How Pathetic is Rick Perry?

It occurred to Rick Perry that if he wanted to be president of the United States, he might need to have a position on taxes. Unfortunately, coherent thought isn't his strong suit. Charles Pierce of Esquire has the skinny in Rick Perry's Tax Plan: A Comical Slow Dance with Confusion:

It is on days like this that I don't envy political economists. They're the ones that are going to have to take this Message from Goobertown seriously. They're going to have to score it. They're going to have to do the math, such as it is, and try to find a coherent formation in this unwieldy parade of hackneyed talking points (Kill the Estate Tax and Save the Family Farm!) and tired applause lines (The Job Creators Are Uncertain!). They're the ones who are going to have to find a way to square the utter abandonment of the progressive income tax, a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, a return to explosively inflationary health-care costs, an unchained and undoubtedly newly amok financial-services industry, and the partial privatization of Social Security, all of which Goodhair has managed to wedge into "Cap, Balance, and Grow (!)."

What I Have Learned from the Cheering at the Republican Debates

Gay? Fuck you!


No job? Fuck you!


No health insurance? Fuck you!

The System is Broken

Since [2006], researchers have found that about 90 percent of major U.S. companies expressly set their executive pay targets at or above the median of their peer group. This creates just the kinds of circumstances that drive pay upward.

The Washington Post.

Shouldn't performance have something to do with it?

Krugman on the Reaction to Occupy Wall Street

What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.

Paul Krugman

Refreshingly Honest

If you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself.  Herman Cain

Doomed to Repeat

Infrastructure Banks

What exactly is an infrastructure bank?

Does it mean that instead of taxing the rich to build roads and bridges that everyone uses for free, the government lends money to the rich so that they can build toll roads and toll bridges that everyone will pay them to use?