Category Archives: News

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On Labor Day, we’re supposed to be celebrating labor, but it’s hard to do that given the recent report that there was “no jobs growth” in August. Check out Robert Reich’s great short essay in the NY Times about what happened to the economy and how we got here. It’s a great summary of what our most esteemed financial experts have been saying for some quite time: Increasing inequality will prolong and worsen the financial crisis. Without a middle class, there is less discretionary income for most families, and therefore the economy can’t find enough spenders to spend. Traditional trickle-down economics holds the idea that giving more money to the wealthy will enable them to invest more and create more jobs, but that clearly hasn’t happened in this economy.

Warren Buffett’s Op-Ed on why we should raise taxes on the rich is making the rounds. Check it out at the NYTimes, and read more about the opinions of other super wealthy people here. According to Buffett, he pays too little in taxes. He writes:

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.