Politics

How a Few Monster Tech Firms are Taking Over Everything from Media to Space Travel and What it Means for the Rest of Us

bigstock-facebook.jpg

The iconic view of tech companies almost invariably stress their roots in people’s garages, plucky individual entrepreneurs ready to challenge all comers. Yet increasingly the leading tech firms – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and especially Google – have morphed into vast tech conglomerates, with hands in ever more numerous, and sometimes not obvious, fields of endeavor.  read more »

City-Specific Immigration Visas Would Be a Modern Day Indentured Servitude

immigration-protest_0.jpg

An idea that’s been kicked around by many is to help turn around struggling cities like Detroit by offering geographically limited immigrations visas. That is, to allow foreigners get their green card if they agree to live in a particular city for a certain number of years.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has now officially endorsed the concept, calling for Detroit to be awarded 50,000 city-specific immigration visas for skilled workers over five years. As the NYT put it:  read more »

America's Glass Half-empty, or Half-full?

bigstock-Text-USA-map-25594874_0.jpg

The stock market is high, real estate prices have resurged, even the unemployment rate is dropping, yet Americans still feel pretty down about the future. A survey released in January by the AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research had 54 percent of respondents expecting American life to go downhill over the coming decades. In a December survey, 23 percent of respondents said things will improve over time.  read more »

The Changing Face of European Economics: Liberalism Moves North

Flags.jpg

Where do we find the nations with the highest tax levels? In the mid-90s the answer was quite clear: in Western Europe. Both Denmark and Sweden had a tax rate of 49 percent of GDP in 1996, followed closely by Finland with a 47 percent level. The tax burden was somewhat lower in France, Belgium, Austria and Italy, where rates ranged from 42 to 44 percent of GDP. Thanks to its oil-wealth Norway could afford a Nordic welfare model with 41 percent taxes, the same level as the Netherlands which had recently slimmed down its welfare system considerably. These Western European welfare states were the nine OECD countries with the highest tax rates. The tenth country was Eastern European Hungary with a rate of 40 percent.  read more »

California's Potholed Road to Recovery

los-angeles-road.jpg

California's economy may be on the mend, but prospects for continued growth are severely constrained by the increasing obsolescence of the state's basic infrastructure. Once an unquestioned leader in constructing new roads, water systems, power generation and building our human capital, California is relentlessly slipping behind other states, including some with much lower tax and regulatory burdens.

The indications of California's incipient senility can be found in a host of reports, including a recent one from the American Society of Civil Engineers, which gave the state a “C” grade.  read more »

The Divisions In The One Percent And The Class Warfare That Will Shape Election 2014

Inequality.jpg

There’s general agreement that inequality will be the big issue of this election year. But to understand how this will play out you have to go well beyond the simplistic “one percent” against everyone else mantra that has to date defined discussion of inequality.  read more »

How Silicon Valley Could Destabilize The Democratic Party

800px-Zuckerberg_meets_Obama_1.jpg

Much has been written, often with considerable glee, about the worsening divide in the Republican Party between its corporate and Tea Party wings. Yet Democrats may soon face their own schism as a result of the growing power in the party of high-tech business interests.  read more »

Some Implications of Detroit’s Bankruptcy

detroit.jpg

There’s been so much ink spilled over Detroit’s bankruptcy that I haven’t felt the need to add much to it. But this week the judge overseeing the case ruled that the city of Detroit is eligible for bankruptcy. He also went ahead and ruled that pensions can be cut for the city’s retirees. Meanwhile, the city has received an appraisal of less than $2 billion for the most famous paintings in the Detroit Institute of the Arts.

A couple of thoughts on this:  read more »

Political, Economic Power Grow More Concentrated

bigstock-obama.jpg

Generally speaking, we associate the quest for central government control to be very much a product of the extremes of left and right. But increasingly, the lobby for ever-greater concentration of power – both economically and politically – comes not from the fringes, but from established centers of both parties and media power.

Recently, for example, an article by Francis Fukuyama, a conservative-leaning intellectual, called for greater consolidation of federal power, most particularly, the Executive Branch. Ironically, Fukuyama's call for greater central power follows a line most often adopted by “progressive” Democrats, who seek to use federal power to enforce their views on a host of environmental, economic and social issues even on reluctant parts of the country.  read more »

The Geography of Cultural Attitudes

soclib-head.png

The cultural and political division of America, the gap between “red” and ”blue” with respect to economic and social liberalism or conservatism is a constant and dominant theme in American discourse. Here’s some narrowly specific measures of social liberalism based on actual votes by citizens or legislatures, not polls or broader indices available.     read more »