Economy

The difference between what I call accuracy and right-side norms within newsrooms is simple. Accuracy norms require journalists to get to the truth. Right-side norms require journalists to prove they’re on the “right” side of controversies. If this includes obscuring or spinning certain facts, so be it. For reasons ranging from politicization to the gutting of smaller and traditional outlets, most American journalism now adheres to right-side norms. Consider the Dave Chappelle controversy. If you don’t yet have an opinion about the jokes Chappelle makes about transgender people in his Netflix special, The Closer, watch it to get them in full context. There’s been enough bloviating about the jokes themselves.

Joe Biden cheerfully told Americans that most of them are too thick to understand what a “supply chain” is. Naturally, he understands it thoroughly. You can see with your very own eyes how well he has handled it. Since, as Joe said, you must be wondering why so many shelves are empty, I’m here to explain. Following the president’s wise advice, I will use small words and a simple story. Let’s begin in the good ol’ days, not too long ago, when the shelves were magically full. The story begins in a land ever so far away, where happy people worked and worked to make Christmas toys for children in Kansas. When they finished making the toys, they placed each one in a little box and then placed lots of them in a great big box.

No one knows what will come out of the sausage making now going on up on Capitol Hill, but let’s take a look at one proposal to raise money to pay for some of the cost of the reconciliation bill. At the moment, capital gains are taxed only when the asset is sold or the owner dies. (The estate tax is just a tax on capital that is triggered by death rather than by sale.) Oregon senator Ron Wyden proposes that they be taxed every year whether sold or not. Unrealized capital gains are certainly a tempting target. After all, for people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, practically their whole, vast fortunes are capital gains, the cost basis of their stock in Microsoft and Amazon is, at most, a few cents a share.

Who knew our relationship with China would be responsible for ruining not one but two Christmases? At least this year we had a bit of warning. Our own vice president told us of the current supply chain issues back in August. While most Americans were worried about President Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Vice President Kamala Harris was in Singapore discussing a different topic altogether. “The stories that we are now hearing about the caution that if you want to have Christmas toys for your children it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months.” For once, Kamala was correct. Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, Americans had very different concerns.

Tucked away in the reconciliation bill now bogged down in Congress is a requirement that banks report the annual deposits and withdrawals from every bank account that has activity of more than $600 a year. It would not list individual transactions, just the total money flow in and out. Ostensibly, this is to catch rich people who have been under reporting income. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen gave as an example: “High-income individuals with opaque sources of income that are not reported to the IRS, there's a lot of tax fraud and cheating that's going on.” Wages, salaries and fees are already reported to the IRS through W-2 forms. So is investment income. That sort of income is what a large majority of American families depend on.

The most important macroeconomic development of the last three decades has been the extraordinary growth of the Chinese economy. In 1990, it was largely a subsistence peasant economy with a negligible footprint in world trade. China now provides the largest share of world exports, and by some standards has already become the world’s largest economy. In 1990, the wage of an average Chinese worker was perhaps 1/40th of that of an American worker. By 2020, it was just about a quarter: a tenfold gain in just 30 years. Before the 18th century, all societies were basically subsistence peasant agricultural societies with a small upper layer of landowning nobles and clerics. Then the Industrial Revolution began.

Many are familiar with the old aphorism that in real estate the three most important determinants of value are location, location, location. Things are a bit different in making economic forecasts and predictions, where two variables matter most: accuracy, of course, but also timing. Regarding accuracy: a lengthy list of economists — some quite eminent — have ended up with egg on their faces because of inaccurate predictions and forecasts. In this regard, there’s the observation by the distinguished economist Irving Fisher, 92 years ago today on October 16, 1929, that stock prices had reached 'what looks like a permanently high plateau’. Since the Great Crash occurred two weeks later, Fisher’s timing wasn’t so great either.

Deep down, everyone has always known that the wealthy and powerful hide away vast quantities of often ill-gained money in far-flung tax havens. In recent years though, with the Panama and Paradise Papers, the public has had chances to see how the clandestine industry that helps the elites do so operates. Another such opportunity has come knocking with what is being called the biggest leak of offshore data in history. The Pandora Papers consist of almost 12 million files that lay out the secret financial affairs of almost three dozen world leaders and hundreds of high-level public officials from more than 90 countries. The details make for sensational headlines: the king of Jordan has a hidden $100 million real estate empire (including a seven-bedroom mansion in Malibu!

