Chance plays a powerful role in every life - our brains and personalities are just chemical soup, after all; a few drops here or there matter enormously - but consequences often become more serious as income levels go down.
At a time when the GOP is playing games with the debt limit, a member of the Supreme Court is refusing to recuse himself from matters he has a financial interest in, and middle class incomes are stagnant, many want to change the subject. I don't. Thi...
To Republicans, I humbly suggest that we make it possible for Democrats to give up their quest for redistribution of income and wealth by our acceptance of an appropriate role for government in financing those public goods and services necessary to s...
We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices a...
You replace it by 23 percent tax, a frank, transparent tax embedded in the cost at retail, and everybody gets to takes their whole check home. And the average income earner gets a 50 percent increase in take-home pay.
Potential home buyers have a two-step decision process. First, they determine whether they can afford to make a purchase - does their income safely cover their mortgage payment? Then they determine whether owning is a better financial choice than ren...
Economists typically think that your happiness goes up as you get more money, but the more you have, the less each additional dollar matters. This means that you value money most in times when you have less income and more expenses.
During my 30 years on Wall Street, taxes on 'unearned income' have bounced up and down with regularity, and I've never detected any change in the appetite for hard work and accumulating wealth on the part of myself or any of my fellow capitalists.
We will be returning to historical levels of inequality. We'll view post-war America as a kind of strange interlude not to be repeated. It won't be the dreams that we all had that virtually all incomes go up in lockstep at three percent a year. It hu...
There are a lot of people in Congress who would never have made a great career or fortune in any other profession. But after they spend a while hanging out with the rich guys, they begin to feel they've been undervalued, and that an eventual seven-fi...
Now, McDonald's is a very good indicator of the global economy. If McDonald's doesn't increase its sales, it tells you that the monetary policies have largely failed in the sense that prices are going up more than disposable income, and so people hav...
There are many people who think we should have zero tax on capital gains, interest and dividends for everybody, as - the very, very wealthy. But recognize that means that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett would pay no income tax at all. And some people s...
It remains to be seen the extent to which the critical needs of seniors in low income high rises, people with home medical needs and those with disabilities have been adequately planned for and met during widespread power outages. I fear the answers.
The world is likely to view any temporary extension of the income tax cuts for the top two percent as a prelude to a long-term or permanent extension, and that would hurt economic recovery as well by undermining confidence that we're prepared to make...
Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liabili...
The ruling passion of the age is to convert wealth into debt in order to derive a permanent future income from it - to convert wealth that perishes into debt that endures, debt that does not rot, costs nothing to maintain, and brings in perennial int...
And what's interesting, and I don't think a lot of Americans understand this fact, is that, one, most new jobs are created by small businesses; two, most small businesses pay tax at the individual income tax, or many small businesses pay tax there.
Eastern Washington families and businesses should be able to deduct every penny of state and local sales tax they pay throughout the year from their federal tax bill, especially when people in most states are deducting their state income taxes.
Anything in this culture that stands still long enough eventually becomes okay if a person can derive an income from it. Eventually, pay-per-view public execution will happen, and it will be half-time entertainment.
Even for women without children, trading hours that produce income for hours that produce “only” art seems like a foolish decision. What a loss for the world, though, to have women's voices silenced because art is our last priority.
That fallacy flies in the face of studies that show, every day, in every way, things are getting a little worse for America's minorities relative to the progress made by those in the top percentiles of assets and income.
