Ok, so I went and saw the movie, thanks to my entrepreneurial colleague Christine Hurt, who already has a post up. Read this post for the basics. I plan to follow up with a much longer analysis when I get the time. Here’s some stuff that should suffice for now.
First, the movie stinks. It’s technically proficient, but there is hardly a spark of genius or originality anywhere in the film. [One exception is the 94-year-old Eli Wallach, one of my favorite actors, as Julie Steinhardt. Note also that Jake's ringtone is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- I'll need to work out all the parallels with that film.] MNS is what you get when somebody who knows very little about business sets out to present a morality tale about business: neither informative nor entertaining. By contrast, the motivations, and therefore the results, of the original Wall Street were much more ambitious. Indeed, as I discuss in my analysis of that film, the art ultimately undercut the polemics. Here, there was no dramatic arc, no character development, just caricatures and events concocted to make Stone’s points about finance discussed below.
Second, Stone and his screenwriters basically took just about everything that was in the original, put it in the blender, and poured it out into this movie. The same shots of frenetic New York business and fun, David Byrne back on the soundtrack, the father-child relationships all over the place (as Christine notes), Gekko, Charlie Sheen in a cameo as Bud Fox, even the same NY realtor who sold Bud Fox his apartment, back here buying Jake’s apartment. The difference is the pieces were much more carefully constructed, and original, in the first film.
Third, I’ll cut to the anti-business chase: once again, as discussed in my longer article about business in film, my earlier paper linked above about Wall Street I, and my recent paper about movies and the financial crisis, it’s all about evil financiers. Stone goes through all of the possible narratives of the financial crisis discussed in my most recent paper — individual speculators, business cycles, banks, government or inexplicable economic forces — and finally finds that behind all of it was the evil financier Bretton James, betting against markets, manipulating bailouts. Stone’s trying to convince us that he’s thought of everything and come up in the end with the financier explanation. But by the time we’ve heard all the other possibilities, the evil financier story doesn’t make dramatic or any other kind of sense.
Fourth, both here and in the original Wall Street, Stone wants to make a point about making real things vs. manipulating money, pumping money out of Main Street and into Wall Street. But he has to acknowledge that Wall Street does do good things, like financing new ideas (e.g., nuclear fusion in the film). So then Stone has to sell ordinary people on some subtle difference between good finance that makes things and bad finance that’s only speculation. If a new financial instrument makes it cheaper to make things, is that bad? Is it good until it turns into a bubble? When, exactly, does that happen? He throws in “moral hazard” and a lot of other stuff, but in the end it’s pretty muddled.
But all of this isn’t to say the film is inconsequential. Audiences will come away with the germ of an idea that there is such a thing as bad finance, and it’s ruining the world. Stone punches this story across with nifty photography and lighting, David Byrne’s music, glossy videos of New York, really bad bad guys like Bretton James, really good good guys like Gekko’s daughter Winnie. As I’ve written in the above articles, all of this conditions filmgoers to accept that finance needs to be reined in, even if they don’t know exactly why.
In the film, Jacob defines insanity as “doing things over and over again and expecting a different result.” A nice comment on the film.
Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how many compromises can dance on the head of the congressional pin; it's to see what exactly different experts think needs to be done. In Ben Bernanke's memorable term: "blue sky thinking."
The first piece came, naturally enough, from Andy Stern; the second was from Dean Baker, and the third was from Mark Zandi. In the coming days, there'll also be pieces from Rep. Paul Ryan, Sonecon's Robert Shapiro, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's David Walker and others. Today's comes from Heather Boushey.
Moving the U.S. economy out of first gear
Heather Boushey
Senior economist, Center for American Progress
We are now nearly a year into what economists call a recovery, but it doesn’t look like one to U.S. workers. A close look at the data shows that while the U.S. economy is no longer in reverse, it is having a hard time getting out of first gear.
The U.S. economy continues to have a significant output gap: Capacity utilization is at 75 percent -- meaning that a full quarter of our machines are sitting idle -- while 1 in 10 workers sits at home. We need to find a way to connect the workers who want to work with the idle machines, be those desktops or assembly lines. What we need is a continued injection of demand -- demand for goods and services that will put businesses into motion to start investing and hiring again.
The question now is what we should do to push demand out of first gear. There are two ways to think about the challenges ahead: what makes sense from an economic perspective and what may be politically possible. Ideally, we can find ideas that do both.
