Greenspan, 82, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve central bank from 1987 to 2006, was a leading cheerleader for deregulating Wall Street and presided over the longest economic boom in American history.

After the housing bubble burst, splattering the toxic remnants of bad mortgage loans everywhere and sending the entire economy into free fall, Greenspan said he reexamined his free-market ideology.

“I found a flaw,” he confessed. “I was shocked because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

To be charitable, going to Alan Greenspan for input on an economic issue nowadays is a little like asking Donald Rumsfeld the best way forward for the U.S. military.

Conservative republican efforts to whip up sympathy for the uber-rich is always funny. Look, the vast majority of us work hard and would love to have the burden of being in the tax bracket of folks like Paris Hilton and Rush Limbaugh, but none of us who are sane remotely feel like we need to have a telethon for Marie Antoinette.

The forensics on the Sarah Palin pick are going to go down in history.

The American economist Paul R. Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.

Mr. Krugman, 55, a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and a columnist for The New York Times, formulated a new theory to answer questions about free trade, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.

“Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most,” he said. “Now it’d be different if you could make the case to me that by giving this tax cut to the very wealthy, everybody else was going to be better off. We saw what happened the last eight years when we gave that tax cut.”

He then explained his statement, first made at a rally in Sarasota, FL, two weeks ago, that asking the wealthiest Americans to accept tax hikes would be patriotic. And he added that the tax rates would still be lower than they were under the Reagan administration.

“I tell you, Democrats,” Biden said, gritting his teeth. “Don’t you step down from anybody telling you that we don’t value, we don’t have American values. … I want this debate about values! I want this debate about American values.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1936

The easiest way to summarize the reason for this extension of Government functions, local, State and national, is to use the words of Abraham Lincoln: “The legitimate object of Government is to do for the people what needs to be done but which they cannot by individual effort do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

Taxes are the price we all pay collectively to get those things done.

To divide fairly among the people the obligation to pay for these benefits has been a major part of our struggle to maintain democracy in America.

Ever since 1776 that struggle has been between two forces. On the one hand, there has been the vast majority of our citizens who believed that the benefits of democracy should be extended and who were willing to pay their fair share to extend them. On the other hand, there has been a small, but powerful group which has fought the extension of those benefits, because it did not want to pay a fair share of their cost.

That was the line-up in 1776. That is the line-up in this campaign. And I am confident that once more—in 1936—democracy in taxation will win.

Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.

Before this great war against the depression we fought the World War; and it cost us twenty-five billion dollars in three years to win it. We borrowed to fight that war. Then, as now, a Democratic Administration provided sufficient taxes to pay off the entire war debt within ten or fifteen years.

Those taxes had been levied according to ability to pay. But the succeeding Republican Administration did not believe in that principle. There was a reason. They had political debts to those who sat at their elbows. To pay those political debts, they reduced the taxes of their friends in the higher brackets and left the national debt to be paid by later generations. Because they evaded their obligation, because they regarded the political debt as more important than the national debt, the depression in 1929 started with a sixteen-billion-dollar handicap on us and our children.

Now let’s keep this little drama straight. The actors are the same. But the act is different. Today their role calls for stage tears about the next generation. But in the days after the World War they played a different part.

The moral of the play is clear. They got out from under then, they would get out from under now—if their friends could get back into power and they could get back to the driver’s seat. But neither you nor I think that they are going to get back.

As in the World War, we have again created a tax structure to yield revenues adequate to pay the cost of this war against depression in this generation and not in the next.

***

A number of my friends who belong in these very high upper brackets have suggested to me, more in sorrow than in anger, that if I am reelected they will have to move to some other Nation because of high taxes here. I shall miss them very much but if they go they will soon come back. For a year or two of paying taxes in almost any other country in the world will make them yearn once more for the good old taxes of the U.S.A.

***

Once more this year we must choose between democracy in taxation and special privilege in taxation. Are you willing to turn the control of the Nation’s taxes back to special privilege? I know the American answer to that question. Your pay envelope may be loaded with suggestions of fear, and your dividend letter may be filled with propaganda. But the American people will be neither bluffed nor bludgeoned.

The seeds of fear cannot bear fruit in the polling booth.

