Former UK finance minister Alistair Darling stated yesterday that the punitive taxes his government assessed to executive bonuses had no effect on excessive pay.
Jan Randolph, a UK banking annalyst, added this in an interview with American Media's "Market Place",
It seems that if you want to get at the root of the problem [of excessive executive pay], you're going to have to do much more than just provide an annual tax. And all it's done is provide a little bit more revenue for the government. It hasn't fundamentally changed incentives and behavior.
This was all said with a somber disappointment regarding the effectiveness of the program in curbing executive pay. But this is great news for Mark Dayton and the democrats in the debate over tax policy in fixing our budget crises. Why? Because what this "failed experiment" in the UK is telling us is that raising taxes on the wealthy, even to as high as %50, has little or no economic impact other than to raise revenue for the government. These addition funds can then be invested in programs that DO have a significant economic impact, such as early education or deficit reduction.
I wonder if anybody in the Dayton camp will pick up on this golden trump card? Hmm, probably not.
It's a slow, Dog Days of August Friday. Not that much newsworthy stuff happening. But there are three news tidbits that I saw today that impact Minnesota's 2010 elections.
First, the verdict is in that if the Republicans were in control, our current depression/recession would be far worse and the deficit would be larger. Second, corporations are going to spend $400,000,000 to influence the 2010 elections through their conservative front groups. Thirdly, only 29% of Americans agree with the Teabaggers.
The impact is that Republican policies don't work so the corporations are going to spend bazillions of dollars lying about Republican policies and smearing Democrats. The Dayton smear ad that hit the airwaves last night is only the tip of the iceberg.
Furthermore, appealing to their teabagger base is not good strategy for the Republicans, but they appear to be committed to it regardless. This, at least, is some good news.
Mark Zandi, who advised John McCain on economic issues, was asked today about Minority Leader John Boehner's criticism of the economic stimulus package and President Obama's economic team.
"I think we'd be in a measurably worse place if not for the stimulus," Zandi said at the Christian Science Monitor breakfast this morning. "If we had not had the stimulus...we'd have fewer jobs today than we actually have."
Zandi was responding to Boehner's contention yesterday that stimulus spending "has gotten us nowhere." Asked whether he agreed with Boehner, Zandi said "no."
"Without the stimulus spending," Zandi insisted, "instead of a 9.5 percent unemployment rate, we'd have an 11.5 percent unemployment rate."
Got that? This is a Republican economic advisor, who, regardless of his politics, understands modern economics, and he's confident that the unemployment rate would be 2 points higher today were it not for the stimulus package.
That translates to literally millions of people who would be out of work and placing a greater strain on the unemployment insurance system were it not for that package of tax cuts and direct investments.
Granted, Zandi wanted the package be more tax incentives rather than direct spending, but it's possible to disagree on the particulars without disagreeing on reality: that the stimulus package saved our economy from a descent into outright Depression-with-a-capital-D.
And there's John Boehner, already measuring the drapes in the Speaker's office, criticizing the package and saying the bill has "gotten us nowhere." This is the guy who would be setting a national congressional agenda were the GOP to pick up 40+ seats this fall.
If that's not a scary enough reason for Democratic voters to turn out this fall, I don't know what is.
Our economy is in crisis because of the house of cards we built on cheap energy, cheap oil to be specific. All of the flaws in our economy were revealed when oil prices spiked at just under $100 per barrel and Gasoline prices reached more than $4 per gallon in some parts of the country. Too much of our economy is based on oil.
The effects on the country were not subtle, raising the costs of everything, putting a bigger and bigger squeeze on consumers. Given the choice between paying the rent or mortgage on time or having food and gas, most would chose food and gas. When the situation continued and consumer debt began to rise many people found they could no longer keep up the house payments and then the defaults started.
On another side increased costs of construction made new homes too expensive, which meant less houses sold. Fewer houses sold meant less work for those building these houses. More unemployment meant less goods purchased. Less goods purchased meant lower production, which meant more unemployment. This viscous cycle continued even when gas and oil prices started to come down. In the past one part of a recovery would have been the wonderful production capacity of the USA. But over the last few decades we have slowly shipped our production to other parts of the world. Reducing those jobs in the US and making the situation less stable. Adding to the instability was the ever increasing costs of Health Care. The Job market, our very economy is teetering on the edge.
So we all knew that 2008 was a really awful year. There was a month when a dozen of my friends lost their jobs. The company I worked for laid off a quarter of it's workforce during this period. But the collapse began long before. We all know that now.
