August 13 -- The Candidates' Debate

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Charles Blow: "... all the [Republican presidential] candidates ... confirm[ed] that they felt so strongly about not raising taxes that they would all walk away from a hypothetical deficit-reduction deal that was as extreme as 10 parts spending cuts to one part tax increases.... No person who would take such a stance is fit to be president of the United States or any developed country. Good governance in a democratic society is about the art of the deal, not fiats and dictum. You want leaders who stand up for principles but not in the way of progress." ...

... Kurt Andersen in the New York Times: "Keeping track of which politician has signed which pledge is head-spinning. These pledges make the politicians more like robots, built to respond in simple, unchanging ways."

Backup Reading:

Don Peck writes a long essay in The Atlantic that I'm excerpting here for the highlighted stat: In 2005, Citigroup analysts wrote that "America was composed of two distinct groups: the rich and the rest. And for the purposes of investment decisions, the second group didn’t matter; tracking its spending habits or worrying over its savings rate was a waste of time. All the action in the American economy was at the top: the richest 1 percent of households earned as much each year as the bottom 60 percent put together; they possessed as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent [emphasis added]; and with each passing year, a greater share of the nation’s treasure was flowing through their hands and into their pockets. It was this segment of the population, almost exclusively, that held the key to future growth and future returns. The analysts ... had coined a term for this state of affairs: plutonomy.... Income inequality usually shrinks during a recession, but in the Great Recession, it didn’t. From 2007 to 2009, the most-recent years for which data are available, it widened a little."

Corporations are people, my friend. -- Mitt Romney ...

... Paul Krugman: "... the corporate profits tax isn’t a tax on these organizations. It’s a tax on these organizations’ profits — the share of their income that does NOT go to workers and suppliers. Now, stockholders are people too — but they are, on average, quite rich people, who are doing very well as most Americans suffer."