ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVES

Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned it s Back on the Middle Class - by Jacob S. Hacker From the publisher's website : Description A groundbreaking work that identifies the real culprit behind one of the great economic crimes of our time— the growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of Americans and the richest of the rich. We all know that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few decades while most Americans haven't. In fact, the exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the current economic crisis, even as the rest of Americans have continued to fall behind. Why do the "haveit- alls" have so much more? And how have they managed to restructure the economy to reap the lion's share of the gains and shift the costs of their new economic playground downward, tearing new holes in the safety net and saddling all of us with increased debt and risk? Lots of so-called experts claim to have solved ...

The following quotation is attributed to Abraham Lincoln in the 1912 three-volume publication Industrial Development of Nations by George Boughton Curtiss. The story is also recounted in the book Free Trade, the Tariff and Reciprocity by Frank William Taussig. “I do not know much about the tariff, but I know this much, when we buy manufactured goods abroad, we get the goods and the foreigner gets the money. When we buy manufactured goods at home, we get both the goods and the money.” The quotation is a good example of a passage that sounds persuasive in a political speech, but has no merit when subjected to scrutiny and the application of basic economic principles. To see the fallacy of the protectionist sentiment, use the same logic on a personal level: When I buy food and clothes from stores, I get the food and clothes and the store owners get the money. When I grow my own food and make my own clothes, I get the food and clothes and get to keep my money. It is essentially an...