Watch the high jobless rate wash down out of the range and encompass the state.
The mantra of conservatives in America is "government cannot do anything right." Conservatives say, "government is the problem." As a result, they want to "starve the beast." However, we must remember the words of our Founding Fathers. They created a Republic because they believed, while no government is perfect and man is corruptible, government must be accountable to the people. Government must represent us. In doing so, they believed government would protect our prosperity.
If we believe as our Founders, then saying "Government cannot do anything right" means "WE cannot do anything right." Saying government is the problem means "WE are the problem." If government really cannot do anything right and government is the problem, then it is our duty as American citizens to correct these problems or our experiment in self-government will fail.
Government is faltering, but not because our Founder's idea of self-government is inherently flawed. OUR government has been hijacked. Every representative of the people is under great pressure to accept financial help from special interest groups who wish to petition our government for costly favors.
The House passed a (very small) bill to give aid to states today. The bill is intended to ease the burden of Medicaid and prevent teachers from being laid off. Pawlenty's office released the following statement:
"The federal government should not deficit spend to bail out states and special interest groups. Minnesota balanced its budget without raising taxes and without relying on more federal money. The federal government's reckless spending spree must come to an end. "
Putting aside the fact that Pawlenty doesn't understand how stimulus works, the bill is completely paid for. A couple tax loopholes are closed and the stimulus extension of SNAP (food stamps) was cut. I actually disagree with how they paid for it--indeed, I disagree with bothering to pay for it at all--but those are the facts. And T-Paw's statement bears no relation to them.
Edit to add: In case anyone is curious, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that Minnesota will get $346m for Medicaid and $167m for education.
(The tradMed has picked up on the name "Waitergate". Bravo! - promoted by Joe Bodell)
Tom Emmer would really like his plan to cut wages to fade away. I mean really, really would like it to go away, but we wont let it. Not even with corporate cash coming in to try and change the subject from his record of harmful votes against working class folks will this issue go away. Why? Because even after two weeks of criticism for his plan to slash workers wages, and every spin attempt he could think of, he still said he would still sign a minimum wage cut as governor. There isn't any way around it, Tom Emmer is just not on the side of working class Minnesotans.
That's why us folks over here at Alliance for a Better Minnesota Action Fund sent a camera crew to Tom Emmer's town hall meeting last week to get the reactions of local workers on how Tom Emmer's plan to cut their wages--by as much as three to four dollars an hour-- would impact their lives. That's why we're putting this ad, "Plan",on the air starting today.
You'll notice that none of these folks look to be raking in $100,000 a year. Certainly none of these folks played a part in creating our economic troubles, so why does Tom Emmer think that our way back to prosperity includes reaching into their pockets for their wages? Because, simply put, Tom Emmer cares more about a corporate bottom line than a family's. We've had eight years of a governor who has chosen big business over working families, and it's time for a new direction.
Visit TomEmmersMN.org or EmmerTruth.MN to learn more about how dangerous Tom Emmer's plan for Minnesota would be to working people across the state. Follow us on Twitter, or find us on Facebook, and together we can make sure we start buidling a Minnesota that works for all of us again.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer has become incoherent on salaries and the minimum wage. This issue became a controversy for him last week at an event at the Eagle Street Grill in St. Paul when he claimed that servers make over $100,000 per year and should have lower wages. This statement in itself is ludicrous, but it's Emmer's history on the minimum wage and his subsequent floundering that makes him incoherent.
Because of this controversy, he's gone beyond flip-flopping. His clarifying statement confuses the situation saying he's not for lower anyone's wages while at the same time suggesting workers accept lower wages to protect their jobs. Now he wants to exempt servers tips up to $20,000.
Tom Emmer isn't a leader who has a plan. He's a back-bencher used to flinging poo and giggling at where it sticks. Now that he's under scrutiny, he's floundering.
I'll begin with the distant past ... 2005. Emmer introduced an amendment to abolish the minimum wage. This is the typically ridiculous kind of thing that fire-brand back benchers do.
Emmer repeatedly said he does not want to lower workers' wages, but (on May 2, 2005 2:15:00 into this clip ) Emmer proposed abolishing the minimum wage.
[picture removed]
Emmer withdrew the amendment after clearly stating "this would repeal the state minimum wage" sources say because Republicans told him it was not a good idea.
In 2008, Emmer clearly understood how much servers made and it wasn't $100K (h/t Flash):
In 2008, Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage to $7.75 because it didn't include the tip credit for hourly service workers. Emmer voted against that bill. In 2005, DFLers defeated a tip credit amendment.
