skip to main |
skip to sidebar
There's a good article in Capitol Weekly on the unexpected $2 billion in income tax revenue that California's budget planners didn't expect. It appears that, as I noted in April, the rich are doing very well, so well in fact, that they paid $2 billion in taxes that the budget people didn't expect. What's interesting about the whole issue if the frame, of course. The anti-tax Republicans, of course, argue that this means we don't have a revenue problem, but a spending problem. Uh, we received $2 billion, not the $15 billion or so that the budget is out of balance, and most especially, the sum we would need to restore the services cut to the elderly, poor, disabled and the sick.
Then there's the other frame. This is the one that says California is too dependent on wealthy Californians and, implicitly, that we should start taxing poorer Californians more. (When Daniel Weintraub was at the Bee, he was a leading supporter of this argument.) Well, I might suggest that a neoliberal economy is necessarily dependent on taxing rich people, as no one else has any money. And that that is the point of the neoliberal economy--that's how it's supposed to work. One need only look at Third World countries, where the government squeezes the majority of the population, while the rich evade taxes entirely, to see what the "let's tax everyone 'equally'" system leads. It's really a system that squeezes blood from turnips.
Sure enough, once somebody actually studied the subject, it turned out that speculation in oil futures is a big part of the market and is pushing up prices. Are we surprised?
And Kevin Hall has been reporting on this for quite some time.
I'm going to be doing a bit of reading. I've limited my reading lately to house magazines and trashy mysteries. Not very edifying unless you wish to confirm that people are still on the stainless steel appliance and granite counters kick. (I've said before that granite counters will soon date a remodel just as avocado refrigerators did in the 1970s.) But I'll be reading up on pensions ( Robin Blackburn's Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us, and his now old (2004) Banking On Death: Or Investing In Life: The History and Future of Pensions). I probably should have read these a long time ago, but never got 'round to it.
And I recommend Doug Henwood's series on education in the Left Business Observer. In the olden days when Metropolitan Home was still being published, I remember receiving that and LBO on the same day, and putting aside Metropolitan Home to read LBO first. It states the obvious, that poor kids do less well in school than rich kids, and that the way to address the problem is to get kids out of poverty. But it has cool charts and graphs and stuff.
And I've become addicted to the old Perry Mason series (starring Raymond Burr), which is now available on video. The black and whites are much better than the color episodes--I don't know why--but it shows an LA that no longer exists. Also fun are the episodes in rural areas, areas now overrun by house farms. You can get them at the library.
And Matt Taibbi has the latest installment of the Goldman tales in Rolling Stone, proving that capitalism is a great system for making money.
I used my new exercise ball to help me scrub the kitchen floor. It worked, after a fashion. It's not as easy as being on my hands and knees. I scrub what I can reach from the exercise ball, stand, move the ball, sit, scrub some more. I can't roll around on the ball, or I'll roll right off it onto the floor. But it works much better than mopping from a standing position. (That just doesn't get the floor clean.) I thought about posting a picture of the clean kitchen floor, but decided I was obsessing just a bit too much...
No matter how much evidence there is against them. There's the really old one advocating means testing for Social Security which was shown to be more expensive than just paying the rich old folks their money--unless you started defining "rich" old folks as people making $35K a year. Now there's the one about "structural" unemployment--that the reason people can't find jobs is that they don't have the skills for the "new" knowledge-based economy. All those middle-aged people can't find jobs not because there are not jobs, not because they face age discrimination, no, of course not. It's because they don't have the skills for the jobs that are available. The article was reprinted in The Sacramento Bee from the Los Angeles Times.
I thought this assertion had been thoroughly trashed here and if you're too lazy (as I was) to read the entire paper, summarized here. But in fact, the whole argument is trashed in the third to last paragraph of the article, proving that reporters don't actually think about what they're writing: "[r]etail employment led the way in April, adding 57,000 jobs. Health care and leisure businesses (read: hotels and restaurants) also beefed up payrolls." Yeah, knowledge-based economy, for sure.
As the five (5) of you who read this blog know, I've written a blog for California tenants who have the misfortune to live in buildings where the landlord is facing foreclosure. I wrote what became the blog at the end of 2007, when there weren't many of us thinking about this issue. More people have thought about it since then, but it's still a hard slog, particularly here in Sacramento, where our city mothers and fathers have studiously avoided any knowledge of the problem, and haven't been falling over themselves to come up with any help for tenants. Sometimes I feel like a voice in the wilderness, but then I realize that J has to listen to me, whether he wants to or not.
But then something happens. And I think, people are paying attention after all. Someone out there noticed. And it was someone with some power, someone who could do something. Now it's likely that tenant groups, neighborhood organizations and public health officials have been screaming for no little time, but the City Attorney in Los Angeles has finally gone after one of the Bad Boy Banks for illegal eviction of tenants in its foreclosed properties and then allowing the properties to deteriorate so badly that they became public health hazards.
And while Yves Smith doesn't think much of going after Deutsche Bank, the decision to, shall we say, do them first, brought a smile to my face. I noted that Deutsche Bank was particularly badly behaved from the beginning and, having failed to reform even a tiny bit during the crisis, informed Tenants Together last year that they weren't bound by no stinkin' laws. I promise to smile only a little as the case unfolds, but will do a small jig 'round the living room when the tenants who suffered illegal eviction and/or had to live in degraded conditions get the monetary settlements coming to them.
The Sacramento Kings (the local basketball team) will be staying in Sacramento for another year. No, please. Not another year of trying to fund a new arena. Not another year of debating whether or not public funds should go to this. (Uh, no public funds for the arena until the grass in my neighborhood park is cut regularly.) No discussions of the jobs created, or not created, by the arena, the hotel rooms occupied by players from good teams, the money spent by the citizenry going to or fro' the games. No discussions of the civic pride in having one of the worst teams in the NBA and their dreadful owners. And please, no discussion of the other uses for the arena--monster truck pulls and concerts. (I LIKE music, so I wouldn't want to go to a concert in a stadium.) Please, please.
But this is such a big issue here that there's been more ink and digital bytes than on the killing of Osama bin Laden. I'm not kidding. The lead story on one local television station was Osama bin Laden, but it was quickly followed by far more time on the Kings. But I guess one of my regular readers was right--this issue is never going to go away.
And I got my exercise ball today. After a bad experience with a local sports' store, I opted to buy from the Kaiser Permanente affiliate. The ball came with all the parts, and it took me about five minutes to fill it. Excellent choice.
There's a good article in Capitol Weekly on the unexpected $2 billion in income tax revenue that California's budget planners didn't expect. It appears that, as I noted in April, the rich are doing very well, so well in fact, that they paid $2 billion in taxes that the budget people didn't expect. What's interesting about the whole issue if the frame, of course. The anti-tax Republicans, of course, argue that this means we don't have a revenue problem, but a spending problem. Uh, we received $2 billion, not the $15 billion or so that the budget is out of balance, and most especially, the sum we would need to restore the services cut to the elderly, poor, disabled and the sick.