Inside the polling booth every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences. There they are sovereign American citizens. There on November 3d they will not fear to exercise that sovereignty.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is working on a plan that would set up a government facility to take on bad debts from financial institutions, preventing a worsening of the global credit crisis, Wall Street sources have told CNBC.

The facility would be similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which was set up in 1989 to take on all the failed thrift assets during the savings and loan crisis, these sources said.

Paulson is said to be shopping the proposal to lawmakers in Congress, a congressional aide told Reuters.

Such a move, according to its advocates, would allow banks to shovel bad debt off their balance sheets and send them back to business as usual.

It is mighty interesting that conservatives think individuals who aren’t in the same economic class as the McCains just need to suck it up, but Wall Street types who mismanage their businesses need a giant taxpayer funded safety net.

Real believable.

On MSNBC, conservative pundit Joe Watkins (one of those black conservatives who exist almost exclusively on tv) has the unenviable task of defending John McCain forgetting how many houses he owns. Watkins first reaches for the POW card, because we can’t think John McCain is an out of touch elitist who isn’t like the rest of us because of his military service. That doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the line they’re going with. But where Watkins digs himself in deep is in arguing that lots of Americans have multiple homes and investment properties. Lots.

That’s like Karl Rove’s ham-handed swipe at Obama as the snooty guy at the country club, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of us do not have country club memberships (and frankly, couldn’t tell you where the nearest one is).

They’re not like us.

“I suppose, if you’ve got 7 maybe 8 houses, the economy looks pretty sound to you.” — Barack Obama

MP3

Report: Abu Dhabi Poised to Buy Chrysler Building for $800M

Anheuser-Busch Confirms $44.6 Billion InBev Offer

Even the people who support cuts in defense spending (I’m not much for that) would think that doing so to give ExxonMobil and the airlines another sweetheart deal is ridiculous.

Bartels comes to this conclusion by examining what happened to income inequality from President Truman to President George W. Bush. He writes, “Under Democratic presidents, poor families did slightly better than richer families (at least in proportional terms), producing a modest net decrease in income inequality; under Republican presidents, rich families did vastly better than poorer families, producing a considerable net increase in income inequality.”

He concludes that income gap increased under Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and both Bushes, while it declined under four of the five Democratic presidents who have served during this period — all except Jimmy Carter. That pattern, he asserts, “seems hard to attribute to a mere coincidence in the timing of Democratic and Republican administrations.”

I can’t wait until he appoints Amy Winehouse as Drug Czar.*

(via)

* President Bush, don’t get any ideas

In this case, let’s take a peep at one year during Fiorina’s time at CEO of HP (before she was effectively fired by the board for poor performance):

The top layoff leader in terms of layoff numbers is Carly S. Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard. She fired 25,700 workers in 2001, and saw her pay jump 231 percent, from $1.2 million in 2001 to $4.1 million in 2002.

In effect, for each of the people Carly Fiorina fired, she got a bump in salary of $112.84.

The woman they’re now calling John McCain’s economic brain values the job of an American worker as $112.84 she can shove in her pocket as she drives home in her luxury car to her gilded palace. Nice.

She was brought on board to grow HP, but instead laid off people then pushed the company into a merger with Compaq that turned into a mess and was opposed by Walter Hewlett, son of HP co-founder and tech pioneer Bill Hewlett. A little after that she was effectively fired by the board of directors.

And yet, this is the leading voice on the Republican side for business and economics. She must have some freaky pictures of someone or something, because even the McCain people can’t be this stupid.

Here is a chart of HP’s stock performance during Fiorina’s tenure (July 19, 1999 – February, 10, 2005):

And here is HP’s chart post-Fiorina (July 19, 1999 February, 10, 2005 – present):

Newsweek calls her “McCain’s Economic Brain”. Perhaps a lobotomy is in order.

Despite extensive efforts to educate workers about saving for retirement, many employees are not doing a good job of managing their company-sponsored 401(k) accounts, a new study indicates.

The analysis of nearly 1 million retirement portfolios found that 69 percent have inappropriate risk or diversification of holdings and 36 percent have worrisome concentrations of company stock. In addition, one-third of savers aren’t putting enough aside to qualify for the full company matching contribution.