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Popularity: 83% [?]
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz says the US has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
“In the US and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview overnight in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”
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The former prime minister Tony Blair has received millions of pounds through an unusual mixture of commercial, charitable and religious income streams. Since he stepped down from office in 2007, his financial affairs have been described by observers as “Byzantine” and “opaque”. The Guardian is now launching an online competition offering a prize to the person who can shine the brightest light on those financial structures.
Blair has a commercial consultancy, called Tony Blair Associates, plus jobs advising a US bank and a Swiss insurer. He has a multimillion pound book deal. He also has a charity, the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative, and another called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. But much of the income, which includes charitable donations from other sources, has been funnelled through a structure called Windrush Ventures No 3 Limited Partnership. Our contest asks: what is Windrush?
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The conference title says it all. And it won’t come as …
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Keep in the know with news and information from our new Podcast offering. See what we will be sharing with you in this introduction by Fred Harrison.
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The conference title says it all. And it won’t come as …
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There is a saying over here that “the perfect is the enemy of the good.”
The perfect is that government ought to be raising needed revenue by the taxation of location and natural resource rents. And, let us hope your efforts will stimulate a public outcry to move in this direction as deliberately as can be done.
The “good” I would suggest, is making use of the income tax structure to capture rent-derived income while hopefully we manage to capture rent more directly from landownership. We have the income tax in place; let’s “fix” it by exempting all individual incomes up to, say, the national median. Above this (with no additional exemptions for deductions), we impose increasing rates of taxation on higher ranges of income. By the time the highest rates are imposed, most of this income is rent-derived, I am almost certain. And, to the extent the income is actually earned, those with that high of an income are not going to be experience any diminished standard of living by actually paying for public goods and services.