I Hope This Conclusion is Right

This is a great tear-down of Timmy's play time at the Fed and Treasury.  It ends rather optimistically and I really hope that is correct.  It does seem that Democrats are moving away from corruption (while the GOP is ready to hop in and scoop up the leavings).  Still, one Senator Elizabeth Warren does not a movement make. The Democratic party (and, frankly, the US) needs more of her.

Family Leave

We should have it, and it should be very much like that in Sweden.  Oddly, it's an issue that traditional conservatives should embrace along with the liberals, except that it runs hard up against the corporate conservatism that actually owns the Republican party (and yes, it largely owns the Democratic party as well).

Minimum Wage vs. Minimum Guaranteed Income

I used to be very much on the side of raising the minimum wage to something "livable", at least $10 and maybe as much as $15/hr ($20k - $30k/year).  I still think we would be better off as a nation (and with many much better off than now) if we doubled it, but I am starting to come around to minimum guaranteed income (this has come up again regarding the civil rights movement, radical socialists that they were).

Minimum guaranteed income does a lot of lifting on a lot of issues--it would have to be set appropriately, but it could be used to eliminate most welfare programs, from cash payments to snap to housing (section 8), and would make useless some of our tax code complexity (we would need to seriously overhaul the tax code to do this anyway).  It also takes a lot of the perceived burden off employers, where we could let the free market reign: if people are willing to work for an extra $2.50/hr, then employers could pay that, but if, as I suspect, people who had more freedom to pick and chose, decided that their time and effort was worth more than it is when they have to take some job, any job, to survive, then employers would be forced by teh markets to pay higher salaries. 

People at the bottom of the income ladder would be far more free, and have greater opportunities.  At the top end: no bitching because they get that money too (well, less, all taxes would need to go up in this scenario).
On top of that, if you look to discussion about the hollowing out of the middle (automation now taking middle class jobs away) as a phenomenon that is likely to continue and expand, then this becomes the best solution.  Technology and enhanced productivity make us wealthier as a society, but the distribution becomes more unequal and the price to pay is that we must transfer some of those benefits down to the people who lost out because of them.  Having a minimum income does just that. 

As for the level...$16k is a fair starting point: it covers bare basics (well, not health care but so long as we're fixing things, we have single payer here) but there is still lots of incentive to work and pull that up.  Probably it would be something along the lines of [GDP/total population/x] where x is some age dependent scaling factor, maybe in the in the 3-5 range for 18+, and 10-20 for under 18 (money to parent/guardian). 

Randian Destroys Business...

Bloomberg has an amusing read on the clusterfuck that is Lampert's management of Sears (well, amusing provided you don't work for Sears/Kmart in which case it is probably horribly depressing).  I do want to make a quick note about this lunatic in charge.  When he responded thus:

“Decentralized systems and structures work better than centralized ones because they produce better information over time,” Lampert writes. “The downside is that, to some, it appears messier than centralized systems.”

He wasn't entirely wrong.  I don't know about better, but decentralized systems certainly produce easier to extract information over time.  One of the problems of centralized systems is that there are lots of feedback systems that are very difficult to accurately measure/discern.  But that difficulty doesn't make the centralized system worse (or, technically, better) it just makes it harder to break down and quantify. 

In the case of Sears, if appliances bring people into the store, but they can get better margins on baby products, then it may be a good idea for those two to team up: offer a special on washing machines (new baby: more laundry) to get people in the door and position the sale item very close to the baby merchandise.  In Lampert world, however, you can't do this because appliances would see a drop in profitability while baby-whatever sees the gain, so next time around baby people get more money/space in the catalog/whatever, and appliances gets less, but because it is appliances that brings more people in the doors, the switch means fewer people come in and lower revenue all around.

Of course, Lampert is a Randian, and those people are largely out of their minds, but putting one of their true believers in charge of a company is mystifying.  Most of our corporate overlords spout that crap but don't really believe it...or so I'd always assumed. 