Emmer said he supports reinstituting the credit, which he said hasn't existed in Minnesota since 1990. He quoted a 2008 Hospitality Minnesota survey of restaurant owners that said state servers make an average of $15.43 an hour in wages plus gratuities.
Emmer made it clear which side of the worker/owner divide he was on back in 2005 and in 2008. However, he hadn't jumped the shark with any statement so ludicrously and blatantly false to make him look clownish.
Unlike business, our state government exists for a different reason. Minnesota's Constitution points this out in Article I, section 1: "Government is instituted for the security, benefit, and protection of the people, in whom all political power is inherent, together with the right to alter, modify or reform government whenever required by the public good." In Minnesota, we must remember the public good. The constitutional goal of our government is to lift ALL boats, not just luxury yachts. The public good is pro-Capitalist and supportive of the small, local businesses that make Minnesota great.
Rep. John Kline (R-MN) held a job fair today in Inver Grove Heights. Even though he sits on the House Education and Labor Committee (Labor = jobs?), he won't do or is incapable of doing anything to create jobs in his district. Instead he holds a job fair to make it look like he cares.
In today's tough economic times, many use any resources available to find jobs including job fairs. My Congressman, John Kline (R) sponsored one such fair at Inver Grove Community College this week. It had good attendance (lots of out-of-work folks) but as the guys in suits said on their way out, all the positions were lower paying entry jobs so they dressed up for nothing.
(Truth Surfer)
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-BP) loves to fearmonger. The G20 Summit in Toronto gives her an excellent opportunity to indulge in a new conspiracy theory. She fears that they are really meeting to set up a "one world government."
In an interview on Scott Hennen's radio show today, Bachmann claimed that the purpose of the G-20 was to "bind together the world's economies." Neglecting the already interconnected nature of the global economy, Bachman declared that "President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy":
BACHMANN: What really concerned me was Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said that we don't want to see one country's economy doing better than another. What? This is the U.S. Treasury Secretary? We don't want to see Zimbabwe's economy do better than the United States? Aren't we supposed to be about the United States and making sure that our economy can be the greatest in the world. If you look at the G20, what they're trying to do is bind together the world's economies. Look how that played out in the European Union when they bound all of those nations economies together and one of the smallest economies, Greece, when they got into trouble, that one little nation is bringing down the entire EU. Well, President Obama is trying to bind the United States into a global economy where all of our nations come together in a global economy. I don't want the United States to be in a global economy where, where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe. I can't, we can't necessarily trust the decisions that are being made financially in other countries.
"So I think clearly this is a very bad direction because when you join the economic policy of different nations, it is one short step to joining political unity and then you would have literally, a one world government," said Bachmann. "I don't want to cede United States authority to a transnational organization." Listen here:
I realize that Republicans don't actually listen to what they say and have no sense of how crazy they sound. I mean, hey, it's working for Bachmann -- her insane ramblings have made her a major player in the Republican party.
Doesn't Bachmann know that the WTO can override American laws already? Didn't Republicans whole-heartedly support the WTO and GATT?
Something I've noticed about the great messaging coming from the Minnesota Nurses' Association leading up to and during yesterday's one-day strike: they've kept the focus on patient care and safety. This is a great move, and the nurses have executed it well.
But dig a little deeper, and what do you find? While the standard grumbling about unions and strikes from the other side is "they just want more money for less work, grumble grumble," what the nurses are saying here is "look, we need to lower the patient-to-nurse ratio. Either hire more nurses, or make us work more shifts."
Interesting, no? I thought so.
Anyway, gubernatorial candidate Mark Dayton put a pithy note on Facebook about the strike:
I proudly walked with dedicated Nurses on picket lines in front of United Hospital in St. Paul and Abbott-Northwestern in Minneapolis. Allina painted a thick yellow line marking off their hospital, not on their property but on our city streets. Instead of spending money on paint and hiring Tom Horner's PR firm to "spin" for them-- they should have been settling with the Nurses and avoiding this stalemate.
Via MinnPost, this is Tim Pawlenty's view of how stimulus works, from Meet the Press:
"So If I took a dollar from you, David - this is what government does - I'm extracting a dollar from you, in the form of taxes. I'm the government. I take it from you, subtract 20 or 30 percent for overhead, because I'm going to manage, squirrel around, do compliance checks, audits, bureaucracy and the like.
Ok, I'll give him the general "government is inefficient" crap for the sake of argument, and because it's often true, though likely not to the extent Pawlenty thinks. Moving on.
