Month: November 2019

So, Elizabeth Warren has a two percent wealth tax plan with three percent on people with more than a billion dollars. She’s suggested raising the over a billion percentage to six percent… And Bill Gates says….

I’m all for super-progressive tax systems,” he said. “I’ve paid over $10 billion in taxes. I’ve paid more than anyone in taxes. If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine.

“But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” he added. “You really want the incentive system to be there without threatening that.”

Mr. Gates is the second-richest person in the world, according to Forbes magazine, with a net worth of $106.2bn.

Well, of course, she didn’t say that, she said six percent. A little over six billion in the first year. Bill’s 64, and of course, the actual nominal amount will decrease each year unless he can grow his money faster than six percent, in which case, what’s the problem?

Elizabeth Warren

He’ll never, ever be anything less than a multi-billionaire, in other words. His bullshit about 100 billion is just that, fear-mongering bullshit.

And if he’s paid ten billion on 106 billion, well his tax rate was about ten percent. Most middle class families would love to have that low a tax rate. (Yes, I know it’s on income, not wealth, but the point is he obviously paid very low income taxes. Which, actually, is what the data shows–the middle and working classes pay a higher percentage than the rich.)

Bill, of course, is the “good” billionaire.” But he’s the guy who gave straight-up fascist Modi a reward. He’s the guy who spent millions to change the educational system in the US, then admitted that the model he successfully pushed doesn’t actually work. He’s the guy who used brutal, monopolistic practices to build Microsoft.

And he doesn’t want to pay a six percent wealth tax that will be used to provide universal healthcare.

Billionaires are bad, and, as an even more radical and willing-to-take-on-billionaires candidate, Bernie Sanders, said, they shouldn’t even exist.

As for Billy, he thinks he deserves to be one of the richest people in the world because he created the Wintel monopoly and crushed rivals with practices which were, under black-letter law, illegal.

But one can understand why he might prefer a Republican president. After all, it was George Bush, Jr. who withdrew the anti-trust suit which would have broken up Microsoft and left Bill worth a lot less than a 106 billion dollars.

Trump, of course, massively dropped tax rates on the rich.

Money comes first, ethics come second. Bill’s always understood that.

Republicans have been pretty good to Bill. Performative wokeism and his good image aren’t worth a six percent wealth tax. As for people without healthcare, welll, better they die than he pay taxes which would leave him a multi-billionaire for the rest of his life.

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Alberta’s Alienation from Canada

By Ian Welsh

On November 5, 2019

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So, for those of you who don’t know, Alberta is sort of Canada’s Texas: It has a lot of oil and a lot of farms.

Alberta is also the heart of the Canada’s Conservative Party. Virtually all of their seats go to the Conservatives every federal election.

Many Albertans feel isolated and disrespected by Ottawa (our capital) and the East. Back in the 70s, Pierre Trudeau (our current Prime Minister’s father) made them sell oil to Canadians for less than market price and even nationalized a little bit of the market.

Since they also have a lot of money, they make what are called “transfer payments” to the other provinces.

So, they feel like they put in more than they get back.

There’s a lot of truth to this, of course. This isn’t the same “Red State” BS like in the US, where they get more from the Feds than they put in and whine about it.

That said, Alberta has been sitting on black gold and fucked it up.

Fucked it up.

They decided that low taxes were more important than investment. They hardly taxed the oil companies pumping the oil, even the foreign ones, and even during boom times when there was no question those companies would pay.

So, they didn’t get as much money as they should.

They also misspent what money they had, and didn’t think about creating a post-oil future economy.

In Canada, we do have poor provinces. The poorest are the Maritime provinces–the ones up against the Atlantic.

Here’s a funny story: Those provinces used to be rich, a long time ago.

See, England needed lots of masts. You need good trees for masts, and the English cut down all their own, and other Europeans had either done the same or wouldn’t chop down enough of them.

Good masts were incredibly valuable. In addition, the Maritimes had the richest fisheries in the world. There are eyewitness accounts from the early days that you could literally dip a bucket into the Ocean and come up with fish.

So the Maritimes were prosperous.

Then the world moved to Steam engines.

Then the Maritimes, quite deliberately and before the advent of climate change, fished the Grand Banks cods to collapse.

