But if that were the case, I decided, I wanted to live in a different world. The full extent of their misdeeds—for instance, the illegal manipulation of key interest rates and foreign exchange, affecting derivatives and mortgages in the amount of hundreds of trillions of dollars—was only just beginning to be fathomed. But those of my persuasion were given short shrift, as the administration sought counsel from the vested interests in the financial sector. When I was growing up in Gary during its own smog-choked “golden age,” it was impossible to see where the city was going. When the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank engage in a rescue, they virtually always impose requirements to ensure the money is used in the way intended. Strong unions were able to bargain for better pay and benefits, so that income was more evenly distributed between capital, management, and labor. And they proudly point out that all the money given to the financial sector has been more than repaid. The standard economic texts of the time seemed to be unrelated to the reality I had witnessed growing up in Gary. Here he met fellow cartoonist Ub Iwerks, the two quickly became friends and in January 1920, when their time at the studio expired they decided to open up their own advertisin… High taxes funded massive infrastructure projects, like the interstate highway system, as well as public higher education. Cautiously and belatedly, some six years after the fact, the Obama administration has now begun to revise its views about the Great Recession. Forging a new consensus on trade. High individual and corporate tax rates also reduced the incentive to pay high executive salaries. A man with no formal education could buy a house and a car, support his family, send his kids to college, and enjoy an occasional vacation. The American Golden Age Blueprint is a briefing that looks at the potential gains associated with America’s possible corporate tax cut. President Barack Obama’s banks-first approach to saving the nation from another Great Depression held that by giving money to the banks (rather than to homeowners who had been preyed upon by the banks), the economy would be saved. But hey, resources were scarce, and one had to make bets where they would be most effective. America was the world’s unquestioned economic, political, and military power. The president’s former Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, in his recent book,  Stress  Test, made a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to defend the administration’s actions, suggesting that there were no alternatives. While some sectors of the economy, especially energy and transportation, were overregulated, regulation was obviously not an insurmountable barrier to prosperity. None of this is the outcome of inexorable economic forces, either; it’s the result of policies and politics—what we did and didn’t do. The fortunes of a child of poor parents who does well in school are far bleaker than those of a child of rich parents who does much more poorly in school. Matters may well get worse. So today, the richer you are, the more you are able to influence the political process and the economic decisions that stem from it, and to rig it all in favor of the 1 percent. There was a healthy debate in the country about alternative courses of action—before, during and after the bailouts. And so the banks shrank lending, and paid their executives megabonuses, even though they had almost destroyed their businesses. Bank officials, meanwhile, get a bonus for the hefty returns they have “earned” for the bank—something a 12-year-old could have done. The business of America was business. Although data at the time were scarce, it might have been true when he wrote it: The inequalities of the 19th and early 20th centuries seemed to be diminishing. But Geithner clearly worried excessively about the “moral hazard” of helping underwater homeowners—in other words, encouraging lax borrowing habits—while seeming to care far less about the moral hazard of helping banks, or the culpability of the banks in encouraging excessive indebtedness and in marketing mortgages that put unbearable risks on the poor and middle classes. But we need a balance of the kind we achieved in the middle of the 20th century, when government was afforded a progressive role. In a true rule-of-law world, a drunk driver would have to pay for not only his own repair costs but also the damage he has inflicted—in this case, the cumulative loss of GDP, which now amounts to more than $8 trillion, and which is mounting at the rate of $2 trillion a year. This is capitalism? It was a company town, named after the chairman of the board of U.S. Steel. 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