Economics Archives - Page 2 of 20

Corporations

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

From government oversight to “financial literacy”

April 30, 2024 • by Basak Kus

Consumer protection started to be seen as a responsibility that individuals, deemed rational and capable, were expected to shoulder themselves, assuming they were provided adequate information about the terms of exchange. ...

The Evolution of America’s (Un)protected Consumer

Habitats

Market Failures

How do we protect consumers from their own mistakes?

November 27, 2023 • by Cass R. Sunstein

Most motor vehicles emit pollution, including greenhouse gases, and use gasoline that increases national dependence on foreign oil. On standard economic grounds, the result is a market failure in the form of excessive pollution, for which some kind of cap-and-trade system or corrective tax is the best response, designed to ...

Economy

Why We Should Worry about Inequality

And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill

January 11, 2023 • by David Lay Williams

Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...

Politics

What You Don’t Know Can’t TIF You

Pretend something isn’t a problem and it goes away, right?

September 29, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

TIFs date back to the 1950s, and every state except Arizona has them in one form or another. There are thousands upon thousands of TIF districts all across the country. Chances are decent you’ve heard about one in your local area....

Economy

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Do poor Americans have too much?

September 27, 2022 • by David Lay Williams

According to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Phil Gramm and John Early, the problem is not that the wealthiest Americans have seen their fortunes dramatically explode. It is rather that the poorest Americans have too much! ...

The Wall Street Journal Resurrects Mandeville

Economy

State Secrets

Let’s ban non-disclosure agreements in government economic development deals

March 23, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ Sometime later this year, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, city council will vote on whether to give a 10-year, $16 million property tax break to the builder of a new warehouse. There is an issue, however, one that goes beyond the potential loss of public money. The city council members – ...

Economy

Location, Location, Location!

Why tax breaks are such a negligible part of corporate decision-making

March 18, 2021 • by Pat Garofalo

_____ Last month, Macy’s received a slew of job creation tax credits from the Ohio Tax Credit Authority to expand a warehouse in Jackson Township, a city located within easy reach of both Canton and Cleveland. One of the township trustees — which is akin to a city council member — had ...

Past Present

Minimum Wage and the Fight for $15

Past Present Podcast, Episode 269

March 2, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: House Democrats have proposed a federally guaranteed fifteen-dollar an hour minimum wage as part of their coronavirus relief bill. Niki drew on this New York Times piece about the effective minimum wage, and Neil referenced this New Yorker article about ...

Columnists

The Trump Administration Wanted You and Your Kids to Get Sick

December 17, 2020 • by Heather Cox Richardson

The reality that Joe Biden is about to become president, and Kamala Harris vice president, is sinking in across Washington, and we now have some indications of what that’s going to mean. Stories about what exactly happened in the Trump administration are coming out, and they are not pretty. For members ...

The Trump Administration Wanted You and Your Kids to Get Sick

Democracy

The Democrats’ Four-Year Reprieve

How did Donald Trump manage to win an even larger number of votes than in 2016, despite lies, corruption, and a bungled pandemic response?

November 19, 2020 • by Dani Rodrik

As Joe Biden eked out a victory in the U.S. presidential election after a few suspenseful days, observers of American democracy were left scratching their heads. Buoyed by polls, many expected a landslide for the Democrats, with the party capturing not only the White House but also the Senate. How ...

Capitalism

Why Business Depends on Big Government

The economy was meant to be underwritten by tax dollars—but Americans don’t want to know that

October 20, 2020 • by Lawrence Glickman

————— One of the most telling statements of our political era was made by Republican Dick Cheney in a Vice Presidential debate with Democrat Joe Lieberman on October 5, 2000, 20 years ago this month. Lieberman jibed that Cheney, the Republican nominee, had profited handsomely from the job he had recently ...

Activism

Remembering and Resisting the Age of Reagan

An activist historian advises his students that the choices they make now will shape their future

September 24, 2020 • by James Goodman

______ It was November 1980, two months after my girlfriend and I moved to New York City from Boston, where we had met a year before. I had just started in the M.F.A. program at Columbia and she had just started a job at a small press, managing the production of ...