The Economic Crisis
Best of 2010: Professor Wolff on Grit TV
Published on January 1, 2011VIDEOFinishing up our Best of 2010, we look at our still-broken economy, and get some ideas for fixing it.
2011: Calling Time on Capitalism
Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Enough!
An employee of the New Fabris factory, in Chatellerault, central France, walks next to a fire in front of the plant, in 2009, after 366 laid-off workers occupied the factory and threatened to blow it up unless they receive a bigger pay-off. 'We want a bonus' is written on the wall in the background. Photograph: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty ImagesLaw and Disorder Radio Interview (December 27, 2010)
Published on December 27, 2010AUDIO(Richard Wolff speaks on the radio show "Law and Disorder" on December 27th, 2010. His interview begins approximately eight minutes into the show.)
Economic Recovery? Austerity in the US and Abroad
The Roller Coaster from Hell
It looks like it is going to be a Wiley Coyote ride and if you are not really scared yet, maybe it’s because you are not paying enough attention, because the signs all say we all ought to be scare s**tless. “One really gets the sense of an economic system spiraling out of control.” That warning comes from leading economist Richard Wolff, author, lecturer and Professor at The University of Massachusetts and the New School University in New York. Wolff cautions that the global economic meltdown is not limited, not temporary, and not easy to fiUS Tax Deal Brings Austerity Closer
Once again, the two old wings of the political establishment do business as usual in Washington. In the tax deal between Obama and the Republicans -- passed with the help of a majority of Democrats -- they all cut taxes, especially on the rich, and extended unemployment benefits. In short, the government keeps spending mountains of money to subsidize a deeply recessional private capitalist economy, to prevent it from spiraling down into depression.Blog: Politics and the National Debt
The US national debt is the outstanding total of each year’s deficits in the federal government’s budgets (where deficit simply means the difference between federal expenditures and tax receipts). Each year’s deficit results from the federal government deciding either to not reduce spending to the level of tax receipts or else to not raise taxes up to the level of federal expenditures. In other words, deficits reflect the political decisions of elected officials in the Congress and the White House. In 1989, the US national debt was about $3 trillion.Response to the President's Commission Deficit Hearing
Published on December 1, 2010AUDIOProfessor Wolff's repsonse to today's release of the Deficit Commission's report. on the Mitch Jesserich's "Letters to Washington" show, on KPFA. Highlights from the President's Commission Deficit hearing; Report from Leigh Ann Caldwell on the Commission's recommendations; Analysis of the recommendations with Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts; and analysis of European economic crisis.Deficits: Real Issue, Phony Debates
Deficits have now risen, yet again, to headline status. Conservatives inside and to the right of the Republican Party frame the national debates by attacking deficits. They want to reduce them by cutting government spending. Liberals respond, as usual, by insisting that overcoming the crisis requires big government spending (“stimulus”) and hence big deficits. Most Americans watch the politicians' conflicts with mixtures of confusion, disinterest, and disdain.
The Crisis and Obama's Decline
The economic crisis that Obama rode to victory in 2008 also rode him down in the 2010 elections. Obama and his economic advisors badly "mismanaged the crisis." While the Obama team seems to have learned little from its failure, we need to draw its lessons if we are to reduce the costly social consequences of that defeat. Obama's administration decided to handle the severe crisis inherited from Bush by following standard Keynesian economics. It undertook massive new spending.