U.S. Beer Market

It is still astounding to me that, even with the rise of small breweries and brewpubs/brewery restaurants, that Inbev and Miller-Coors have 80% of the beer market in this country.  More astounding, still to me, is that if you look at all the independent brewers (which includes Samuel Adams), their entire market share is 6%!  That number is more astounding by the fact that prices for those beers are higher (sometimes much higher). 

On the one hand, I don't know why anyone buys Budweiser or Miller Lite at just about any level.  Really, it's kind of creepy, and pretty much reinforces that I will continue to not buy those beers for reasons that go beyond: "They suck."

Fuck You, Apple

Apple is really just the worst offender on this crap.  And they want a repatriation tax discount/holiday so that their behavior will go almost completely unpunished.  What we should do is state that US companies holding money overseas pay a 5% surtax on any profits not repatriated within 1 year, and no discounts for bringing it back.  Make it more expensive for them to keep their profits sheltered abroad.  Now this may mean more cooking the books to hide money, but at some point that becomes illegal and even if it isn't it would hurt share prices.

Unbelievable

Really, this response is all you need read, but the original article is just...Wow.  It's like reading an Onion piece.  McDonald's pays most of their employees minimum wage and little to no benefits.  Of course they have shitty service.  Thankfully, the commenters at the article are, with one exception, completely on target.

$10 an Hour is $20k per Year

...And that is if you can manage full time.  That may be a lot of money to a high school student with approaching $0 in living expenses, but for most people it is hardly anything.  Yes, such a person will (almost certainly) qualify for EITC which puts real money back in their pocket, but SS/Medicare and most state income taxes don't give a damn.  Just the SS/Medicare portion will cost said individual $1500.

No, our politicians, and their money masters have no concept of what people in these circumstances have to deal with: "work harder!", "go back to school!", and any other patronizing response are not helpful, and often not possible.  Also, too: they don't care.

Things I can't get too excited about...

Ikea removing women from ads.  Ads exist to sell things.  If showing women in a bikinis helps to sell, then companies do that.  If adding a dog or cat helps to sell, then companies do that.  So it seems pretty obvious that a company trying to sell into a very misogynistic society that finds images of women to be highly offensive, would not show images of women.  I suppose they could have removed all the people so that it was less...obvious?...but if people in the ads helps sales, and women hurt, then you will see ads with people but not women. 

Now, the anti-woman attitude in Saudi Arabia is certainly highly offensive, and anyone who is really offended about this should be offended that Ikea is selling there at all, not that they removed women from the ads.  Maybe Ikea should be trying to change the world by opening a store then publishing an ad that will offend the people who could shop there?  Maybe by offending some, Ikea could have reaped huge rewards from all the women who would come to purchase things there in support?  ...Or maybe it's all a clever ruse, and after they sell a certain amount they will announce that the entire supply chain producing furniture for Saudi Arabia was composed of lesbians...lesbians who had sex on all the furniture before it shipped infecting it with the highly contagious lesbianacervix bacterium which makes male dangly bits turn to sand and fall off.

Or maybe Ikea wants to make money and it's cheap and easy to Photoshop out the women...

Large companies can--and it is admirable when they do--challenge the status quo and be a force for good, but I don't really expect it of them--though maybe I should--and I get a little confused when other people do.  In reality the bigger the company, the less concern it has for anything other than profit.  Smaller companies and businesses care about their workers because the CEO has to see them every day.  They care about the community because it affects their workers and because they live there (or at least have to drive through).

Bankers Should Go to Jail

Not all of them, certainly, but if you manage to arrest the CEO or board members of just one bank engaging in crap like this story I heard this morning, then I'll bet we would start to see a whole lot less of that type crap. Also, too, foreclosure fraud.

