Cary Neeper's Blog: Reviewing World-changing Nonfiction - Posts Tagged "taxes"

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About ThemThe Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them by Joseph E. Stiglitz, New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 2015.
The titles of other books by Nobel Prize winner Stiglitz suggest fair warnings and solutions: Rewriting the rules, …Growth, Development, and Social Progress, …How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future, Freefall, Making Gobalization Work, Fair Trade For All…, Globalization and Its Discontents.

The solutions: Don’t spend money we don’t have. Reduce corporate welfare. Increase safety nets for the poor. Help workers improve their skills and get health care. Invest in education, technology and infrastructure. Assure fair global trade. Stop subsidizing American agriculture. The author reminds us that improving our education would help us compete in the global market.

Student dept is now (2015) more than all credit card debt at 1.2 trillion dollars. (13 % owe over $50,000 each.) The author observes that universities hire adjunct professors (who love to teach, usually) at unlivable wages, while insisting that those hired as professors bring in research money.

Simple changes include raising capital gains and inheritance taxes, spending to broaden access to education, enforcing anti-trust laws, reforming corporate governance and executive pay, and regulating banks to end exploitation.

Without putting a label on his ideas, his ideas appeal to common sense--like eliminating discrimination and exploitation by disallowing manipulation and unearned favoritism-- redoing “financial regulations and corporate governance.” Included are ways to lower the rate for capital gains and equalizing the proportion of income paid as income tax. Take a look at patrioticmillionaires.org and their book.

The Essential Bernie Sanders and His Vision for America by Jonathan Tasini, C,helsea Green Publishing, Vermont, 2015.

Bill McKibbon said it:”…Bernie…always means what he says, and he always stands for what he believes.” In this small book J. Tasini gives us the full text of Bernie’s Vermont talk announcing his run for President of the U.S.”

Like the book, the speech is divided into topics critical to correcting our laws so that health care is a right--as is a college education--where child care , health care, and veteran benefits are affordable and where all Americans realize the full promise of “…equality that is our birthright.”

To clarify each topic, Bernie’s words and political activities are presented by Chapter topics, each ending with a short summary of “Bernie Facts that summarize his detailed political and legal action and his stands in Congress . The twenty topics include a wide spectrum of government concerns: Economy, Health Care, Education , Environment, Taxes, Wall Street, Workers, Family Values, Society, Politics, Infrastructure, Veterans, Agriculture, Immigration, Civil Rights, Foreign Policy, Foreign Trade, Media, Government Oversight, and Personal Liberty.