Main Street

Interesting things around the internet

• Some politicians and pundits like to draw our attention to people who don’t earn enough money to pay income tax, as if only paying payroll and sales and various other taxes but NOT income tax is some privilege. Notice that they draw a lot less attention to the 4,000 people or households making more than $1 million per year who don’t pay income tax…
• Wal-Mart has changed one of its key measures of performance. Shockingly, the change benefits its current CEO, who got more money after the goal posts were moved than he would have if they’d stayed in the same place. Meanwhile:
  

  But Mr. Flickinger said Wal-Mart’s pay packages seemed especially unfortunate in light of the company’s decision late last year to end its longtime profit-sharing programs for lower-level workers. This arrangement was created by Sam Walton, the company’s founder, and was a source of considerable pride to him.

  “Profit-sharing has pretty much been the carrot that’s kept Wal-Mart headed forward,” Mr. Walton wrote in his 1992 autobiography, “Sam Walton: Made in America.”

• Paul Krugman:
  

  The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

  (snip)

  These days Americans get constant lectures about the need to reduce the budget deficit. That focus in itself represents distorted priorities, since our immediate concern should be job creation. But suppose we restrict ourselves to talking about the deficit, and ask: What happened to the budget surplus the federal government had in 2000?

  The answer is, three main things. First, there were the Bush tax cuts, which added roughly $2 trillion to the national debt over the last decade. Second, there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which added an additional $1.1 trillion or so. And third was the Great Recession, which led both to a collapse in revenue and to a sharp rise in spending on unemployment insurance and other safety-net programs.

• The Writers Guild of America, East has been organizing “non-fiction” (aka reality) television workers. Now, Lion TV, which makes shows like Cash Cab and History Detectives, has agreed to bargain with its unionized employees. This is terrific news, and hopefully will set a precedent in the up-to-now pretty exploitative reality TV industry.