Economy

It’s very unlikely that I’d be a reasonably successful journalist today if I hadn’t come from an upper-middle-class family. Fresh out of college, I got a series of non- or low-paying internships. It wasn’t until spring of the following year that I found a staff position with benefits (and a salary of $33,000, which at the time seemed like plenty to live on). Because my parents provided financial support and because I had no debt, I was able to gain the experience and connections that helped launch my career. Somewhere, surely, there is a 37-year-old who is very similar to me and who wanted to be a journalist, but who is now doing something else because it just wasn’t feasible, financially.

Is renaming the seasons a sign of late-stage capitalism? Or empire? Or decadence? Whatever the case, our cultural commissars have spoken and they’ve decided that seasonal epithets are back in. No longer is it acceptable to wistfully recall the summer of ’69; we must now commemorate it as Raspy Canadian Dreamboat Summer or some such thing. The Chinese have long categorized their years according to animals — dogs and rabbits and tigers and so on. Not us. What we’ve done is to head to the Narcissus pool, hold up a calendar, and demand that the months and equinoxes look a little more like us. This began two years ago when someone called Megan Thee Stallion released a rap single called ‘Hot Girl Summer’.

'Hey, that’s some nice Facebook traffic you’re getting. Would be a shame if something happened to it.' That’s the tone, more or less, from a Monday NPR article 'profiling' Ben Shapiro’s phenomenally successful Daily Wire news brand. The average New York Times article on Facebook collects just under 2,000 likes, shares, and comments. The average Daily Wire link receives nearly 40,000. At the peak of the 2020 election, Daily Wire articles averaged almost 100,000 engagements. No other publication comes close. And all of this really bothers NPR. For 2,000 petulant words, NPR does everything it can to imply that the Daily Wire should be kicked off Facebook. Why? Because...because...it’s just not fair! Why do people read their articles more than ours?

Millions of unshaved lesbians are celebrating this week after Victoria's Secret decided to go all-in on marketing with a butch over-opinionated soccer star instead of naughty, scantily-clad models. The lingerie giant announced Wednesday they were cutting ties with their iconic Victoria's Secret Angels, the tall Barbie doll-esque models sporting fluffy wings. In their place are Megan Rapinoe, 35, along with six other female athletes, as well as transgender and plus-size women for the ‘VS Collective’. Hot, right? https://twitter.com/sapna/status/1405270760994709505 Rapinoe, a member of the US women’s national soccer team, made a name for herself in 2016 after she kneeled during the national anthem in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, Microsoft workers ‘chose’ to sleep in data centers, according to a company executive. Last year, Microsoft directed employees to work from home after the virus landed in the US. In October 2020, a company internal memo announced more employees could work from home permanently. As cases and deaths continued to climb, however, some employees were so crucial that they had to sleep at locations hosting the company’s public cloud infrastructure and online services such as Microsoft Teams. 'I heard amazing stories about people actually sleeping in data centers,' said Kristen Roby Dimlow, Microsoft's corporate vice president, CNBC reported.

As that peerless philosopher of the 20th century Marvin Gaye once pointed out, there are three things in life of which we can all be certain: taxes, death and trouble. Cockburn has long admired the late soul legend’s lyrics, but this week, that weary little aperçu has rung somewhat hollowly in his mind. You will have no doubt read of the damning report published this week by ProPublica, investigating the murky relationship between the taxable assets and actual taxes paid by some of America’s billionaires. If so, you probably agree that it makes for thoroughly depressing reading.

The New York Times fiercely defended editorial board member Mara Gay this week after she faced ridicule on Twitter for comments she made on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Gay had told the Lucy and Desi of cable news that she was 'disturbed' by the sight of American flags flying high in Long Island on Tuesday. She apparently witnessed anti-Joe Biden flags standing alongside the Stars and Stripes. This horrid scene prompted her to fear that Donald Trump's supporters did not see a difference between 'whiteness' and 'Americanness'. 'We have to figure out how to get every American a place at the table in this democracy...how to separate Americanness, America, from whiteness,' Gay said. 'I was really disturbed,' she continued. 'I saw...

Donald Trump wasn’t a man for international agreements. Just imagine for a moment, though, that it was him rather than Joe Biden who had just persuaded the G7 to back a minimum global corporation tax rate. Would it be hailed as a great breakthrough for fairness, a sideswipe against amoral global corporations?  Like hell it would. On the contrary, the same deal pulled off by Trump would have been attacked as a charter for the big tax avoiders to carry on as they are — as well as a bullying attempt by the US to divert more tax revenues to its own shores at the expense of smaller countries with competitive tax rates. There are two elements to the agreement reached over the weekend. The first is the proposed minimum tax rate of 15 percent.

