May 2007
9 posts
News of the Week vblog, May 30, 2007
Robert Reich’s vlog, May 30, 2007 from Robert Reich on Vimeo
Stock Market Bull
To understand why the stock market continues to be bullish despite the slowdowns in American productivity and in corporate profits, you have to go back to the old law of supply and demand from Economics 101. When the supply of something decreases while the demand for it stays up, its price rises. Here, I’m talking about supply and demand in publicly-traded stocks. In case you hadn’t noticed,...
How to Reduce the Use of Off-Shore Tax Havens
After suggesting a couple of weeks ago that the stratospheric earnings of equity-fund managers ought to be considered income rather than capital gains and therefore taxed at 35 percent rather than 15 percent, I was deluged with emails telling me the plan wouldn’t work: It would just drive fund managers into offshore tax havens. No less than Jon Corzine, the former chief executive of Goldman Sachs,...
Democrats and the Deficit
House Dems have just unveiled their budget. It’s a gangly, wordy, and ambitious document that – no surprise – contains lots of things all Democrats can agree on, and whose numbers don’t quite add up. The most distressing aspect is its avowed commitment to reduce the budget deficit. Here we go again. Shortly after Bill Clinton was elected president he asked me to head up his economic transition...
Reich's vlog, May 16, 2007
Robert Reich’s vlog, May 16, 2007 from Robert Reich on Vimeo
A Better Idea for College Loans
One of my former students who graduates from business school next week has already landed a job with a private-equity firm paying him $240,000 next year, which I can tell you is a lot more than the salary of his former professor who’s more than three decades older. My student tells me with a smile he’ll be able to pay off his student debt way ahead of schedule. But that’s not his real reason for...
Priivate-Equity Baloney
This week, Senators Max Maucus and Charles Grassley, the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Finance Committee, are holding “informal meetings” to consider whether the stratospheric incomes of private-equity partners ought to be treated as compensation rather than as capital gains, for tax purposes. Way back in the 1970s, newly-minted MBAs with dollar-signs in their...
Vlog, May 6, 2007
Robert Reich’s vlog, May 6, 2007 from Robert Reich
The Record-Breaking Dow and the Supply Side...
I’m spending my spare time these days debating supply-siders who are convinced that the record-breaking Dow proves the correctness of the Bush tax cuts. Yes, the Dow did reach a record high last week. But the Commerce Department also reported that economic growth slowed to its weakest pace in four years. How can investors do so well while the real economy is doing so poorly? My supply-side...
