Weekend Reading

Is Trump Country Really Better Off Under Trump? No. It's Falling Further Behind
The Scandinavian Style Of Capitalism
What Do We Actually Know About The Economy? (Wonkish)
How The Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around The Country
A Stats-Based Look Behind The Venture Capital Curtain
Working Class People Are Underrepresented In Politics. The Problem isn't Voters.
P/E Ratios Are Misleading...Especially Right Now
America's Monopoly Problem In One Chart
America Has A Monopoly Problem - And It's Huge

Weekend Reading

State Shared Revenue: Not So Much Going On
The Story of Stagnant Wage Growth
An Unlikely Group Of Billionaires And Politicians Has Created The Most Unbelievable Tax Break Ever
So Many Seats, So Many Tax Breaks
This Is Why Lawmakers Want To Gut The Endangered Species Act
White Americans Support Welfare Programs - But Only For Themselves, Says New Research
Koch-backed Study Finds Medicare For All Would Save U.S. Trillions
Much Of The U.S. Electric Grid Could Go The Way Of The Landline Phone
Most Wealthy Countries Aren't Religious. Then There's The U.S.
Billionaires Gone Wild
How Government Helps The Economy
Rulers Of The World: Read Karl Marx
A Radical Defense Of The Right To Strike
Stock Buybacks, Explained
The Trump Administration's Giant Fuck You To Working People
Chris Abele Suspending Values Tour

Sunday Reading

Wisconsin Jobs Agency Writes Off $1.1 Million Loan Owed By DePere Businessman Jailed For Defrauding Investors
Three Reason Why The U.S. Is Vulnerable To Big Disasters - And Getting More Vulnerable All The Time
U.S Coal Industry Shows No Signs Of Comeback
High Court Sticks It To Milwaukee
Justice Kennedy Wasn't A Moderate
A Trade Tutorial For Trump
Which Anti-Poverty Programs Work
The Mind-Bendy Weirdness Of The Number Zero, Explained
In Many States, The End Of Roe V. Wade Is Already Here
Growth Benefits Of U.S. Tax Cuts May Be Overestimated: Fed Study
Fresh Proof That Strong Unions Help Reduce Income Inequality
New Study Confirms That American Workers Are Getting Ripped Off
Walker Protected Polluters Who Illegally Dumped Human Waste
How The Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around The Country

Weekend Reading

Koch-Backed Bill Guts Local Control
GOP Leaders Call Extraordinary Session To Change Election Laws

Legislators Pass Law to Benefit Landlords

Inflation? Bring It On. Workers Could Actually Benefit.

What Do We Know About Subsidized Employment Programs?

Six Teenagers Are Running For Governor In Kansas, And Suddenly This Doesn't Seem So Preposterous

Plight Of Phoenix: How Long Can The World's Least Sustainable City Survive?

Is Population Decline Bad?

Miller Park Tax Ends In 2020. Not.

How Vulture Capitalists Ate Toys 'R' Us

As Storms Get Stronger, Building Codes Are Getting Weaker

Wells Fargo CEO Is Getting A 36% Raise After The Bank's Nightmare Year

Kris Kobach Is A Loser

The Suburban Mystique

Sunday Reading

Wall Street Journal Hypes Financial Industry Scare Story On Public Pensions
Law Firm Exploring Whether Johnson Controls Merger Deal Wrongs Longtime Shareholders
Hard Money Men
Kasich Is Almost As Bad As Trump
Breaking Up The Big Banks Is Easy
Corporate Profits Near Record Highs. Here's Why That's A Problem
Kansas Tried Tax Cuts. Its Neighbor Didn't. Guess Which Worked.
Republicans Lied In Wisconsin
How Much Have Housing Prices Gone Up in 30 Years? Hint: Less Than a Big Mac

Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Could Block 300,000 Registered Voters From the Polls

The VA Isn’t Broken, Yet. Inside the Koch brothers’ campaign to dismantle the country’s most successful health care system.

Percentage of U.S. Adults Without Health Insurance

Hidden Healthcare Horrors

One of the odder subplots of the health reform saga has been the almost pathetic efforts of Republicans to come up with Obamacare horror stories. You might think that given the complexity of the law and the almost unlimited resources of the propaganda machine, they’d be able to come up with someone to serve as the poster child of the law’s terrible effects on innocent Americans. As far as I know, however, we have yet to see a single credible example — all the characters featured in Koch brothers ads or GOP speeches have turned out to be potential beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act, if only they were willing to look at their actual options. 

