Neil deMause

Barack Obama hasn’t talked much about tax policy since his run-in with Joe the Plumber, but one of his biggest challenges will be fixing a system where the tax burden is increasingly skewed toward the little guy:

Barack Obama, it’s fair to say, has a lot on his plate right now: Halt the economic freefall, reform health insurance, extricate our troops from Iraq, stop SUV drivers from turning the Earth into a hellish postapocalyptic wasteland. Then there’s one of our country’s biggest, if less mentioned, messes: tax policy.

In recent decades, it seems, no matter how much money we as a nation produce, it all ends up in the pockets of about twelve people. Since the mid-’80s, the average income of the bottom nine-tenths of Americans has gone up about 6 percent; for the rich, it’s nearly doubled… [read more]

Is the sports bubble about to pop? It’s probably too soon to tell, but that won’t stop me from reading the tea leaves.

Sports are all about omens. All it takes is for a baseball player to get called out a few times in a row and sportscasters will declare him to be “slumping” and that his team has “lost momentum.” (Either that or he’s “due.” Omens are funny that way.)

In recent weeks, the portents that many sports-watchers have been keeping an eye out for are predictions of how one of our other national obsessions — the spectator sport that is the roller-coaster economy — will affect teams’ bottom lines… [read more]

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg got his way last week when the city council voted to overturn term limits and allow him to run for a third term. He should be careful what he wishes for.

When Fiorello LaGuardia was elected to a third term in 1941, he was still widely considered New York’s greatest mayor ever. When Robert Wagner followed suit 20 years later, he won in a landslide. Ed Koch won a third term with 78 percent of the vote, at a time when he was being touted as a potential presidential candidate.

Four years later, each of them was gone in disgrace… [read more]

In case you haven’t heard, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is pulling out all the stops to change the city’s term-limits law so he can seek a third term in office. The city council held public hearings last Thursday and Friday, and I dropped in for a visit:

Last week’s City Council hearings on term limits were, to put it nicely, a fiesta of convoluted arguments and strange bedfellows. Starting with the three competing options on the floor — lift the eight-year limit by council fiat, hold a special voter referendum or leave things as is — things only got more surreal as advocates of each position tried to explain why their side, and not the other guy’s, represented the “will of the people.”… [read more]

Once again, not my headline. (Mine was something about not giving it “a free pass” – baseball reference, get it?) In any case, though, even if we’re not really all at risk by shortstops rampaging across the land with bats in hand, the reality is pretty disturbing:

We’re used to horror stories about the Mets bullpen, but not like this. Last week, it was revealed that reliever Ambiorix Burgos had turned himself in to Dominican Republic police after being accused of a hit-and-run that killed two women; the mother of one of the victims charged that Burgos had intentionally run over her daughter after she refused to date him… [read more]

The bailout bill isn’t exactly working wonders, but one longtime Wall Street critic still think it was a necessary first step:

When millions were cheering on the House of Representatives last week for initially saying no to the Wall Street bailout plan, Doug Henwood was not among them. The founder of Left Business Observer, and whose classic book “Wall Street” argued that the stock market was at best useless and at worst dangerous, Henwood nonetheless watched in dismay as fellow lefties from Rep. Dennis Kucinich to the antiwar group Code Pink argued for rejecting the bill.

Henwood isn’t crazy about the bailout plan, even after Congress trimmed some of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s most grandiose power grabs. But, he says, that’s not the point… [read more]

Now that the House of Representatives has torpedoed the Wall Street bailout bill, maybe they’ll be ready to consider the modest proposal I put forth in this week’s Metro column:

Washington scrambled this past week to approve a $700 billion bill to tackle a crisis that some called “the greatest threat to this country since the Depression:” a crisis that could lead to 35 million people living in poverty.

While critics worried that the cost would be too great, proponents of a bailout for the poor noted that the nation cannot afford to have one in eight members of its productive workforce bereft of cash… [read more]

The economy is crashing harder than Travis Barker’s plane, so why are some New Yorkers breathing a sigh of relief?

I’d say it was about 15 minutes after Lehman Brothers suffered total existence failure that I got the first instant message: “At least maybe now I’ll be able to afford an apartment.”

This wasn’t just whistling in the economic dark. It’s a sad fact that the “good times” that have now ended were great for Wall Street types and those who service them (high-end restaurateurs, yacht salesmen), but less so for the rest of us…

I’ve written about the scene at the Project FAIR help desk for welfare recipients before; today I tell the stories of two women I met last week that exemplify how trying to jump through welfare’s nonsensical hoops can be a full-time job:

If you’ve ever been tempted to think of welfare recipients as lazy, it’s worth a visit to the “fair hearing” site in Brooklyn, where people who get public benefits — whether welfare, food stamps, disability or Medicaid — can go when they have a problem with the system.

Take Crystal Maurin, who was informed earlier this year that she’d failed to show she was doing the 35 hours a week of “work activities” the city now requires. (That she was fully employed at the time as a child-care worker for the city itself — leaving her own 2-year-old with friends while doing so — apparently wasn’t proof enough.)… [read more]

This Thursday is September 11, and Major League Baseball is marking the day by dressing up its players in “patriotic” uniforms:

This Thursday, all Major League Baseball teams will take the field wearing specially designed “Stars and Stripes” caps, part of the league’s Welcome Back Veterans initiative. (Barring rainouts, the Yankees and Mets won’t take part, as they’re off that day.) Following the games, the caps will be auctioned to raise money for veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

There’s nothing wrong with helping veterans — no matter how you feel about America’s current wars, those returning from battle are in undeniable need of help — but doing so on September 11 turns a simple charity event into a troubling political statement… [read more]