President Obama has encouraged Congress to vote on a set of growth-oriented tax cuts, which are in the “realm of the possible.” Policymakers should focus on putting money in the hands of people who will spend it given where our economy is. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, as Obama proposes, is a good idea. The middle class will continue to spend these extra funds and this will boost demand and spur economic growth. But Congress should allow the tax cuts for those earning above $250,000 to expire because they do relatively little to boost demand and our economy can ill afford ineffective economic policies.
Other good tax ideas include extending the full range of provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that boost incomes for middle- and working-class families. These include the Making Work Pay tax cut, which gives a $400 tax cut for single filers and up to $800 for joint filers. It is implemented by reducing the amount of tax withheld from each paycheck. Other ARRA tax provisions include improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit and expansion of the Child Tax Credit, including making it refundable.
The president also proposes allowing firms to deduct 100 percent of new equipment purchases in 2010 and 2011 rather than depreciate these expenses over time. These are the kind of policies that should garner Republican support, and pairing them with middle-class tax cuts makes good political sense. But it will probably not do much to boost demand. The fundamental problem facing firms (especially small businesses) is not enough customers. It is not the cost of investing, which is at historic lows.
These proposals are a good start. But if we want to bring unemployment down in the short to medium term, there are other bold steps we can focus on to boost demand. Andy Stern and Dean Baker have already outlined some good ideas. Here’s my “blue sky” contribution:
Invest in laying the foundation for economic growth. Congress should seriously consider Obama’s proposal to increase infrastructure spending by $50 billion to invest in roads, rails and runways (and let’s really think “blue sky” and wonder if maybe a new Congress could allocate even more).
There are two stark realities in front of us that make this a crucial step. First, the United States has been underinvesting in infrastructure, which threatens our economic competitiveness moving forward. Every U.S. business relies on our transportation networks and electricity grids to keep their operations humming. We need an upgrade. And second, it may be some time before we’re back to full employment; taking steps now to make long-term investments that will boost job creation in the years to come is smart policy.
Invest in ourselves. We should put our national service programs “on steroids” to give our youngest workers useful job experience and an opportunity to give back to their communities. Expanding our national service programs, as Stern suggested, is also an excellent way to meet pressing community needs and tap into the skills and expertise of older workers.
But there are other ways to create jobs now. For instance, Congress should extend the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Emergency Jobs Program, which as of the end of September will have created 250,000 jobs through public-private partnerships nationwide. The Local Jobs for America Act, introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), would create approximately 1 million jobs by providing $100 billion in funds to be used over two years to protect state and local government jobs and create local government and nonprofit sector jobs.
Do the right thing: Boost demand through unemployment benefits. At the end of November, extended benefits for the long-term unemployed will expire. The U.S. economy continues to have more long-term unemployed -- those out of work and searching for a job for at least six months -- than at any time in more than half a century.
Unemployment benefits are targeted at these workers, and we know that this is one of the most effective ways to boost demand because recipients go out and spend these benefits. So later this fall Congress should extend long-term unemployment benefits until the unemployment rate comes back down -- no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Further, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance, is also an effective way to boost demand as well as help families avoid hunger and continued funding is critical.
Denver Broncos <b>News</b> - Horse Tracks - 10/02/10 - Mile High Report
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Small Business <b>News</b>: Management 101
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bench craft company rip off
bench craft company rip off
Denver Broncos <b>News</b> - Horse Tracks - 10/02/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .... Horse Tracks!
Haley Barbour Defends <b>News</b> Corp's Donations To RGA, Chamber Of <b>...</b>
The reports that News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, has given two separate million-dollar donations to conservative entities has sparked another wave of criticism over the cable company's editorial leanings.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Management 101
Is management ability something you're born with or can it be learned through careful study? Just as there can be many kinds of small business owners and many.
bench craft company rip off bench craft company rip off
Ok, so I went and saw the movie, thanks to my entrepreneurial colleague Christine Hurt, who already has a post up. Read this post for the basics. I plan to follow up with a much longer analysis when I get the time. Here’s some stuff that should suffice for now.
First, the movie stinks. It’s technically proficient, but there is hardly a spark of genius or originality anywhere in the film. [One exception is the 94-year-old Eli Wallach, one of my favorite actors, as Julie Steinhardt. Note also that Jake's ringtone is The Good, the Bad and the Ugly -- I'll need to work out all the parallels with that film.] MNS is what you get when somebody who knows very little about business sets out to present a morality tale about business: neither informative nor entertaining. By contrast, the motivations, and therefore the results, of the original Wall Street were much more ambitious. Indeed, as I discuss in my analysis of that film, the art ultimately undercut the polemics. Here, there was no dramatic arc, no character development, just caricatures and events concocted to make Stone’s points about finance discussed below.
