On this week's episode of Economic Update, Prof. Wolff provides updates on rich tax evaders, Takata airbags, equalized wealth data, money in Chicago politics. Major discussions of corporate food scandals, govt fiscal "crises" and why build worker coop sectors.
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Upon listening to it, a few things came to mind:
On states that are trying to ‘dissuade’ rich people from moving to another state, it doesn’t surprise me in the least that states treat this like they’re declaring a state of emergency. Pathetic. I tell you, if a state had a ton of poor people leaving, a mass exodus, I’m sure the state wouldn’t give them incentives to stay. I would expect it to levy a penalty against them actually. I do not say this rhetorically, the US has raised the fee for renouncing your citizenship. I don’t recall the actual numbers but it went up by thousands of dollars. I don’t put it past any US state to follow suit.
On the discussion of if the wealth in this country were spread equally, each person would get over $216k, mentioning the site wid.world, this reminded me of the Gini Coefficient, which I decided to email Professor Wolff about it in hopes he would discuss this concept. I’m sure he knows about it but I don’t know if he’s ever talked about it in past Econ Updates. I’m still going through all of the podcasts so I may not have gotten to that point yet.
On the Chicago political cartel, let’s not forget one enormously powerful politician and presidential candidate that’s from the Chicago area: Hillary Clinton, who according to the Wall Street Journal has taken in more Wall Street money than all the other candidates combined. It just makes perfect sense that she was born and raised there.
On today’s version of capitalism and the goal of traditional capitalism to be a monopoly, I think today’s corporations are more savvy than that. The goal, which seems clear to me, is that they don’t go for a monopoly, but rather a duopoly (Apple/Microsoft, Walmart/Target) or triopoly (AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile, NBC/ABC/CBS) or similar. Small oligopolies, because monopolies are “illegal”. If monopoly was the goal then Microsoft would have bought and destroyed Apple years ago when the latter was enduring hard times, and AT&T would have devoured Verizon a long time ago. This way these corporations essentially can function as a criminal syndicate, agreeing on price structures, locations and other logistics, promise not to attempt to drive another out of business. To paraphrase the reasoning behind this in the movie “The Godfather”, there’s plenty of money to be made for each crime family. How socialist of them. And we all know how this level of corporate competition, or more accurately corporate cooperation and collusion, has benefitted the American people. Or ‘American consumers’ as they view us.
On the site Oleg is directing to, that podcast is also 10 min long. I wonder if this is an Audioboom problem. I say this because I refreshed my podcast subscription today, and a new version of this podcast was downloaded automatically. However it was 10 min long also.
I’ve been following Dr. Wolff for several years now and don’t like to miss a single program!
Listening to him keeps me hopeful. :)
Upon downloading this podcast this morning from iTunes, it reflects only a 10 minute duration. It abruptly cuts off at that point. The podcast that was downloaded was to both my Macbook and my iPhone. I do enjoy your show, I am downloading every podcast there is and going through them when I can. Keep up the good work.