Krugman's letter to Obama: What You Must Do

[erislover]

Thanks for the clarification, 50million. Still, housing is something that comes with a lot of costs, especially in a shady or shifting job market. If unemployment will be on the rise, more people need to be mobile, not tied into a 30 year mortgage. I’m just skeptical about increasing home ownership or helping homeowners without a clear reason why that particular segment of society is suffering from some kind of market failure.

[Richard_Parker]

@clairobscur

Sorry for the hijack, but what prevent workers from unionising? (And what would be an “Employee Free Choice Act”?)

Analysis of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Money quote:

Llots of folks think that the union election process is fundamentally broken. There are many studies on this. To summarize a few results: 91% of employers force employees to attend intimidating one-on-one meetings with supervisors; 51% illegally threaten to close their worksite when employees try to form a union; 30% unlawfully fire workers who support forming a union as a way of intimidating others. An alarmingly high percentage of employees feel that they would be fired if they supported a union in a union election process.

Now you may say, “but that’s illegal, sp why don’t unions and workers just bring claims?” The problem is the uniquely weak remedies under the NLRA. An employee fired for union organizing gets the right to reinstatement and backpay – minus whatever the employee made or should have made while waiting to be reinstated. And after all the litigation and appeals, reinstatement usually takes years. Compare other employment law statutes, like the FLSA (double damages, attorneys fees) or Title VII (punitive damages, consequential damages, emotional distress damages, attorneys fees); none of that is available under the NLRA. It’s clear that a not-insignificant number of employers intentionally violate the NLRA because the penalties are so trivial. So, I think, the part of EFCA that would increase penalties for employer violations during union organizing campaigns is a no-brainer.

[Kimstu]

@Chief Pedant

And as a nitpick, social security is argued by many not to be a tax. It’s a fund financed by collective contributions. BS, I know. It’s a tax and there ain’t no fund anywhere.

“Even for current and many future retirees, the amounts of payroll taxes continue to be dwarfed by the amounts of benefits received, as seen in figure 2.” (Sentence just above Figure 2)

http://www.urban.org/url.cfm?ID=310667

Nitpick back atcha: your cite refers to the combination of Social Security and Medicare benefits, not just Social Security. It’s the sharply rising costs of Medicare that really make the combination expensive.

@Chief Pedant

The idea that we haven’t already shifted the tax burden to high earners is bogus, in my opinion

? How you figure? It is definitely true that until recent years, the wealthy brackets provided a larger proportion of total federal income tax revenues than they used to. But that’s mostly because, in the booming 80’s and 90’s, the wealthy possessed a larger proportion of total income than they used to. And the Bush tax cuts reversed that trend, as a 2004 Congressional Budget Office study found:

[T]he wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.

Over that same period, taxpayers with incomes from around $51,500 to around $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase. Households earning around $75,600 saw their tax burden jump the most, from 18.7 percent of all taxes to 19.5 percent.

Not just the share of total tax burden but also the effective tax rate was reduced more for the wealthy than for any other group by Bush’s tax cuts.

So I don’t quite see where you’re getting your claim that we’ve “already shifted the tax burden to high earners”.

[clairobscur]

@Richard_Parker

Analysis of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Money quote:

OK. Thank you.