On October 3, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington DC, released a huge trove of 11.9 million leaked documents pertaining to the wealth of hundreds of world leaders, public officials, and billionaires. Like the Panama Papers that were leaked in 2016, the Pandora Papers detail vast offshore holdings, perhaps as much as $32 trillion, that have allowed the beneficiaries to avoid taxes that would have been due had the wealth been held at home. For instance, a United Kingdom company controlled by Cherie Blair, the wife of former prime minister Tony Blair, acquired a £6.45 million ($8.8 million) property in London not directly but by purchasing a British Virgin Islands company.

I just read a headline on the Daily Mail (I know, I know, I get what I deserve): '[Singer] Demi Lovato says they are no longer sure they want children — admitting life in their 30s without kids is "pretty nice" — as they open up about coming out as nonbinary and pansexual.' I rubbed my eyes and put in my monocle. Surely someone for whom English is a second language wrote this article? I squinted. 'Demi Lovato is no longer sure that parenthood lies in their future.' As intrigued as I was to learn more about Demi’s reproductive longings, neither my grammatical standards nor my sanity could take any more. Off I sped as fast as I could to the American Diner to recover my faith in humanity.

If you’re reading this in El Salvador, you’re probably taking a break from street protests against President Nayib Bukele’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender, enacted last week. This small, heavily indebted Central American republic abandoned its own currency, the colón, 20 years ago in favor of using the US dollar — and has enjoyed relative financial stability ever since. The populist right-wing president’s insistence on shifting to the unregulated, ultra-volatile virtual currency favored by gamblers and money-launderers will supposedly bring savings of $400 million a year in commissions on the remittances from expatriate workers on which his economy depends.

To be chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people is usually an accolade worth fighting for. Yet this year, it seems to be the celebrity equivalent of the booby prize. Cockburn imagines that it was put together by various subversive elements within the publication who hoped to see the mass ridicule that its various choices, both of subjects and of writers, have led to. They will not be disappointed. That an airbrushed photograph of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, takes pride of place in the ‘Icons’ section says all that you need to know. He, poor boy, looks as if he has been captured by a militant group and is being made to put out a hostage video, while she — quite literally — is wearing the pants.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics issued its August jobs report this morning and the numbers are pretty dismal. While the unemployment rate dropped 0.2 percent to 5.2 percent, the number of new jobs created was only 235,000, far below expectations of about 700,000. In June the number was 962,000 and in July a whopping 1.1 million. And the unemployment was not spread evenly across the population. Unemployment went down for adult men and whites, but black unemployment went up significantly, from 8.2 percent in July to 8.8 percent in August. The surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus is widely thought responsible.

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort constantly to flagellate itself for not being perfect. Yet neither America’s resilience nor its resources are infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans. There are concrete consequences when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings. Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once journalists became progressive poodles rather than the watchdogs of government, the Biden administration had no fear of audit.

When a tech guy named Hamish McKenzie first reached out to me in early 2018 to see if I would try out his new newsletter platform Substack, because he thought I could make some money from it, I was skeptical. When I finally wrote him back, in May that year, I said, ‘I’m slightly leery of devoting much time to anything that won’t guarantee pay — I know that sounds somehow crude, but it’s just the reality of being a freelance writer. My book has forced me to do less freelancing than I would have otherwise, and while I’m fine for now, I do need to make sure to budget my time in a responsible way.’ A few years later, I’m exceptionally grateful that I took the plunge. I’m also a bit worried about where it’s nudging me as a writer and a thinker.

You’ve probably heard by now that effective October 1, 2021, OnlyFans will be banning sexually explicit content on its site that is all but exclusively known for hosting sexually explicitly content. OnlyFans has done what every start-up aspires to, at least in one sense. Both consumers and creators of content on OnlyFans have transcended mere ‘user profile’-status and have penetrated the mainstream, becoming infinitely stereotyped, talked about and joked about archetypes. When someone quips that a woman ‘probably has an OnlyFans’, it doesn’t matter if she actually has one or not. That kind of signifier means something. OnlyFans has left a real mark on Western culture; something that few tech companies are able to achieve.

Cockburn understands the appeal of communism. There are times when even he has dreamt of holding property in common — that ill-fated purchase of a timeshare in Cancun, for instance. So he understands the plight of the young idealists at Current Affairs, a magazine founded in 2016 with the mission to ‘help usher in a glorious era of democratic socialism’. Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, Current Affairs is the private kingdom of one man, in this case the dandy communist Nathan Robinson. For five years, Robinson has been all over Current Affairs like a cheap suit, while a small team of deluded volunteers has labored in his salt mine, generating content for the greater glory of the revolution, and their leader, the Potemkin page-turner. But even five-year plans go awry.