many frontline workers during the pandemic.

New Mexico will see the largest jump, adding $1.50 to its hourly minimum and bringing it up to $10.50. Arkansas, California, Illinois and New Jersey will each increase their minimum wages by $1.

Alaska, Maine and South Dakota will increase wages by just 15 cents an hour, while the rate in Minnesota will rise by half that, at 8 cents, to $10.08 an hour.

  The Hill

Don't get carried away.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A voice in the wilderness

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once dubbed it the “horse and sparrow” theory: “If you feed the horse enough oats, some will pass through to the road for the sparrows.”

We know it as trickle-down economics.

  The Guardian

And I can't believe anyone still buys that shit.

Mainstream economists are already talking about a “K-shaped” recovery – the better-off reaping most gains while the bottom half continue to slide.

[...]

The president-elect has rejected a wealth tax, but maybe he should be even more ambitious and seek to change economic thinking altogether.

INCLUDING a wealth tax.

Build-up economics reached its zenith in the decades after the second world war, when the richest Americans paid a marginal income tax rate of between 70% and 90%. That revenue helped fund massive investment in infrastructure, education, health and basic research – creating the largest and most productive middle class the world had ever seen.

When you're talking to the middle classes, always stress marginal tax rate. Nobody's trying to take 70-90% of the uber-rich's "hard earned" money. Not even a fraction of that.  (They earn it the way I earn wrinkled skin.)  

[S]tarting in the 1980s, America retreated from public investment. The result is crumbling infrastructure, inadequate schools, wildly dysfunctional healthcare and public health systems and a shrinking core of basic research. Productivity has plummeted.

Hmmm, you mean, with St. Ronald Reagan as president?

Studies show an average return on infrastructure investment of $1.92 for every public dollar invested, and a return on early childhood education of between 10% and 16% – with 80% of the benefits going to the general public.

The Covid vaccine reveals the importance of investments in public health, and the pandemic shows how everyone’s health affects everyone else’s. Yet 37 million Americans still have no health insurance. A study in the Lancet estimates Medicare for All would prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year, while saving money.

If we don’t launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we’ll spend trillions coping with ever more damaging hurricanes, wildfires, floods and rising sea levels.

The returns from these and other public investments are huge. The costs of not making them are astronomical.

The problem to solving the problem is that the cost accrues to future generations.

In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down.

Just look around you. You don't need a "study".

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.