Best content in Comparative Politics

Democrats claim higher taxes on the rich and more benefits for the poor are the best ways to reduce inequality
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Republicans argue what we really need is more growth, accomplished by lowering taxes to spur work and investment with, it seems, benefit cuts to make up lost revenue.
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Each party is dead certain about how to address inequality, yet neither knows what it is.
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Kay Bradley on 21 Jan 21

"Democrats claim higher taxes on the rich and more benefits for the poor are the best ways to reduce inequality"

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">"Democrats claim higher taxes on the rich and more benefits for the poor are the best ways to reduce inequality"</div>

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Moaning Moguls | The New Yorker - 0 views

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In the past year, the venture capitalist Tom Perkins and Kenneth Langone, the co-founder of Home Depot, both compared populist attacks on the wealthy to the Nazis’ attacks on the Jews.
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recent work by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty showed that ninety-five per cent of income gains in the first three years of the recovery went to the top one per cent—a lot of them believe that they’re a persecuted minority.
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Business leaders were upset at the criticism that followed the financial crisis and, for many of them, it’s an article of faith that people succeed or fail because that’s what they deserve.
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If you believe that net worth is a reflection of merit, then any attempt to curb inequality looks unfair.
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as a classic analysis by the historian James Weinstein showed, the reforms were intended to co-opt public pressure and avert more radical measures
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they sprang from a pragmatic belief that the robustness of capitalism as a whole depended on wide distribution of the fruits of the system.
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Committee for Economic Development, which played a central role in the forging of postwar consensus politics, accepting strong unions, bigger government, and the rise of the welfare state.
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The C.E.D. called for tax increases to pay for the Korean War and it supported some of L.B.J.’s Great Society
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As Mizruchi put it, “They believed that in order to maintain their privileges, they had to insure that ordinary Americans were having their needs met
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That all changed beginning in the seventies, when the business community, wrestling with shrinking profits and tougher foreign competition, lurched to the right
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Today, there are no centrist business organizations with any real political clout, and the only business lobbies that matter in Washington are those pushing an agenda of lower taxes and less regulation. Corporate profits and C.E.O. salaries have in recent years reached record levels, but there’s no sign of a return to the corporate statesmanship of the past (the occasional outlier like Warren Buffett notwithstanding)
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In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines
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Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform
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Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten
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Don't Tax the Rich. Tax Inequality Itself. - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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at some point the concentration of economic power could undermine the democratic requisite of dispersed political power.
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It would be bad for our democracy if 1-percenters started making 40 or 50 times as much as the median American.
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a tax that would limit the after-tax incomes of this club to 36 times the median household income.
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Importantly, our Brandeis tax does not target excessive income per se; it only caps inequality. Billionaires could double their current income without the tax kicking in — as long as the median income also doubles. The sky is the limit for the rich as long as the “rising tide lifts all boats.” Indeed, the tax gives job creators an extra reason to make sure that corporate wealth does in fact trickle down.
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Our Brandeis tax is conservative in that it doesn’t attempt to reverse the gains of the wealthy in the last 30 years. It is not a “claw back” tax. It merely assures that things don’t get worse.
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Ian Ayres, a professor of law at Yale, is the author of “Carrots and Sticks: Unlock the Power of Incentives to Get Things Done.” Aaron S. Edlin, a professor of law and of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is co-editor of “The Economists’ Voice: Top Economists Take On Today’s Problems.”
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Op-ed: Stop the Wall Street recruitment | Stanford Daily - 0 views

www.stanforddaily.com/...op-the-wall-street-recruitment wall St protests wealth inequality finance education economics Economy

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Exploring Wealth Inequality | Cato Institute - 0 views

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1876 United States presidential election - Wikipedia - 0 views

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Democrats conceded the election to Hayes in return for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South.
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while in Oregon, one elector was replaced after being declared illegal for being an "elected or appointed official".
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Compromise of 1877, which awarded all 20 electoral votes to Hayes;
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five presidential elections in which the person who won the most popular votes did not win the election,
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To date, it remains the election that recorded the smallest electoral vote victory (185–184), and the election that yielded the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting age population in American history, at 81.8%.
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Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes from four states unresolved: in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party reported its candidate had won the state,
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Opinion Today: The Facebook influencers of the insurrection - kbradley@headroyce.org - ... - 1 views

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Opinion | White Riot - The New York Times - 0 views

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Opinion | How Trumpism May Endure - The New York Times - 0 views

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shared by Kay Bradley on 10 Jan 21 - No Cached

The story demands a religious loyalty.
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Mr. Trump’s Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms. Its guiding theories include: Christianity under duress and attack; large corrupt cities full of Black and brown people manipulated by liberal elites; Barack Obama as alien; a socialist movement determined to tax you into subservience to “big government”; liberal media out to crush family and conservative values; universities and schools teaching the young a history that hates America; resentment of nonwhite immigrants who threaten a particular national vision; and whatever hideous new version of a civil religion QAnon represents.
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The Confederate Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. It emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat in the 1860s, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations and rituals in search of a story that could win hearts and minds and regain power in the Southern states. It was initially a psychological response to the trauma of collective loss among former Confederates. It gained traction in violent groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and in the re-emergence of the Democratic Party’s resistance to Reconstruction.
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Crucially, the Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on battlefields.
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Confederate Lost Cause ideology
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All Lost Causes find their lifeblood in lies, big and small, lies born of beliefs in search of a history that can be forged into a story and mobilize masses of people to act politically, violently, and in the name of ideology.
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By the 1890s, the Lost Cause was no longer a story of loss, but one of victory: the defeat of Reconstruction. Southerners — whether run-of-the-mill local politicians, famous former generals or women who forged the culture of monument building — portrayed white supremacy and home rule for the South as the nation’s victory over radicalism and Negro rule.
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glory of America
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But it does seem to be tonic for those who fear long-term social change;
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liberalism; taxation; what it perceives as big government; nonwhite immigrants who drain the homeland’s resources; government regulation imposed on individuals and businesses; foreign entanglements and wars that require America to be too generous to strange peoples in faraway places; any hint of gun control; feminism in high places; the nation’s inevitable ethnic and racial pluralism; and the infinite array of practices or ideas it calls “political correctness.”
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border walls; ever-growing stock portfolios; access to the environment and hunting land without limits; coal they can burn at will; the “liberty” to reject masks; history that tastes of the sweetness of progress and not the bitterness of national sins.
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Kay Bradley on 10 Jan 21

"Mr. Trump's Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms. Its guiding theories include: Christianity under duress and attack; large corrupt cities full of Black and brown people manipulated by liberal elites; Barack Obama as alien; a socialist movement determined to tax you into subservience to "big government"; liberal media out to crush family and conservative values; universities and schools teaching the young a history that hates America; resentment of nonwhite immigrants who threaten a particular national vision; and whatever hideous new version of a civil religion QAnon represents."

<div class="cArrow"> </div><div class="cContentInner">"Mr. Trump's Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms. Its guiding theories include: Christianity under duress and attack; large corrupt cities full of Black and brown people manipulated by liberal elites; Barack Obama as alien; a socialist movement determined to tax you into subservience to "big government"; liberal media out to crush family and conservative values; universities and schools teaching the young a history that hates America; resentment of nonwhite immigrants who threaten a particular national vision; and whatever hideous new version of a civil religion QAnon represents."</div>

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