Capitalism and Democracy: Year-End Lessons
This article originally appeared at www.truth-out.org
2013 drove home a basic lesson: US capitalism's economic leaders and their politicians now regularly ignore majority opinions and preferences. For example, polls showed overwhelming popular support for higher taxes on the rich with lower taxes on the rest of us and for reversing the nation's deepening economic inequalities. Yet Republicans and Democrats, including President Obama, raised payroll taxes sharply on January 1, 2013. Those taxes are regressive; they take a smaller percentage of your income the higher your income is above $113,700 per year. Raising the payroll tax increased economic inequality across 2013.
(More...)
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
December 18, 2013
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
December 18, 2013
Welcome to Econ… A Q&A with Richard Wolff
Recently, through an e-mail exchange I was able to ask Richard Wolff a few questions about economics and alternatives to capitalism. Dr. Wolff is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...
(More...)
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
December 13, 2013
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
December 13, 2013
Capitalism and Unemployment
Capitalism as a system seems incapable of solving its unemployment problem. It keeps generating long-term joblessness, punctuated by spikes of recurring short-term extreme joblessness. The system's leaders cannot solve or overcome the problem...
(More...)
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
November 15, 2013
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
November 15, 2013
The Great Austerity Shell Game
Barack Obama speaking in March 2013 about the sequester, the automatic spending cuts mandated by Congress. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP
(More...)
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
November 04, 2013
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
November 04, 2013
US Political Dysfunction and Capitalism’s Withdrawal
After 200 years of concentrating its centers in western Europe, north America, and Japan, capitalism is moving most of its centers elsewhere and especially to China, India, Brazil and so on. This movement poses immense problems of transition at both poles. The classic problems of early, rapid capitalist industrialization are obvious daily in the new centers. What we learn about early capitalism when we read Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky and Jack London, we see now again in the new centers.
(More...)
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
October 27, 2013
d@w Contributor:
Richard Wolff
October 27, 2013
