This week there are a number of stories that relate to recent posts on Brucenomics.
Corporate taxes
My latest post Corporate Taxes: No More Simplistic Solutions!” talked about President Obama’s proposal to raise the tax on dividends. My opinion is that raising the tax on capital gains make more sense. This week a special feature article in the Financial Times, “Tax treatment of private equity: Questions over a quirk” delves into the issue of taxes paid, or rather not paid, by hedge fund managers. Continue reading →
Normally I don’t write about a the story from a single article in a newspaper, but today there is an article in the London Financial Times that is so outrageous I have to write about it. This article shows the epitome of the craziness going on in the saga of what rich banks and wealthy investors are doing to themselves, this country, and to the world.
Most Americans will never know about this story because it is taking place in Ireland. And that’s unfortunate!
Scylla v. Charybdis
These were my two favorite monsters from Greek literature. These two sea monsters awaited Odysseus (Ulysses) on his way home from the the battle by the Greeks to retrieve beautiful Helen from her captors in Troy. Scylla was an enormous rock shoal near Sicily. Charybdis was a gigantic whirlpool that was so close to Scylla, ships could not get through the gap. Odysseus had to sail between these two sea monsters in order to get himself and his crew home to Ithaca.
Odysseus was caught “between a rock and a hard place”. He had to choose one. For the “good of the many” as Star Trek puts it, Homer’s story of the ten-year Odyssey back to Greece reveals that Odysseus chose Scylla, the rock. He risked losing a few of his crew, rather than take the “all or nothing” course and risk falling into Charybdis, the whirlpool, and destroying all of his twelve ships and his men.
Today taxpayers are the modern variants of the crew on the Odyssey, and we too are having a hard time surviving. As this Irish tale shows, the reason is that bankers and investors are locked in a destructive battle that threatens to take all of us down underwater. Continue reading →
Banks and People (part 3 of 3)
At the start of the crisis, the U.S. government said it wanted banks to switch from making investments back to making loans, loans that were sorely needed by businesses and consumers. Now, with TARP about to end, President Obama is still saying the same thing.
Continue reading →