The media doesn’t seem to understand the basics about budgets — and the inescapable relationship between aggregate revenues, aggregate spending, and total deficits. Either that, or reporters just choose to play dumb. The end result is the same, however: Journalists don’t probe deeply — or they probe when it is too late to matter —…
Category: Articles
Have the Super-Rich Seceded From the United States?
It was in 1993 during Congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in…
Press Agent for the Super-Rich
Published Oct. 17, 2011 in the Washington Monthly. ( Link to article) It is hardly surprising that the super-rich hire press agents to sing their praises. Since time out of mind, the powerful have tossed a few pieces of silver to writers willing to extol them. So it appears to be with John Steele Gordon,…
Goodbye to All That
Barbara Stanwyck: “We’re both rotten!” Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you’re a little more rotten.” -”Double Indemnity” (1944) Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the…