This is a great article on economics and what's wrong with the current economic debate. I'll include a little in this post.
Hudson on Junk Economics
The Toll Booth Economy
By MICHAEL HUDSON
America's regressive tax policies and the leeching of the finance/insurance/real estate (FIRE) sectors on the real economy are reducing American competitiveness:
What is not heard is a call to finance Social Security and Medicare out of the general budget instead of keeping their funding as a special regressive tax on labor and its employers, available for plunder by Congress to finance tax cuts for the upper wealth brackets. Yet how can America achieve industrial competitiveness in global markets with this pre-saving retirement tax and privatized health insurance, debt-leveraged housing costs and related personal and corporate debt overhead?
Hudson on shifting taxes to wealth rather than labor:
Surprisingly, one does not hear even an echo of calls to restore state and local property taxes to their Progressive Era levels so as to collect the "free lunch" of land rent and use its gains over time as the main fiscal base. This would hold down land prices (and hence, mortgage debt) by preventing rising location values from being capitalized and paid out as interest to the banks. It would have the additional advantage of shifting the fiscal burden off income and sales (a policy that raises the price of labor, goods and services). Instead, most reforms today call for further cutting property taxes to promote more "wealth creation" in the form of higher debt-leveraged property price inflation. The idea is to leave more rental income to be capitalized into yet larger mortgages and paid out as interest to the financial sector. Instead of housing prices falling and income and sales taxes being reduced, rising site values merely will be paid to the banks, not to the local tax authorities. The latter are forced to shift the fiscal burden onto consumers and business.
On minimizing economic free lunches:
What have been lost are the Progressive Era’s two great reforms. First, minimizing the economy’s free lunch of unearned income (e.g., monopolistic privilege and privatization of the public domain in contrast to one’s own labor and enterprise) by taxing absentee property rent and asset-price ("capital") gains, keeping natural monopolies in the public domain, and anti-trust regulation. The aim of progressive economic justice was to prevent exploitation – e.g., charging more than the technologically necessary costs of production and reasonable profits warranted. This aim had a fortuitous byproduct that made the Progressive Era reforms seem likely to conquer the world in a Darwinian evolutionary manner: Minimization of the free lunch enabled economies such as the United States to out-compete others that didn’t enact progressive fiscal and financial policy.
On today's neofeudalism:
Today, the financial sector is translating its affluence (at taxpayer expense), into the political power to pry yet more public infrastructure away from state and local communities and from the public domain at the national level, Thatcher- and Blair-style as it is sold off to absentee buyers-on-credit to pay off public debt (while cutting taxes on wealth yet further). No one remembers the cry for what Keynes called "euthanasia of the rentier." We have entered the most oppressive rentier epoch since feudal European times. Instead of providing basic infrastructure services at cost or subsidized rates to lower the national cost structure and thus make it more affordable – and internationally competitive – the economy is being turned into a collection of tollbooths. How strange that this year’s transitory wave of post-bubble books fails to place the financialization of the U.S. and global economies in this long-term context.
There's much more good stuff in the article at the link above as well.