by Guest Author Jan Kregel, Levy Economic Institute

Introduction

The recent losses at JPMorgan Chase, the money laundering activities of HSBC, and the recent discovery of collusive activity to influence the London Interbank Offered Rate by the money market desks of some of the largest global banks, some two years after the adoption of the Dodd-Frank Act, have led to calls for a more rigorous approach to the regulation of large multifunction banks that are clearly too big to manage and too big to regulate.

Pictured is Hyman Minsky (1919-1996).

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by Roger Erickson, Mike Norman Economics

Tom Hickey dug up a forgotten book. C.Wright Mills — The Higher Immorality (1956) that triggers questions about the biology of politics.  This book continues the tradition of pragmatic self-analysis that's been strangely lacking in ambition in the USA these past 50 years.

There's nothing in this book, of course, that wasn't previously written thousands of years ago, by Dravidian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Roman, Greek, & Sanskrit writers - and artfully plagiarized by demented but curiously useful people in various religious texts. So what could we do differently? What part of common sense is failing to propagate through our electorate, via the process we call politics?

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Written by Michael Kulla

Man's "carbon footprint" is about more than just climate change with havoc wrought by erratic weather patterns, low-land flooding, etc. Along with the greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels come a host of other pollutants which pose immediate hazards to the populations exposed.

The yellow haze of smog hovering over the skyline isn't just a stain on our view. It leaves a mark on our minds. Researchers are identifying surprising connections between man made air pollution and decreased cognition and well-being.

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by Frank Li

In a previous post (Mitt Romney vs. Deng Xiaoping), I concluded: "America simply cannot afford another term of Barack Obama, nor a Romney Presidency that is less than the greatest!"

What, then, is the greatest? Let's name the three best American Presidents, as well as the three worst in contrast, shall we?

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by Joseph M. Firestone, letsgetitdone at Corrente

Reposted from New Economic Perspectives

The Fiscal Times is a digital rag funded by Peter G. Peterson to propagandize the ideology of neoliberal austerity. Today, a post by Josh Boak highlighted the proposal of “fixing” Social Security by lifting the cap on payroll taxes.

"Social Security already appears to be running aground, just two decades before the program—which accounts for about 20 percent of federal spending—is projected to crash into insolvency.

"The program launched during the Great Depression—keeping millions of senior citizens from sliding into poverty—has steadily been paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes, relying on the interest earned on federal bond holdings to help bridge the difference. Social Security costs are estimated to total $789 billion this year, paid for by $623 billion in payroll taxes.

"There’s an easy repair, but it involves drastically hiking taxes, so voters aren’t hearing about it on the campaign trail. Under federal law, millionaires and billionaires get to dodge payroll taxes on a substantial percentage of their salaries. Employers and workers are charged payroll taxes on salaries up to $110,100 a year, meaning anything above that—a category that includes someof the middle class—is payroll-tax free. Simply lifting that cap would cover about 90 percent of the projected shortfall over 75 years, according to forecasts by the Social Security Administration.

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