David Coates Have I missed something? Perhaps I have. Or is one of the troubling undersides of the Glenn Beck rally on the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday not yet receiving the full coverage that it deserves?[1]
- The rally has rightly been criticized as a questionable attempt to exploit the legacy of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement which he led. This country has no history of excluding white males from voting or from sitting at food counters; and certainly no history of white men being lynched simply for looking at an African-American woman. Many of Glenn Beck’s overwhelmingly white supporters at the rally may feel persecuted and unloved, but in the full story of persecution and racial hatred in this country they don’t even make the front row. Indeed, when Glenn Beck was reminded by Chris Wallace on Fox News immediately after the rally that the original civil rights movement had an economic agenda as well as a political one – that the original March on Washington was one for jobs as well as for freedom – Beck explicitly rejected the legacy of that wider agenda.[2] But rights without resources, as Lyndon Johnson once said, are not full rights at all. ‘The man who is hungry, who cannot find work or educate his children, who is bowed by want, that man is not fully free.”[3] Martin Luther King understood that – it was what took him to Memphis and his death – but Glenn Beck clearly does not.
David Coates
(co-authored with Peter Siavelis)
It is less than a year (November 2009) since Janet Napolitano – the Homeland Security Secretary and the administration’s point person on immigration – announced her and the President’s commitment to a three-pronged approach to the issue of immigration reform. READ FULL POST
David Coates
“Social Security is not the trouble; it’s just the target.”[1]
It would appear that there will be a new battle awaiting us on the other side of the mid-term elections – as though we did not already have battles enough – one about Social Security and its future. [2] READ FULL POST
David Coates We face a political season in the fall that will be full of Republican calls to continue the Bush tax cuts and conservative demands to scale back government spending. Those calls are already in full cry, and with the mid-terms looming, we can only expect more of the same – arguments like this, placed by Arthur Laffer in the August 2nd edition of The Wall Street Journal.
“Few things are as clear in economics as the fact that high tax rates don’t succeed in raising revenue or increasing the burden on the wealthy….Not only do the direct tax consequences of higher tax rates on those in the highest brackets lead to higher deficits, the indirect effects magnify the tax revenue losses many fold. As a result of higher tax rates only on those people in the highest tax brackets, there will be less employment, output, sales, profits and capital gains – all leading to lower payrolls and lower total tax receipts. There will also be higher unemployment, poverty and lower incomes, all of which require more government spending. It’s a Catch-22. Higher tax rates on the rich create the very poverty and unemployment that is used to justify their presence.”[1]
Really? Oh that it was that simple. But it is not – not, for at least the following four sets of reasons, no one of which appeared alongside the Laffer piece in the paper most widely read in US business circles.
David Coates When the financial crisis broke in September 2008, it was widely understood – both in policy-making circles and in popular conversation – that problems in the U.S. housing market were central to the unfolding events. But thereafter, the events themselves took center stage: and the problems of the housing sector, though not forgotten, slipped down the political agenda and off the popular radar. That was a mistake. Problems in the U.S. housing market remain central to our continuing difficulties – problems experienced by people wanting to buy houses, and problems experienced by people who already own one. Economically and politically, a resolution of the U.S. housing crisis remains a key requirement for long term prosperity and, more immediately, for the continuation of a Democratic White House.[1]
Economically the current recovery is slow in part because the housing sector remains sluggish. The housing sector remains sluggish because the inventory of unsold houses remains high; and the inventory of unsold houses remains high because the foreclosure crisis refuses to go away. Politically, Obama and the Democrats are losing popular support because unemployment and job insecurity are rife. Unemployment and job insecurity are rife because the economy remains sluggish; and the economy remains sluggish in part because there are still so many foreclosed homes on the market. People are losing their homes in record numbers in contemporary America, and they are doing so now on Obama’s watch, not on Bush’s.
