Visual source: Newseum
Eduardo Porter says that far from having fuzzy goals, OWS protestors are right on target.
Wall Street financiers were always well paid. In the last three decades their representation at the very top of the income pyramid has grown by leaps and bounds. A recent study by two academic economists and a Treasury Department analyst found that financiers — bankers, fund managers and the like — account for about 14 percent of the taxpayers in the top percentile of income distribution. There are more non-financial business executives than bankers in this wealthiest slice of income. But their share of this slice fell over the past quarter century, while the financiers’ share grew substantially. Today financiers account for 16 percent of the income of the top percentile, up from 9 percent in 1979. Their share is now almost as big as that of lawyers and doctors combined.
With tax cuts and deregulation, Wall Street ceased to be a service for the rest of the nation and became a place to simply get very wealthy, very quickly. OWS is after the right people, and it's in the right place.
Frank Bruni can't reconcile the gap between the surplus of circuses and the lack of bread.
BEING surprised by something nutty from Herman Cain’s presidential campaign is like balking at an autopsy in a “CSI” episode: certain things go with the territory.
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Meanwhile Rick Perry, who would trade his five best pairs of custom-made cowboy boots for just one of Cain’s percentage points in the polls, tried to steal the dubious thunder of the Herminator’s 9-9-9 tax hallucination by announcing an either-or, multiple-choice tax phantasm of his own.
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In the midst of all this, two attention-commanding sets of numbers were released. One, from the Congressional Budget Office, confirmed an increasingly uneven distribution of wealth in this country, noting that the inflation-adjusted incomes of the most affluent Americans had grown much, much faster over the last three decades than the incomes of the middle class. The other, from a New York Times/CBS News poll, showed that 74 percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and 89 percent do not trust that government will do the right thing.
I'm convinced that the purpose of the GOP primary has nothing to do with selecting which candidate will lose to President Obama. It's entirely a distraction, a national shout of "look over there!" while the folks on Wall Street try to carry off the 2% of national wealth they don't already own.
Ross Douthat can see clearly enough that the nation is out of kilter.
Over the last 30 years, the U.S. economy has generated more large fortunes and more stress for the middle class. While the rich have grown extraordinarily rich, median wages have barely increased, the costs of health care and higher education have jumped, and socioeconomic mobility has lagged behind that of other developed nations. Americans have never begrudged the wealthy their success, as long as they had a chance to rise higher than their parents, and perhaps get rich themselves. But our era of diminished expectations is putting that in doubt.
However, he moves from there to a "don't touch the rich" position, arguing that taking more money from the rich is just going to prop up the retirement and health care that the rest of the nation needs for years, or decades (gee, who would want that) and ignoring that it would take only minor adjustments to actually keep programs sound indefinitely. Eventually it all comes down to Douthat pining for Chris Christie, who could have done a much better job of holding up the delusion of conservative economics than any of the clear nut cases actually running. Douthat is worried that with the current crop of Republicans, we might wake up before the last crumbs are carried away.
Craig Lambert looks at the economy of "shadow work."
The other night at the supermarket I saw a partner at a downtown law firm working as a grocery checker, scanning bar codes. I’m sure she earns at least $300,000 per year. Even so, she was scanning and bagging her purchases in the self-service checkout line. For those with small orders, this might save time spent waiting in slower lines. Nonetheless, she was performing the unskilled, entry-level jobs of supermarket checker and bagger free of charge.
It's hard not to think that the $300k partner wouldn't benefit from a little grocery bagging time, but there's a cost to shadow work.
Science fiction novels of a half-century ago dramatized conflicts between humans and robots, asking if people were controlling their technologies, or if the machines were actually in charge. A few decades later, with the digital revolution in juggernaut mode, the verdict is in. The robots have won. Although the automatons were supposedly going to free people by taking on life’s menial, repetitive tasks, frequently, technological innovation actually offloads such jobs onto human beings.
We're becoming a "no service" economy, where people are increasingly willing to fill in for missing workers by doing for themselves what we used to expect from the businesses we visited. Why do grocery stories put up a self-service lane? Not because it moves you through faster. Because it saves them the salaries of checkers and baggers. It reduces jobs, and we help them do it.
The New York Times says that there's actually one debate the GOP candidates aren't eager to join.
There are almost 12 million potential Hispanic voters in the United States. And both parties say they are eager to court their votes. So one has to wonder why the Republican presidential contenders would miss the chance to debate before the largest possible audience of Spanish-language television viewers.
This month, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman Jr., Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich said they would not participate in a debate on Univision tentatively scheduled for Jan. 29, before Florida’s Republican primary. Instead, they are expected to debate in December on NBC’s Telemundo, which has less than a third of Univision’s typical evening audience.
Why not debate on the much more popular Univision? First off, they had the bad taste to tell the truth about a drug conviction in Marco Rubio's family. Secondly, Univision may be
too popular. Republicans don't want to be seen answering questions about immigration in a forum where they don't feel free to kick an electric fence and a few alligators into their answer.
The New York Times notes one program where we could make immediate cuts saving billions of dollars. Why isn't this item first on the super-committee's chopping block?
Twenty years after the end of the cold war, the United States still has about 2,500 nuclear weapons deployed and 2,600 more as backup. The Obama administration, in an attempt to mollify Congressional Republicans, has also committed to modernizing an already hugely expensive complex of nuclear labs and production facilities. Altogether, these and other nuclear-related programs could cost $600 billion or more over the next decade. The country does not need to maintain this large an arsenal. It should not be spending so much to do it, especially when Congress is considering deep cuts in vital domestic programs.
The number of weapons is ridiculous. The modernization program is entirely pointless. The testing regime is absolutely unnecessary. Naturally, we can't cut here.
Leonard Pitts points up the amendment that is increasingly ignored, when it's not being treated as downright un-American.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated . . . — Fourth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
Just in case you forgot.
There has been, after all, an appalling amount of forgetting where that amendment is concerned. And New York City has become the epicenter of the amnesia. Yes, the “stop and frisk” policy of questioning and searching people a cop finds suspicious is used elsewhere as well. But it is in the big, bruised apple that the issue now comes to a head.
600,000 people, 85% of them black or Hispanic, were frisked in New York City last year. Less than 2% of them turned out to be carrying illegal drugs or weapons. At that rate, we might as well just go house to house and turn everyone out naked—it would certainly be no more in opposition to the Constitution.
Gonad Chomping Bacteria. Did that get your attention? It's even weirder than it sounds.
The many strains of Wolbachia can do some amazing things to their insect hosts: changing their sex, killing their offspring, and possibly even creating new species. And, in the process, they might just provide enough benefits for their hosts to make it all worthwhile.
It's hard to think that getting your gonads gnawed off by a bacteria might be a
good thing, but as it turns out... read the article.
Climate change holds some mysteries for the future, but there are some known changes coming.
Warm air holds more moisture: about 5 per cent more for each 1°C temperature increase. This means more rain or snow overall, and more intense rain or snowfall on average.This trend is already evident, and is stronger than models predict.
More intense precipitation means more floods. While we can't say whether a particular flood is due to climate change, modelling indicates that climate change is making such events far more likely and more extreme.
More floods, and perversely, more droughts, are in our future. Oh yeah, and more snows. Enjoy the white stuff, Northeast.