Economics from a people first point-of-view

National liabilities are the other side of national assets. In my last post, I didn’t discuss this side of things. Governments not only don’t track their own assets; apparently they don’t track their own liabilities either.
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Before I finish my series on the incredible transition taking place in the publishing industry, I need to comment on the current controversy about our government’s debt and deficit. There’s an important pair of terms related to debt and deficit that aren’t being discussed right now, and they should be.

Clive Crook of the Financial Times asserts that President Obama’s new budget for 2010 is only a “”minutely worded wish-list,” that most likely won’t be honored by Congress. All of us probably agree with that statement. But Crook also  believes the “only remedies [for the US debt/deficit dilemma] are lower spending and higher taxes.” I strongly disagree with that. Only one-third of the U.S. deficit is paid for by taxes, and there IS another way to approach the US government’s debt/deficit problem.
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Is Your Job Already Outsourced? (part 2 of 3)

(Click here for Part 1)

Last time, I looked at ownership of large book publishers in 2004. We saw that many large American book publishers were taken over by foreign print book publishing companies. In 2010 the picture is way worse. Those large foreign book publishers have themselves been swallowed up by even bigger media conglomerates.
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