Economy Archives - Page 5 of 17

Corporations

The Car Rental Sales Tax Swap Scam

Car rental corporate consolidation, funded by you

February 21, 2023 • by Pat Garofalo

Big car rental corporations did a very good job sweeping across the country collecting what is a massive backdoor tax subsidy on the purchase of their main business asset....

Corporations

Amazon Web Services holds about 40 percent of the cloud computing market

January 26, 2023 • by Pat Garofalo

As one Virginia resident put it, “Northern Virginia is being overwhelmed by these things. … We may as well start calling ourselves the Commonwealth of Amazon.”...

Corporations

The FTC took the first step, now states need to follow up

January 23, 2023 • by Pat Garofalo

Getting rid of non-competes is a big deal and is a big win for economic freedom for all workers...

Economy

How Sanctions Contributed to Venezuela’s Economic Collapse

Despite claims that they targeted the Maduro regime, sanctions had indiscriminate effects on the country

January 17, 2023 • by Francisco Rodríguez

This essay was originally published by The Global Americans and is reprinted with permission During the past decade, Venezuela lived through the largest economic contraction documented in the history of the Western Hemisphere. The implosion took place at the same time as the U.S. government barred oil purchases, froze government bank ...

How Sanctions Contributed to Venezuela’s Economic Collapse

Economy

Why We Should Worry about Inequality

And why we should take seriously Plato and John Stuart Mill

January 11, 2023 • by David Lay Williams

Plato and Mill respectively propose a variety of measures to achieve their desired degree of economic equality (not precise equality in either case), though both agree (1) that inheritance taxes should play a significant role, and (2) that this equality should be achieved incrementally, rather than all at once, to ...

Finance

Austerity, Then and Now

An excerpt from The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism

January 9, 2023 • by Clara Mattei

Part of what makes austerity so effective as a set of policies is that it packages itself in the language of honest, hardscrabble economics. Vague sentiments such as “hard work” and “thrift” are hardly novel; they have been extolled by economists since the days of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and ...

Corporations

Election Day 2022: Good (and Some Bad) News for State Corporate Power Politics

Big tech antagonists did well, but so did megadeal boosters

November 14, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Big Tech antagonists won big in attorneys general races. So did all of the governors who have been promoting major corporate subsidy deals in recent months won their reelection races, lending more evidence to the already existing heap of it that massive corporate handouts can be potent political tools....

Election Day 2022: Good (and Some Bad) News for State Corporate Power Politics

Corporations

An Ethics of Refusal

Beyond “The Great Resignation”

November 14, 2022 • by Benjamin P. Davis

In the United States, we live in a country where someone who works for a law firm that services Big Oil is by and large considered intelligent and successful, maybe even ethical due to their pro bono representation, no matter that such a firm, for instance, did not represent foreclosure ...

Capitalism

The Rat Race of Prestige and Boredom

W. David Marx on how status affects human behavior

November 9, 2022 • by Alla Anatsko and W. David Marx

The whole idea of cultural capital is knowing what objects to buy, how to arrange them, how to behave—all of these things go together. Just because you can purchase an object does not mean you can get into the group....

Corporations

The “Transferable” Subsidy Scam

Meet a big, under-the-radar problem

October 31, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

It’s a mess, is what I’m saying. But making a corporate subsidy transferable is an easy thing to do under the radar, without folks knowing what it means or realizing what their state is in for when such a policy is actually implemented. ...

Capitalism

The Semiconductor Shell Game Has a Big Winner

Money in politics finds a current in semiconductors

October 13, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

This deal confirms my worst fears about the confluence of a genuine semiconductor shortage and lack of domestic manufacturing with a huge pot of federal subsidies that state officials are vying for in an election year. The table was perfectly set for overspending on giant deals in order to facilitate ...

Corporations

Corporate Subsidies Exposed by Georgia Judge

The state made big promises in a deal with an electric car manufacturer

October 5, 2022 • by Pat Garofalo

Subsidy deals almost always necessitate new obligations on behalf of taxpayers to provide services to the corporation’s physical grounds and its future workers. But the costs of those services — be they increased water and power usage, public safety, infrastructure degradation, environmental costs, or what have you — are not ...