(8 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
I was reading his column today, The Obama Agenda and it hit me: kaBoom! why shouldn’t this guy, better than any one in Washington at reading the economic tea leaves, get tapped to serve in Washington.
cross posted at Daily Kos
Hey. The guy just won a Nobel Prize. He’s a professor at Princeton University. He would advocate using tax payer dollars to create an equitable health care system. He would advocate for making sure states retain essential services, both because they are needed and to keep people employed. He’s for a new New Deal and that means putting people to work on our failing hard infrastructure, like bridges, tunnels, dams, power grid. And I’m sure he’d advocate for proportional taxation… and yeah. I’m thinking that would mean the 1% will pay a more equitable share.
I always love how those 1 percenters use numbers against us. We always hear how 1 percent pays half of all taxes collected. But let’s think about this for one minute (and i barely passed math):
In the United States at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation’s wealth.
Doh… sounds like they are getting a good deal to me. I mean, if I understand it right: the top 10% (and this is before BushCo pushed the figures higher) have 71% of the wealth but only pay 50% of the taxes.
You see, this is the kind of crap that kills me. Not to mention that most of that money is made from industrial processes that deplete resources all over the world. and pollute our environment. so they have to pay to balance out the harm done in making all this money.
why should the bottom 41% of us always have to clean up the mess?
Fuck.
Anyway. I vote for Paul Krugman as Treasury Secretary. He’d explain the nuts and bolts to us in ways we can understand. And while we’re at it? Let’s put Bill Moyers in the FCC chairman’s spot. Because it’s time to get some competent and reliable outsiders inside Washington.
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Why, do you ask, would I like to see Paul Krugman be named chairman of the Federal Reserve? It’s simple: until or unless Congress passes legislation returning it to the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve is in charge of printing money in the U.S. That provides slightly more power, in my humble opinion. But whether it’s fed Chairman or Treasury Secretary, I like the idea of Krugman being The Guy.
Don’t count on it happening, though; Obama will choose another supply-sider, or let Paulson remain. After all, Goldman Sachs invested heavily in Obama’s campaign; they want their former CEO or someone else friendly to their interests in charge of the economy.
…but I have to echo the people who don’t think he’d accept and that don’t think he’d be tempermentally suited to it.
Krugman is a fantastic academic economist. But that doesn’t add up to being a good manager, nor to having the particular skills needed to manage the various bailouts that Treasury is currently involved in. Krugman’s particular specialty is trade theory; this is very important stuff, but not really the purview of Treasury at all, and particularly the Treasury under present circumstances.
I think that taking Krugman out of his role as an academic probably isn’t in the best interest of the US, but if he was willing to do so, he’d be a great head of the International Trade Commission, and more suited to that than Sec. of the Treasury.