Second, Stone and his screenwriters basically took just about everything that was in the original, put it in the blender, and poured it out into this movie. The same shots of frenetic New York business and fun, David Byrne back on the soundtrack, the father-child relationships all over the place (as Christine notes), Gekko, Charlie Sheen in a cameo as Bud Fox, even the same NY realtor who sold Bud Fox his apartment, back here buying Jake’s apartment. The difference is the pieces were much more carefully constructed, and original, in the first film.
Third, I’ll cut to the anti-business chase: once again, as discussed in my longer article about business in film, my earlier paper linked above about Wall Street I, and my recent paper about movies and the financial crisis, it’s all about evil financiers. Stone goes through all of the possible narratives of the financial crisis discussed in my most recent paper — individual speculators, business cycles, banks, government or inexplicable economic forces — and finally finds that behind all of it was the evil financier Bretton James, betting against markets, manipulating bailouts. Stone’s trying to convince us that he’s thought of everything and come up in the end with the financier explanation. But by the time we’ve heard all the other possibilities, the evil financier story doesn’t make dramatic or any other kind of sense.
Fourth, both here and in the original Wall Street, Stone wants to make a point about making real things vs. manipulating money, pumping money out of Main Street and into Wall Street. But he has to acknowledge that Wall Street does do good things, like financing new ideas (e.g., nuclear fusion in the film). So then Stone has to sell ordinary people on some subtle difference between good finance that makes things and bad finance that’s only speculation. If a new financial instrument makes it cheaper to make things, is that bad? Is it good until it turns into a bubble? When, exactly, does that happen? He throws in “moral hazard” and a lot of other stuff, but in the end it’s pretty muddled.
But all of this isn’t to say the film is inconsequential. Audiences will come away with the germ of an idea that there is such a thing as bad finance, and it’s ruining the world. Stone punches this story across with nifty photography and lighting, David Byrne’s music, glossy videos of New York, really bad bad guys like Bretton James, really good good guys like Gekko’s daughter Winnie. As I’ve written in the above articles, all of this conditions filmgoers to accept that finance needs to be reined in, even if they don’t know exactly why.
In the film, Jacob defines insanity as “doing things over and over again and expecting a different result.” A nice comment on the film.
Late last week, I spoke with former SEIU president and current Georgetown fellow/fiscal commission member Andy Stern about hosting a series of pieces laying out different ideas to kick-start job creation. The idea here is not to see how many compromises can dance on the head of the congressional pin; it's to see what exactly different experts think needs to be done. In Ben Bernanke's memorable term: "blue sky thinking."
The first piece came, naturally enough, from Andy Stern; the second was from Dean Baker, and the third was from Mark Zandi. In the coming days, there'll also be pieces from Rep. Paul Ryan, Sonecon's Robert Shapiro, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's David Walker and others. Today's comes from Heather Boushey.
Moving the U.S. economy out of first gear
Heather Boushey
Senior economist, Center for American Progress
We are now nearly a year into what economists call a recovery, but it doesn’t look like one to U.S. workers. A close look at the data shows that while the U.S. economy is no longer in reverse, it is having a hard time getting out of first gear.
The U.S. economy continues to have a significant output gap: Capacity utilization is at 75 percent -- meaning that a full quarter of our machines are sitting idle -- while 1 in 10 workers sits at home. We need to find a way to connect the workers who want to work with the idle machines, be those desktops or assembly lines. What we need is a continued injection of demand -- demand for goods and services that will put businesses into motion to start investing and hiring again.
The question now is what we should do to push demand out of first gear. There are two ways to think about the challenges ahead: what makes sense from an economic perspective and what may be politically possible. Ideally, we can find ideas that do both.
President Obama has encouraged Congress to vote on a set of growth-oriented tax cuts, which are in the “realm of the possible.” Policymakers should focus on putting money in the hands of people who will spend it given where our economy is. Extending the Bush tax cuts for the middle class, as Obama proposes, is a good idea. The middle class will continue to spend these extra funds and this will boost demand and spur economic growth. But Congress should allow the tax cuts for those earning above $250,000 to expire because they do relatively little to boost demand and our economy can ill afford ineffective economic policies.