So Cathy McMorris Rodgers went on Facebook to ask for Obamacare horror stories — and instead got an avalanche of testimonials from people who got essential insurance and care thanks to the ACA. 

Why can’t the GOP find the horror stories it knows, just knows, must be out there? Matthew Yglesias gets at most of it by noting that Obamacare does, in fact, redistribute from the few to the many: 

[O]ne of the main things it does is raise taxes rather dramatically on a pretty small number of high-income people in order to give subsidized health insurance policies to a substantially larger number of low-income people. Indeed, this is one of the main things Republicans don’t like about it! 

But there’s a bit more to the story. Millionaires paying higher taxes aren’t the only people hurt, at least slightly, by the law. If you are a young. healthy person (especially if you’re male), living in a state that didn’t have community rating pre-ACA, you may have had a cheap policy that went up in price once the law went into effect; and if you’re affluent as well, you don’t receive subsidies. So there are victims out there. 

The problem for the GOP is that they’re the wrong kind of victims. What Republicans want are struggling, salt of the earth regular Americans, preferably older and with expensive medical conditions — not healthy, well-paid guys in their 20s. But the profile of the ideal Obamacare victim matches, pretty much exactly, the profile of the kind of person Obamacare was designed to help. 

And the inability of the GOP to come up with true horror stories is, in its own way, a demonstration that the law is working as intended.

Weekend Reading

Paul Ryan Declares War Against Math
The Remarkable Impact Of The Deep Tunnel
Corporate Deadbeats: How Companies Get Rich Off Taxes
Return Of The Bums On Welfare
Skill Gaps, Skill Shortages, And Skill Mismatches: Evidence For The U.S.
Rep. Paul Ryan's Whopper About Competitive Districts
Why Public Investment Really Is A Free Lunch
Unlike Walmart, Costco Has No Plans To Cut Employee Health Benefits
The Koch Brothers' War On Transit
Wisconsin Supreme Court Vs John Doe

Sunday Reading

Too Big To Fail. Not Too Strong
The Koch Attack On Solar Energy
Recovery Has Created More Low-Wage Jobs Than Better-Paid Ones
Coburn Says Let Free Market Decide Race To The Bottom On Wages
Scalia Makes Huge Factual Error In Supreme Court Opinion
Do Fewer Unions Make Countries More Competitive?
There's No Evidence Privatization Works, But it Marches On
How Global Warming Is Scorching The United States
Charter Schools Fail: Report Calls Their Magic Into Question

Sunday Reading

Comparing Recessions & Recoveries
Dissecting Romney's Statement
Fantastic News On Jobs
It Pays To Be Rich
Koch Brothers & Allies Pledge $100 Million To Beat Obama
The One Percent Versus The Twenty Percent
Private Equity & "Job Creation"
Rachel Maddow Mocks Mitt Romney
Romney's Gift From Congress
Soaking The Poor, State By State
Why Don't We Pay People Enough?
Why The GOP Should Stop Invoking Reaganomics
Why The Super Bowl Is Socialist

Happy Holidays

Phony Legislation

Midweek Reading

Business As Usual

How Koch Industries Makes Billions By Demanding Bailouts & Subsidies

Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About

The Rich Have Recovered, The Country Hasn't

Six Tests For Corporate Tax Reform

Wisconsin's Legacy of Labor Battles

Wisconsin Union Fight Isn't About Benefits

Weekend Reading

Blame Wall Street

Corporate tax revenue nearing historic lows

Economic Pain Is Coming From CEOs

Free Trade Is Great, But Offshoring Rattles Me

How You Can Boycott The Kochs

GOP budget cut could trim 200,000 jobs

Revisiting Wage Stagnation

Scott Walker: Selling Out His Constituents

Serious Ethics Violations By Scott Walker

Union Busting Is Theft -- Class Warfare From Above

Walker Roadmap For Conservative State Governance

Yes, America Still Needs Unions

Misdirection & Ulterior Motives

A false equivalence, being repeated throughout the media, is that it's unfair to make some people, who make less than public workers, especially during these tough times, pay taxes for unionized compensation that is higher than certain taxpayers' own earnings. It's just not fair.

But what about private sector workers making more than public workers? An enormous amount of state and federal spending is corporate, private-sector welfare. Why shouldn't they have to sacrifice? As AIG, Citigroup, Lehman, et al, have shown us, they are on the public dole just as much as any public worker. Although, I'm not aware of any public worker seeing a million dollar bonus or compensation anywhere near that of the priviged, private-sector titans.