Now, they are poor as hell, and always getting those transfer payments.

So, this is Alberta’s future.

The funny thing is that Alberta is also a big agricultural province, but, of course, since oil makes more money, they’ve gone ahead and polluted like hell, destroying vast swathes of land.

To summarize: Alberta did not invest enough in industries to take over when oil (a non-renewable resource) became less valuable. They did do what they could to fuck up their sustainable resource industry: farming.

Most of this is not the rest of Canada’s fault. Yeah, they would have had more money if Ottawa had given them a complete free hand, but they had plenty of money and wasted it on low taxes and tax cuts and didn’t bother to be good environmental stewards.

These decisions were made in Alberta, by Albertans, not in Ottawa.

Resource economies are always, at best, cyclical. They are always in danger of being destroyed by substitution (as is happening with hydrocarbons). A smart jurisdiction uses their resource-based wealth to buy a future not reliant on those resources.

There are lessons here for a lot of countries and regions. Canada as a whole has fucked up its economic balance over the last 20 years (a different article). Russia is way too reliant on resources. Various US states are going to take it on the chin when hydrocarbon prices collapse, and they too have been short-sighted, greedy, and stupid: They’ve been doing things like polluting their groundwater with fracking.

In the future, water is going to be far more valuable than oil. So is good agricultural land.

These places have gone out of their way to destroy both.

The problem with Ottawa isn’t so much that they interfered in Alberta, but that they interfered in Alberta in the wrong ways.

As for Albertan voters who always vote Conservative: You’re fools. Because they know you will always vote for them, they do nothing for you. When the Conservatives were in power for almost a decade, they sucked up to Ontario and Quebec, because they knew they needed their votes.

You? You got nothing, exactly because they know they don’t need to give you anything.

There are those in the US who might think on this lesson as well.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 3, 2019

By Tony Wikrent

On November 3, 2019

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 3, 2019

by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Neoliberalism Tells Us We’re Selfish Souls – How Can We Promote Other Identities?

[Open Democracy, via Naked Capitalism 11-1-19]

“Economics is the method: the object is to change the soul.” Understanding why Thatcher said this is central to understanding the neoliberal project, and how we might move beyond it. Carys Hughes and Jim Cranshaw’s opening article poses a crucial challenge to the left in this respect. It is too easy to tell ourselves a story about the long reign of neoliberalism that is peopled solely with all-powerful elites imposing their will on the oppressed masses. It is much harder to confront seriously the ways in which neoliberalism has manufactured popular consent for its policies.

The left needs to acknowledge that aspects of the neoliberal agenda have been overwhelmingly popular: it has successfully tapped into people’s instincts about the kind of life they want to lead, and wrapped these instincts up in a compelling narrative about how we should see ourselves and other people. We need a coherent strategy for replacing this narrative with one that actively reconstructs our collective self-image – turning us into empowered citizens participating in communities of mutual care, rather than selfish property-owning individuals competing in markets….

In thinking about how we do this, it’s instructive to look at the ways in which neoliberal attempts to reshape our identities have succeeded – and the ways they have failed. While Right to Buy might have been successful in identifying people as home-owners and stigmatising social housing, this has not bled through into wider support for private ownership. Although public ownership did become taboo among the political classes for a generation – far outside the political ‘common sense’ – polls consistently showed that this was not matched by a fall in public support for the idea. On some level – perhaps because of the poor performance of privatised entities – people continued to identify as citizens with a right to public services, rather than as consumers of privatised services. The continued overwhelming attachment to a public NHS is the epitome of this tendency. This is partly what made it possible for Corbyn’s Labour to rehabilitate the concept of public ownership, as the 2017 Labour manifesto’s proposals for public ownership of railways and water – dismissed as ludicrous by the political establishment – proved overwhelmingly popular.

USA and many other countries claim to be republics. Neoliberalism is a direct attack on the basic principles of republicanism. From the chapter “Republicanism,” from Gordon Wood’s 1969 Bancroft Prize winning book, Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787:

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: November 2019

There Are No Good Billionaires (Bill Gates Edition)

Alberta’s Alienation from Canada

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 3, 2019

Strategic Political Economy

Open Thread