Seriously: just arrest a few of 'em and sentence them to 5 years--maybe start with Jaime Dimon? Not nearly enough of a penalty for the harm they have inflicted and are inflicting, but it would get the rest in line right quick. Either that or they would "go Galt" and we would still have a better society as a result.

Corporate Creepy!

This article on Target and marketing statistics is all kinds of creepy, but the goal I find perfectly reasonable and I'm ok with it. One of the comments said that the purpose of marketing was to make people buy things they don't need, but in a lot of cases it is to redirect the purchase of those things they don't need away from someone else.

A new mom may not need a baby crib at all, but there's a good chance she'll get one anyway, and so Target just wants to be the place she gets it. They aren't trying to change what she buys, just where she looks/buys it.

...doesn't make it not creepy:

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

Austerity: The Cure That Kills

Totally preventable suffering of real people, so that the moneylenders can get their pound of flesh. I'm don't really care if our rulers are stupid, evil, or (most likely) both. This is just horrible. The article concludes:

Why, Mr. Lains asks, should he and his fellow citizens suffer while the bondholders get their money back? “It’s not the fault of the Portuguese people,” he said. “The fault lies with the structure of the euro.”

People suffer, the economy craters, but the bankers must be paid off! Too bad no one that actually understands things gets to affect outcomes.

Buffett Rule

There are some good points against such a rule in this Forbes article. Notably the inflation issue, which is a huge problem for long held cap gains. Also it was helpful for me to see some of the distinction. What it doesn't deal with, however, is the major issue that the Buffett Rule is supposed to solve, namely: It isn't fair that multi-millionaires and billionaires receiving (many) millions in cap gains per year but next to nothing else are taxed at a ridiculously low level.

I'm sure that there are better fixes available (some combination of corporate/debt tax rewriting), and it could be that the Buffett rule on its own is a bad plan, but so too is keeping things like they are.

Note: reinstatement of the estate tax to pre-Bush levels actually helps a lot, and combined with an inflation adjusted cap gains rate of 25%, reduction of the corporate rate to 20% (closing all loopholes), and probably something else...not gonna happen.

More Venting About The 1%

The NY Times has a nice fluff piece on the 1% here which includes lots of completely irrelevant and rather stupid bits of information. The worst offender is the note that being in the local 1% is different in different places. No shit, because people with shit-tons of wealth tend to live in wealthy places just like poor people tend to live in poor places. Because where we live is a reflection of our wealth/income/status not the other fucking way around!

Someone living in Nassau can't cry about being poor because they only make $400k and then proceed to bitch that it doesn't go far because the cheap houses in Nassau are $500k, and private schools are expensive, and...STFU! Where you live has zero effect on whether you are rich or not, because--and this seems really hard for lots of the 1% to grasp--you can fucking move! You can even move and live in the same area. There are plenty of New York City residents that make way under $100k/year, so it's possible. It isn't even that fucking hard.

So, no, $500k, $400k, even the paltry sum of $250k is not poor, or middle class. So while a just starting out MD with $100k in loan debt making $150k/year can't afford to take a helicopter to work, or to spend a week on a private island, or to own a 40' yacht (at least not yet), they don't have any financial hardship that should merit any sympathy from anyone else on the planet.

Moreover, and this is another gripe, but it isn't even that they don't deserve or didn't earn the money (though for lots of the top 0.1% that may be true, especially when it comes to wealth not income), it's that they aren't some put-upon, downtrodden, schlemiel trying to make ends meet.

Rich people, particularly the hardworking, well educated variety, are not hated in this country. Not even close. The inequality (of opportunity) is. If you are born to poor, uneducated parents today, you're kind of screwed. Very, very few work their way up from that, and many of those that have did so more than 20 years ago when the playing field was more even than today. The past 10 years has seen such dramatic shift in government encouraged inequality that no one who really pulled his/herself up by the bootstraps can really speak to what that means unless they are under 40, and even then it's iffy. This country is that much different.

