We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process is critical infrastructure, like the financial sector, like the power grid… There’s a vital national interest in our electoral process.
Professor Mankiw seems to be advocating for a system under which taxes are paid by people who work for a living, but not by people who get rich owning businesses that their parents and grandparents created
We need to explain why we believe that raising the income of working Americans is good, not just assert that it is.
Some people think that the American economy will totally fall apart if venture capitalists are required to pay the same income tax rates the rest of the working population.
Congress passed a new rule that did remove some of the gaming and tax sheltering that people used to do. But it also replaced one loophole with another.
Should businesses be trying to influence policy to increase their profits? Sometimes, lobbying and spending money on campaign donations to gain access to legislators seems like a good idea.
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Last week, David Samson, the now-former Chairman of the Board of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, pleaded guilty to bribery under a federal charge.
Let’s look into exactly what liberties the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is ‘denying’ American consumers.
Elected officials are unavoidably more inclined to answer to organized efforts by a small number of financial services executives who have a vested interest in continuing to make money than to the many Americans trapped in debt who do not have the means to get in front of their elected officials.
Very few of these business owners are invited to testify before a congressional committee that can take action about their complaints. The individuals who are granted the opportunity to argue their case before Congress often have one thing in common: they are wealthy political donors.
However, I believe that putting the bond holders ahead of the minimum wage workers (not to mention schools and hospitals) in priority does not promote economic growth.
Maybe each of the above situations is a violation of the Hobbs Act. Maybe none of them are. The difficult thing is that we don’t really have a law against political corruption.
We hear a lot of talk about pay: how much CEOs earn, how little waiters get, etc. While an important indicator, wages do not fully address the real inequality in our nation.
While I have no special expertise about sexual assaults, I do know a lot about how the wealthy elite have used their money to gain more political power. I would like to focus on the intersection of wealth and power that The Patriotic Millionaires have been talking about for some time.
The bankers (and their lawyers) are a lot better at finding loopholes in the law than are the rest of us.
The Patriotic Millionaires is an organization created to fight against the evil cycle of the richest people using their money to get more political power, and using their political power to get more money.
Stephen made a compelling and provocative argument that many corporate executives were raping their companies with the consent of the voting shareholders. He made a strong case that facilitating this was creating a risk to BlackRock’s reputation, just as allowing sexual harassment creates a risk to company’s reputations.
BlackRock almost always votes its shares in favor approving higher CEO pay for the companies in which they are invested… Our member, Steve Silberstein, disagrees.
The Patriotic Millionaires have suggested that the litmus test for political corruption should be to close the carried interest tax loophole, an egregious policy that allows investment fund managers to pay a much lower tax rate than everyone else
The first step to dealing with the problem of inequality in access to government is to just understand how unequal the system is. And it truly is that unequal now.