Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

A corporation deigns to let taxpayers into a previously private park they paid for

Back in 2017, Nashville, Tennessee, provided real estate investment trust Ryman Hospitality with about $13.8 million in tax breaks to build a waterpark at its Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center. However, taxpayers weren’t able to access the park unless they stayed overnight at the four-star facility. The hotel limited waterpark access ...
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Enjoy Your Pandemic Waterpark

How to Reopen the American Economy Now

We don’t have to choose between a depression and tens of thousands of avoidable deaths

And, of course, economists are on the case. In my favorite economic paper on the COVID-19 economy, Harvard University economist James Stock describes a new family of epidemiological-economic models that provide guidance about how best to reopen the economy. Here are his smart reopening requirements: promote collective behaviors to stop the spread of the ...
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How to Reopen the American Economy Now

Where Is the Risk in the COVID Economy?

A look at shadow banking

We are witnessing a public bailout of the private sector that dwarfs the bailout response to the 2007­–2008 Great Recession. Compared to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) implemented in 2008, today’s mobilization of public funds through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act amounts to ...
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Where Is the Risk in the COVID Economy?

Wages Against Essential Work

Our undervaluation of traditionally female work is coming home to roost

The streets around Highland Hospital, a few blocks from my house in Rochester, New York, are lined with signage “thanking” and “supporting” the “essential” workers who labor there. Many signs are hand-made, propped on porches or taped to light poles; others are mass-produced, like campaign signs, anchored into residential lawns. ...
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Wages Against Essential Work

How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

The rich have been successfully chipping away at Americans’ trust in government for decades

About 75 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to “do what is right” when polled during most of the last years of the Eisenhower administration and early years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency. In 2019, when the Pew Research Center released its most recent poll of public trust in the government, only 17 percent ...
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How Billionaires Get Away With Their Big Con

There’s a Hidden Economic Trendline That Is Shattering the Global Trade System

Why economic nationalism is suddenly a fashionable excuse for countries to decrease their reliance on the existing global supply chains

Covid-19 has accelerated a process that was well underway before it, spreading beyond U.S.-China-EU trade negotiations and into the world’s 50 largest economies. As much as many defenders of the old order lament this trend, it is as significant a shift as the dawn of the World Trade Organization (WTO) ...
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There’s a Hidden Economic Trendline That Is Shattering the Global Trade System

We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Reconstructing our tax system is an integral part of future national industrial policy as we restart the economy

Taxation is one of those areas that exposes the contradictions at the heart of globalization. Globalization of goods has proceeded quickly, as has the harmonization of industrial standards across countries. Harmonization of taxation? Not so easy. The power to tax is the ultimate national prerogative, one that very few sovereign nations would ...
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We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Let’s Make Sure We Get the Green New Deal Right

Covid-19 will force us to rethink many of the assumptions underlying existing GND proposals

Advocates of the Green New Deal (GND) are looking to change the way we handle a range of problems facing society, especially in the wake of environmental challenges occasioned by climate change. In response, policymakers have suggested a variety of programs designed to deal with these challenges. Should any of ...
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Let’s Make Sure We Get the Green New Deal Right

Don’t Sell Your Mind

A few years ago, an exciting new publishing house named Unnamed Press published my memoir about street life in the seventies, including the time I spent hooking in various whorehouses and massage parlors around town. The book was well received, and I went on a small tour, where my readings ...
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Don’t Sell Your Mind