Thomas Piketty

How Important Is It To You And Your Family That The Super-Rich Pay Their Fair Share?

In 2011, when progressives proposed a 5.6% surtax on millionaires to pay for Obama's jobs program, conservatives whose primary job is, after all, to represent the interests of millionaires, went wild, accusing the Democrats of "class war." The GOP responded, as usual, with the same old tropes about how taxing the rich would discourage job creation and how small businesses would suffer. But, historically, even responsible Republicans have supported federal income taxes.

Alan Grayson: Why Democratic Voters Stay Home

Jane Wyatt, formerly of Father Knows Best, as Spock's mother Amanda Grayson in the original Star Trek series. Does this mean Spock and Alan Grayson are future relatives? by Gaius PubliusJust a short piece on the stay-at-home phenomenon among Democratic voters. Many of us have written about it, including myself, as a rejection of the wealth-serving direction of the mainstream of the party.

Capital Must Be Taxed

In the 1940s, following decades of booms, busts, unemployment, disorder, wars and destruction, rigid free market policies were abandoned. Governments began to deliberately act to maintain employment and market demand. This shift was identified with J.M. Keynes, a prominent British economist and government adviser who had made the case that classical economics was wrong. Depressions, he wrote, were not caused by a decline in the supply of capital but by a fall in demand caused by declining wages and rising unemployment.

Is Tomorrow's Primary In New York Important At All?

Tomorrow is election day in New York. Reform-minded Democrats are threatening to do the impossible: upend the career of a very powerful conservative Governor, Andrew Cuomo but defeating him and his handpicked right-wing candidate for Lieutenant Gov., banking lobbyist Kathy Hochul. Cuomo-Hochul represent all the worst of an Establishment that has treated the public with disdain and contempt.