Nearly three years since the ostensible end of the recession, the United States is still beset by over 15 percent underemployment—millions of Americans who would like to work full time and either can’t find jobs, or can only find part time work. We know from a large body of research that unemployment and underemployment have many negative consequences, not only financial but physical and mental. But this plague of underemployment exists alongside the corresponding problem of over-employment.

I think these do a fantastic job of articulating one of the underlying reasons i find both political parties so (a) pathetic and (b) frustrating. Neither party articulates a vision for what an America that provides "middle-class achievement, economic independence, and democratic inclusion" to the working class would look like under current global economic and technological conditions. (I think that's a big part of the explanation that Democrats need to hear, by the way, for why lower-income/working-class "red staters" consistently vote in a manner that Democrats perceive to be contrary to that class's inherent economic interests -- a Democratic party which is essentially neo-liberal and under the sway of professionalism cannot articulate a convincing alternative to a Republican vision whose appeal is primarily "let's make things the way they were", even if that Republican vision doesn't articulate an accurate causation for the disappearance of those conditions.)

We have been living in a society where debts, rather than rights, have been the major means for accessing basic social goods like housing, education, and health care.

This contest could be the ultimate test of whether such voters can be won back through unadorned and unabashed class-based populism.

Nearly 90 percent of the families that paid no income tax make less than $40,000, most much less. The real problem is that so many Americans are struggling on such a small income, not whether they pay taxes. The two tax credits lifted 7.2 million people out of poverty in 2009, including four million children. At a time when high-income households are paying their lowest share of federal taxes in decades, when corporations frequently avoid paying any tax, it is clear who should bear a larger burden and who should not.

We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn't bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won't be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.<br />
<br />
And what does that mean? Who spends hundreds of millions of dollars for what looks, on the outside, like rank incompetence?<br />
<br />
It strains the imagination to think that the country's smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by "surrendering" at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?

fuck the rich.

"contrary to widespread views," as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung study put it, these taxes are automatically deducted along with social contributions from the paychecks of Greeks employed in both the private and public sectors. It is mainly the small wealthy class that manages to cheat the authorities out of €40 billion in tax each year. That is the OECD's estimated volume of annual tax evasion. The Greek central bank puts the losses at somewhere between €15 billion and €20 billion.<br />
These tax cheats have little to fear. As Panos Kazakos, an Athens-based professor of politics, puts it: "I have never seen a single person put in jail for tax evasion." Robolis adds that the government, which supposedly has no money available for social services, just published a list of companies that owe the state a total of €9 billion in social contributions -- but it does nothing to get that money.<br />
<br />
This injustice is what is making people in Greece so angry.

What both of these reasons have in common is that instead of putting money into the hands of people who not only need it but would spend it, thereby stimulating demand and more jobs, they keep (or put more) money into the hands of people who already have it and don’t need to spend it in economically beneficial ways. Presumably because they are, in Yglesias’ eyes, the real movers and shakers of the economy, as opposed to the vast majority of middle- and working-class people or the government that represents them.

In 2005, the California Supreme Court defined a rule of “unconscionability” for consumer contracts: when they “deliberately cheat large numbers of consumers out of individually small sums of money.” The federal trial court and the Ninth Circuit applied the rule in this case.

(paired with record profits.)

Extending the Bush tax cuts over the next 10 years, which Boehner favors, will increase the deficit by twice as much as the $2 trillion in spending cuts he's calling for will reduce the deficit.

"The technical name of the program that Mack and Karches took advantage of is TALF, short for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility. But the federal aid they received actually falls under a broader category of bailout initiatives, designed and perfected by Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, called "giving already stinking rich people gobs of money for no fucking reason at all." If you want to learn how the shadow budget works, follow along. This is what welfare for the rich looks like."

Be prepared to hear tons like this in the coming weeks. This is a narrative that the mainstream media goes orgasmic over: talk of "toughness," "courage," "honesty," etc, in someone making a proposal that will anger a favored political constituency-- never mind that the people who Paul Ryan is getting tough on here are poor people, who are actually powerless. (The media particularly likes these getting tough measures when, as is the case for Ross Douthat and the political class writ large, they will not actually be asked to suffer at all, given their elevated economic station.)

Years ago I remember a lot of moderate liberals talking about how the Bush era radicalized them. For me, it was the economic collapse of 2008 that did it. The financial industry almost literally came within a hair's breadth of destroying the world, but even so it took only a few short months for them to close ranks with Republicans and the rich to prevent anything serious being done to rein them in. Profits are back up, new regulations are barely more than window dressing, nothing was done to help underwater homeowners, bonuses are as obscene as ever, unemployment remains sky high, and the public has somehow been convinced that this was all their own fault — or perhaps the fault of big government, or big deficits, or something. But the finance industry has escaped almost entirely unscathed. It's mind boggling. If this doesn't change your view of who really runs the world, I don't know what would.

"Can they both be right? To help answer that question, it helps to ask who benefited from TARP, and who was supposed to have benefited. You get no sense from its inelegant title, which promises "relief" from "troubled assets" but fails to note who that relief will be provided to. If you think the financial sector was supposed to get relief, you fall in Samuelson's camp. If you think homeowners were as well, you fall in Barofsky's."<br />
<br />
"There is the concern that the government ended up bolstering the companies responsible for the crisis, rather than people caught in it."

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them.<br />
<br />
Lop their wealths off.

Let's be honest about why we can't have nice things.

A foundational text for the New Class War.

Mr. President: please take a moment to step away from Libya and consider the impact the bank lobbyists are currently having on the evisceration of your financial reform. I'd much prefer you'd gone to war with them--by appointing Elizabeth Warren to chair the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau--than with this peripheral lunatic dictator in the Middle East.

Finally, the country was assured that regulatory reform would address the threat to our financial system posed by large banks that have become effectively guaranteed by the government no matter how reckless their behavior. This promise also appears likely to go unfulfilled. The biggest banks are 20 percent larger than they were before the crisis and control a larger part of our economy than ever. They reasonably assume that the government will rescue them again, if necessary. Indeed, credit rating agencies incorporate future government bailouts into their assessments of the largest banks, exaggerating market distortions that provide them with an unfair advantage over smaller institutions, which continue to struggle.

The lesson we learned learned is that homeowners were only a priority insofar as their health mattered to the banks’ health. When those two things became unmoored, the administration was willing to declare victory.

Most of the other Wall Street bigwigs whose firms took unconscionable risks — risks that nearly brought the global financial system to its knees — aren’t even on Justice’s radar screen. Nor has there been a single indictment against any top executive at a subprime lender.

Rick Santorum says we have a worker shortage when our unemployment rate is around 9% and the true joblessness rate likely several percentage points higher. Dan Savage, for some reason, agrees with him, and advocates allowing more immigration. We don't have a worker shortage. We have a jobs shortage. I think our immigration policy is daft, and I think anti-immigrant animus is very often driven by simple xenophobia and racism. But to say that what we need for the benefit of our economy is to drive down wages through importing more workers, after decades of stagnant real wages and spiraling income inequality, is nothing short of cruel.