Pretty much all Americans dream of being rich someday. A majority of Americans consider that to be ~$150k/year. That's a lot of money, even in New York.

[Big] Banks...Still Evil

I hope that Occupy Wall Street is causing this change in bank behavior. But I would be much happier if this works:

...several companion movements, such as National Bank Transfer day...“revitalized a citizen’s movement to take money out of the large Wall Street banks and to put it into community banks or credit unions.”

People should drop Bank of America like the bad bet they are. Here are current BofA rates of return for money market accounts:
Ponder, for a second, that they have a bracket for people with $2.5 million stashed in a money market fund. Then ponder that the rates are, across the board, abysmal. Now look at my little, local credit union rates:
The $5 to open share account returns the best rate possible from BofA. Even better, the rates at the other credit union where I am a member:
I get a better rate of return on $30 than someone at BofA with $30 million. Why the hell would anyone keep their money in a big bank? Back in the day--the '30's?--you may have had more security, but the share accounts at (these and most) credit unions are FDIC insured so there is no more risk here than at BofA. Also, too, these credit unions didn't need bailing out so what risk is present is, if anything, lower.

But No One Will Listen

Matt Taibbi is right that OWS and Tea Partiers (at least as they were initially conceived) are natural allies against the too big to fail, big government dependent financial industry. But that is complicated and hard, and too many Democrats (and allies) and Republicans (and allies) are scrambling to work OWS into the same divide that they fit everything else into.

It also neglects the fact that while when the Tea Party started a couple years ago they were very much anti-TARP and anti-bailout, they have morphed into ultra-conservative Republicans. It wasn't long before tea party events were being sponsored by pro-corporate pseudo-Libertarians, and that anger was quickly redirected to being against taxes (on the wealthy) and against regulation (a very pro-corporate stance).

OWS seems, in no small part, a reaction to the Tea Partyification of the GOP.

There has not been a place in politics for populism in the past maybe 30 years. "What's the Matter with Kansas" does a pretty good job of explaining how the GOP has managed to use wedge issues to get lots of people to vote against their own best interest. Democrats have, in response, pushed further to the right themselves on some notion of capturing that elusive "moderate" "middle of the road" voter that doesn't really exist. Most people in this country are very poorly served by both parties. Companies are, on the other hand, very well served by both parties.

Money has so much power that when the Tea Party started to rise up against the GOP's horrible anti-American policies, they were gobbled up whole by the party that they wanted to change. The few wacko candidates that they worked into the GOP have been even more pro-corporate pro-wealth, anti-regular American, than those already there. Now OWS has arisen, purportedly from the left, but really from a slightly different anti-politics-as-usual popular front in this nation. So far they have been more successful than was the Tea Party at keeping "above the fray" of politics, but I wonder how long it can last.

People are not happy. The rich are doing fine and the rest are suffering. The financial industry wrecked the economy and not only got off scot-free but were bailed out by the rest of us, who have gotten nothing back. OWS is the response.

Most of the media has some interest in placing OWS into a camp, either to attack, or to co-opt, or to simplify...mostly to simplify. While the populist movement has a rather simple reason for being, the specifics for what can/should/must be done and in what order and how are myriad and become complex when trying to figure out. Moreover, even for the policy savvy (like Matt Taibbi) there isn't really a simple solution, and politically there isn't really a possible solution.

Tax Repatriation Holiday Suggestion

Coming from this post...I would change it from "Holiday" to "Penalty". Basically, congress could say that firms repatriating funds pay an additional penalty of 5% (in some fashion that doesn't discourage international investment/business, maybe by having it only applied to funds in excess of their net international [sales]). Then say that the penalty will be enacted in the near future, maybe next year. Companies will be motivated to get that money back into the US (which they clearly want to do otherwise the holiday idea would be worthless) before the penalty kicks in.

The result would be a rush to get funds repatriated before the penalty kicks in and less hoarding of money abroad in the future.