Montpellier, France I got a letter from Joe Biden, which doesn’t happen every day. In the envelope was a check, made out to me, for $1,400. The letter is headed THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON and dated April 22 although it has taken some time to drop into the boîte aux lettres due to the President experiencing confusion over my address. ‘My fellow American,’ he began. Although I am not one I did once work there and paid Social Security contributions, apparently qualifying me for the President’s generosity. ‘I am pleased to inform you,’ he continued, ‘that because of the American rescue plan, a direct payment was issued to you.’ Having attracted attention, Joe, my new best friend, continues. ‘This has been a hard time...brighter days are ahead...

It’s June and the biggest corporations on the planet want you to know that they are celebrating gay Pride — unless you live somewhere like Saudi Arabia in which case they couldn’t care less. On their main Twitter page, Procter & Gamble have put a Pride flag in their banner and in their pinned Tweet they proudly proclaim: 'We strive to be a champion of #LGBTQVisibility year-round, using our voice to drive acceptance, inclusion and a love for humanity.' I guess there are no gay people in Saudi Arabia to champion, which must be why P&G’s Saudi Twitter handle has not a single rainbow flag in sight and a pinned tweet simply wishing people a blessed Ramadan. But that is the beauty of corporate wokewashing.

Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti announced Friday that they were leaving the Hill, where they helmed the popular morning show Rising, and going independent. It seemed like a shock, considering the Hill's YouTube subscriber count ballooned with Krystal and Saagar in front of the cameras. But sources close to the show tell Cockburn that the duo's departure was a long time coming. The problem may have been political. Krystal and Saagar started cohosting Rising together two years ago and began covering populist issues from a left and right perspective, focusing on areas of agreement between the two sides of the political spectrum. The pair earned a New York Times media profile and appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience.

Is President Joe Biden living up to expectations? It’s hard to say, since the expectations generated on his campaign trail were so murky. Biden made plenty of promises on the stump but only one thing was ever clear: he wasn’t Donald Trump. Beyond that, no one was really certain what iteration of Biden would enter the Oval Office on Inauguration Day. A pragmatic moderate or a progressive ideologue? A return-to-normal steady hand or a malarkey-scourging bomb thrower? The law-and-order author of the PATRIOT Act or the 'Black Lives Matter' anti-racist he suddenly morphed into last summer? Biden was so defined by who he wasn’t that no one ever quite worked out who he was. Now we have our answer. Whatever moderation was once attributed to him has been quickly abandoned.

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns. The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture.

It’s 2021, and as your new Spectator media columnist I’m here to tell you that the American media is a disaster. It’s not that there aren’t still many exceptionally talented reporters and editors doing good work, against all odds — there are. It’s that the overall scene is being destroyed. Newspapers are on the verge of extinction. Newer, supposedly more agile online-only outlets are shedding staff or shuttering as well. No one has come close to developing a replacement for the funding model that kept journalism humming along nicely until the internet came along and broke everything. Of course, the destruction has birthed creation. Journalistic startups pop up frequently, though few do anything that seems worthwhile and sustainable.

It wasn’t the exact same speech, but the words were familiar and the message was identical. President Biden addressed the disappointing April jobs report on Monday, just as he did on Friday. Economists had expected the economy to create as many as one million jobs in that month, but employers added just 266,000. Biden insists that everything will be all right. It takes time to recover from a once-in-a-century pandemic, he said, urging patience both days and no doubt sensing the political danger a slowing economy puts on his ambitious infrastructure package and other spending proposals. On Friday, the president asserted that his $1.9 trillion stimulus package was a long-term play: 'We never thought that after the first 50 or 60 days everything would be fine.

'There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,' is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson. Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue. Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme that swindled 40,000 people, including his closest friends, out of $65 billion. But if 'getting money' is among the most innocent of callings, America has more than its fair share of the goodly people who excel at it. According to Forbes's 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755. And more than one in every four billionaires is an American.

President Biden wants to nearly double the tax on income from capital gains, currently at 20 percent, to 39.6 percent. Add to that the 3.8 percent Obamacare surcharge and you’re up to 43.4 percent. Many states tax capital gains as well and in 13 of them (plus the District of Columbia) the total tax on capital gains would be over 50 percent with the proposed new federal rate. In California it would be a staggering 56.7 percent. But it gets worse. Unlike the tax on regular income, the capital gains tax is not indexed for inflation. So with long-held assets, much of the gain is illusory. For instance, if you bought an asset in 1971 for $50,000 and sold it this year for $1,000,000, you would owe taxes on a nominal capital gain of $950,000. At 56.