Other good tax ideas include extending the full range of provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that boost incomes for middle- and working-class families. These include the Making Work Pay tax cut, which gives a $400 tax cut for single filers and up to $800 for joint filers. It is implemented by reducing the amount of tax withheld from each paycheck. Other ARRA tax provisions include improvements to the Earned Income Tax Credit and expansion of the Child Tax Credit, including making it refundable.
The president also proposes allowing firms to deduct 100 percent of new equipment purchases in 2010 and 2011 rather than depreciate these expenses over time. These are the kind of policies that should garner Republican support, and pairing them with middle-class tax cuts makes good political sense. But it will probably not do much to boost demand. The fundamental problem facing firms (especially small businesses) is not enough customers. It is not the cost of investing, which is at historic lows.
These proposals are a good start. But if we want to bring unemployment down in the short to medium term, there are other bold steps we can focus on to boost demand. Andy Stern and Dean Baker have already outlined some good ideas. Here’s my “blue sky” contribution:
Invest in laying the foundation for economic growth. Congress should seriously consider Obama’s proposal to increase infrastructure spending by $50 billion to invest in roads, rails and runways (and let’s really think “blue sky” and wonder if maybe a new Congress could allocate even more).
There are two stark realities in front of us that make this a crucial step. First, the United States has been underinvesting in infrastructure, which threatens our economic competitiveness moving forward. Every U.S. business relies on our transportation networks and electricity grids to keep their operations humming. We need an upgrade. And second, it may be some time before we’re back to full employment; taking steps now to make long-term investments that will boost job creation in the years to come is smart policy.
Invest in ourselves. We should put our national service programs “on steroids” to give our youngest workers useful job experience and an opportunity to give back to their communities. Expanding our national service programs, as Stern suggested, is also an excellent way to meet pressing community needs and tap into the skills and expertise of older workers.
But there are other ways to create jobs now. For instance, Congress should extend the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families Emergency Jobs Program, which as of the end of September will have created 250,000 jobs through public-private partnerships nationwide. The Local Jobs for America Act, introduced by Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), would create approximately 1 million jobs by providing $100 billion in funds to be used over two years to protect state and local government jobs and create local government and nonprofit sector jobs.
Do the right thing: Boost demand through unemployment benefits. At the end of November, extended benefits for the long-term unemployed will expire. The U.S. economy continues to have more long-term unemployed -- those out of work and searching for a job for at least six months -- than at any time in more than half a century.
Unemployment benefits are targeted at these workers, and we know that this is one of the most effective ways to boost demand because recipients go out and spend these benefits. So later this fall Congress should extend long-term unemployment benefits until the unemployment rate comes back down -- no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Further, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food assistance, is also an effective way to boost demand as well as help families avoid hunger and continued funding is critical.
bench craft company rip off
Denver Broncos <b>News</b> - Horse Tracks - 10/02/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .... Horse Tracks!
Haley Barbour Defends <b>News</b> Corp's Donations To RGA, Chamber Of <b>...</b>
The reports that News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, has given two separate million-dollar donations to conservative entities has sparked another wave of criticism over the cable company's editorial leanings.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Management 101
Is management ability something you're born with or can it be learned through careful study? Just as there can be many kinds of small business owners and many.
bench craft company rip off bench craft company rip off
Denver Broncos <b>News</b> - Horse Tracks - 10/02/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .... Horse Tracks!
Haley Barbour Defends <b>News</b> Corp's Donations To RGA, Chamber Of <b>...</b>
The reports that News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, has given two separate million-dollar donations to conservative entities has sparked another wave of criticism over the cable company's editorial leanings.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Management 101
Is management ability something you're born with or can it be learned through careful study? Just as there can be many kinds of small business owners and many.
bench craft company rip off bench craft company rip off
Denver Broncos <b>News</b> - Horse Tracks - 10/02/10 - Mile High Report
Your Daily Cup of Orange and Blue Coffee .... Horse Tracks!
Haley Barbour Defends <b>News</b> Corp's Donations To RGA, Chamber Of <b>...</b>
The reports that News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, has given two separate million-dollar donations to conservative entities has sparked another wave of criticism over the cable company's editorial leanings.
Small Business <b>News</b>: Management 101
Is management ability something you're born with or can it be learned through careful study? Just as there can be many kinds of small business owners and many.
bench craft company rip off bench craft company rip off
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