http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3478
From the site:
In recognition of Tax Day, we’ve collected our top ten charts related to federal taxes. Together, they provide useful context for ongoing debates about how to reduce deficits and reform the tax code.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/21/american-bile/
From the site:
Not long ago I was walking toward an airport departure gate when a man approached me.
“Are you Robert Reich?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re a Commie dirtbag.” (He actually used a variant of that noun, one that can’t be printed here.)
“I’m sorry?” I thought I had misunderstood him.
“You’re a Commie dirtbag.”
My mind raced through several possibilities. Was I in danger? That seemed doubtful. He was well-dressed and had a briefcase in one hand. He couldn’t have gotten through the checkpoint with a knife or gun. Should I just walk away? Probably. But what if he followed me? Regardless, why should I let him get away with insulting me?
I decided to respond, as civilly as I could: “You’re wrong. Where did you get your information?”
“Fox News. Bill O’Reilly says you’re a Communist.”
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15784/social_democracy_in_the_south/
From the site:
It’s early on Friday morning and the union hall is packed with people waiting to see Bernie Sanders. Mostly gray-haired retirees fill the first few rows while unionists, college students and activists, including some veterans of the Occupy movement, are scattered toward the back of the modestly-sized room. They’re here for a town hall meeting that’s been billed “The Fight for Economic Justice.”
http://www.offthechartsblog.org/gini-index-from-census-confirms-rising-inequality-over-four-decades/
From the site:
As our statement on Tuesday’s Census Bureau report notes, a key measure of inequality known as the Gini index was tied for its highest level on record in 2012, further evidence of worsening inequality.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/print/lets_get_this_class_war_started_20131020
From the site:
Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.” Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case free market capitalism and globalization—that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
http://www.epi.org/blog/growing-growing/
From the site:
The September release of the Census Bureau’s income and poverty numbers (and I link to them here only to remind us all that the federal shutdown has made the unavailable) add one more data point to a lost decade punctuated by the recessions of 2001 and 2007, and also to a longer trajectory—stretching back to the 1970s—of starkly unequal income growth.
That growing inequality is underscored by plotting the Census data (reporting average family income by income percentiles) alongside the top incomes estimates of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (recently updated through 2012).
From the site:
WASHINGTON — Shortly after President Obama started his second term, a loose-knit coalition of conservative activists led by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III gathered in the capital to plot strategy. Their push to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care law was going nowhere, and they desperately needed a new plan.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/responsible-budget-reporting
From the site:
Are you concerned a proposed farm bill would spend $195 billion on farm subsidies over the next decade? How about $80.35 billion spent on food stamps last year? Would you be more or less concerned if it were $1.95 billion and $8 billion?
From the site:
Doing policy work in Washington, I tend to be around people who are highly educated and think of themselves as very intelligent. Many of them think of ordinary Americans as being stupid and ill-informed. After all, they understand little about politics and the government; in their view this reflects a lack of intelligence.
It would be great if everyone were smarter (especially the people doing policy work), but the problem of an ill-informed population has at least as much to do with the failures of the highly educated people as the failures of the masses. Nowhere is this more obviously the case than with the federal budget.
Public opinion surveys consistently show the public is terribly confused about the budget. They hugely overestimate relatively small areas of spending, failing to recognize that popular programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid account for the largest portion of the budget, along with military spending.
For example, a 2011 CNN poll found that the typical person thought foreign aid accounted for 10 percent of the budget. The actual number is less than 1 percent. They thought public broadcasting accounted for 5 percent of the budget. The actual number is 0.012 percent. There were several other items where the typical person overestimated spending levels by a factor of 100 or more.
Rather than laughing at the stupidity of the average American it might be helpful to ask why such misperceptions exist. One obvious answer is that the media almost never reports the budgets for these programs in relation to the overall budget.
When a typical person hears that the government spends $445 million a year on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, they are likely to think that this is a lot of money, since it is way more than most people will ever see in their lifetime. Almost no one has their nose in the budget books, so they are not able to recognize that this sum is just a bit more than one hundredth of one percent of the budget.
The same is true for other categories of government spending. People hear huge numbers and think that programs involve lots of money, because to them these sums would be lots of money. They are not in a position to assess the importance of a program to the federal budget.
This raises the obvious question: why don’t reporters express spending as a share of the total budget? Most people understand percentages. If they heard a reporter say the appropriation for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was just over 0.01 percent of federal spending they would know that this is not a very big item in the budget.
The same would be true for other categories of spending. Would the Republicans spend as much time pushing their plan to cut food stamps by $4 billion a year if everyone knew that this was just 0.1 percent of the federal budget because it was reported as 0.1 percent of the federal budget every time it was discussed?
Or to take a slightly older example, when he ran for president in 2008 John McCain repeatedly highlighted as an example of government waste a federal appropriation of $1 million to construct a museum for the Woodstock music festival. Would this museum have made as good a political prop if news accounts always referred to the sum as 0.00003 percent of federal spending? Whatever one thinks of the museum, no one should have been misled into believing that this expenditure was even close to being an important item in the federal budget.
The absurdity of the current method of reporting budget numbers is that everyone knows it is awful. No reporter thinks that most of their readers understand the huge budget numbers that appear in news articles, especially when it is often not even clear the number of years involved. In fact, the budget reporters even managed to fool Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman about the size of the Republicans’ proposed cut to food stamps by not making it clear that the number was for 10 years and not 1 year. If Paul Krugman can be misled by budget reporting, does anyone really believe that a typical reader is being accurately informed?
There is no excuse for not expressing budget items as a share of the total budget in every article where they are discussed. The purpose of the news media is to inform, and it is not accomplishing this purpose now. This is a shift that requires zero money or training. (The Center for Economic and Policy Research has a budget calculator that allows the calculation to be done in seconds.) There is no one employed as a reporter at a major news outlet who would have any trouble using percentages in their pieces, if this was the standard.
So the story is really simple: the public confusion stems from incredibly incompetent budget reporting. The masses may or may not be stupid, but when it comes to knowing the relative importance of different items in the budget, the finger of blame should be pointed at the people who think they are smart.
http://mediamatters.org/research/2013/10/09/media-keeps-up-false-equivalency-reporting-on-g/196382
From the site:
Media outlets continue their campaign of false equivalency to misleadingly assign President Obama an equal share of the blame for not negotiating with Republicans to repeal, defund, or delay the Affordable Care Act to end the government shutdown. But polls show the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of GOP actions that led to the shutdown.
From the site:
What the report makes clear is that the current Republican obsession with attacking programs that benefit Americans in need, ranging from food stamps to Obamacare, isn’t about some philosophical commitment to small government, still less worries about incentive effects and implicit marginal tax rates. It’s about anxiety over a changing America — the multiracial, multicultural society we’re becoming — and anger that Democrats are taking Their Money and giving it to Those People. In other words, it’s still race after all these years.