If we compare working class people with the highest-paid public sector workers, and then compared those same working class citizens with the highest-paid private workers, which would have the bigger discrepancy? It's not even close. The "well-paid" in the private sector have earnings that dwarf anything a public worker could dream of.

Not all public workers make more than private sector workers. In fact, most make LESS. Some public workers make more than other public workers. The same happens in the private sector, where certain private sector workers make more than other private sector workers. There are private sector workers that make more than public sector workers, and vice versa. 60% of Wisconsin's public workers have a 4-year college degree - and these workers earn less than their private sector counterparts.

There are private CEOs in Wisconsin making more in a year than a unionized employee could make in a lifetime. But...somehow...that isn't unfair? Why aren't we asking to see some sacrifice from them? We seem to be fooling ourselves with the belief that the working- and middle-class have been living the high-life these past few decades. Everyday workers have not been the ones garnering the gains of the last quarter century. The "winners" have been the richest of the rich. The top percent of richest Americans has more wealth as the bottom 50 percent! We should also note that over 50% of the population earns less than $48,000 per year. Nearly 85% of Americans earn under $100,000 per year.

There are taxpayers without children, yet their taxes still fund schools. Some people don't own a car, but their taxes allow roads and plowing. Certain citizens never enjoy our park system, but they still pay for it. There are many things some of us may never, or rarely, use. Yet, we still pay taxes for them, because they are still very important to many businesses and citizens in our state, and therefore an important part of our economy, infrastructure, and future.

Another element that is being pushed aside (in this well-choreographed misdirection and attack on collective bargaining) in this discussion is the fact that public workers are providing us with a service. Public workers are actually doing work. They are providing services we all count on. Services we decided long ago were better provided through the public sector rather than a private, corporate, for-profit entity. Sewer, water, education, public works, police, fire, health services, transportation, public spaces, to name a few.

State and local government spending is one of the most stimulative expenditures/investments government can make. For every $1 invested in states and localities, $1.41 is returned. That's a very good bang for the buck. The idea that we are losing money through our investment in the public sector is totally false. We experience a net gain from such funding. A 41% return on your investment is excellent, in case you were wondering.

This is typical Republican politics. They protect the wealth of their campaign benefactors. And, they're rewarded handsomely for doing so. It's not about governing for these paid-for corporate shills. It's about entrenching wealth and power.

The Koch brothers (surely you've read something about them by now) have been big funders of Scott Walker's campaign and policy efforts. The Koch brothers have a serious business presence in Wisconsin, and therefore, a lucrative interest in our politics and policy. The brothers are, "Huge polluters, emitting thousands of pounds of toxic pollutants. As soon as he got into office Walker started cutting environmental regulations and appointed a Republican known for her disregard for environmental regulations to lead the Department of Natural Resources. In addition Walker has stated his opposition to clean energy job policies that might draw workers away from Koch-owned interests."

The nefarious activities of the private sector have multiplied over the last 40 years. As Chuck Collins said, "Everytime a politician complains that 'there is no money' or 'we must make these cuts,' we should be pointing to the corporate tax dodging that could immediately close our budget gap...They pretend their profits are earned in tax havens like the Grand Cayman Islands and their losses are earned in the U.S., lowering their tax bill."

As Robert Freeman reports, "Corporate profits are at an all-time high. But corporate taxes are among the lowest in the industrial world. Income inequality is at its highest level since 1917. Between 2000 and 2006, the two-thirds of all growth in the entire economy we to the top 1%."

"During the second world war, income tax receipts from corporations were 50% greater than from individuals. By the 1980s, individual income taxes regularly yielded four times more than taxes on corporations," explained Yves Smith. It should also be noted that during the period(1947 to 1973), the U.S. also experienced its greatest period of economic growth in the history of our country.

Following the advice of Rahm Emanuel ("Never waste a crisis"), the Republicans are manufacturing a "crisis" to rush through their crony policies. As Brian Beutler reminds us, "Democrats faced a shortfall twice as large ahead of the previous budget cycle and managed to close the gap." Why do we have another gap? It's the economy, stupid! It's not suddenly, after operating for decades, the fault of unions.

For Further Reading:

Corporate Welfare

The Great American Jobs Scam

Snow Day Reading

Disconnect Between Economic Growth & Median Income

Koch Brothers Earned Billions, Laid Off Thousands

Obama's Bid To End Oil Subsidies

Obscene Bonuses For Execs

There's No Such Thing As The Free Market

Wall Street Pay Hits Record High