The NY Times is reporting that NY and California have agreed to sign on the 50 state deal and that is will immunize robo-signing. If that is true, it’s over folks. The housing market is not going to recover any time soon and the court system will be permanently corrupted by forged and perjurious documents.

This settlement is an incredible breach of the social contract between the government and the governed.

The Benefit and the Burden begins with a short history of American taxation and a description of the core issues in the definition of income. It follows with some discussion of the principal economic arguments that have flowed around the relationship between taxes, growth and fairness, and then proceeds to examine the issues surrounding preferences in our tax code – for housing, for charitable contributions, for capital gains, and the problem of taxing corporate profits. It ends with a discussion of reform proposals, and Bruce makes his case for a VAT to close the revenue gap and fund the government that we will need, among other things, to support an increasingly elderly population.

I encourage readers to purchase two copies of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism – one for themselves and one as a Christmas present for their right wing uncle. That uncle might well stay with Skocpol and Williamson’s highly readable and well-crafted study to the end without throwing it down in anger – something I can’t say with much confidence about my book with DiMaggio.

From USA Today comes news of a survey by a group of Baylor researchers on the values and beliefs of the American public. The study examines the intersection of personal faith/religious expression and economic beliefs, views on gays and lesbians, spirituality and mental health, and other issues.

What leaped out at me from the USA Today write-up was the confusion that many folks on the conservative end of the religious spectrum have.

They’re worshiping Milton Friedman and calling him Jesus. Sorry, folks, but there is no commandment that reads “Thou shalt pull thyself up by thine own bootstraps.”

If you’re hoping that the Nancy Pelosi’s picks for the Congressional Super Committee have either the wisdom or courage to stand against the job-killing spending cuts Obama and Congress imposed on the nation, you’ll be disappointed.

We are silent in that we do not have the resources to hire battalions of lobbyists to offer bribes campaign contributions that would allow us to gain a voice inside the beltway.

No. It probably isn’t. Probably just some more wishful thinking on my part. Nevertheless, I was quite surprised this morning to see a few pieces around the web pointing out that a “new Republican Jobs bill” was just another tired rehash of the same failed policies of the last thirty years.

I’m not going to act like an economist and claim to be “surprised” that folks are spinning various education pieces today. No, I am not at all surprised that it is happening, but I am a little frustrated when I see something like this from today’s (Sunday May 22) NY Times where the headline uses “grassroots” and “Bill Gates” together. The idea of anything funded from the coffers of a billionaire being considered “grass roots” is beyond ludicrous.

OK. I guess technically the title is not true. If folks hadn’t been laid off and collected Unemployment Compensation, the funds would just be sitting in the various state coffers, unused. But the unemployed are not the reason the economy tanked; the unemployed are not the ones sending jobs overseas; the unemployed are not the ultimate root cause of the problem.

Notice how all but one of those tax credits are geared towards and most affect your average working people? Nothing about all the corporate tax credits. I’m a bit too lazy to go do all the research for this but I’d make a WAG that the reason the corporate tax credits aren’t showing is because they are all broken down to the lowest level possible, most likely by industry. Far easier to keep things looking smaller to say “Oil Industry Tax Credits” or “Technology Tax Credits” rather than just to say “Corporate Tax Credits” – makes them look far smaller than the dastardly Earned Income Tax Credit or Mortgage Interest deduction.