This just in..The perfect top marginal  rate is 70%.

 Brad Delong says that  Paul Krugman says that Mark Thoma says that Emmanuel Saez and Nobel laureate Peter Diamond say  that's the sweet spot where the Government achieves the maximum overall good 

Good being defined as the Govt causing as little unhappiness as possible while collecting as much  cash as possible. Or balancing the fiscal requirements of the deficit with  the moral need to do that as painlessly as possible.

Making an omelet without breaking eggs.

Keith Olbermann, natch, covered this with his well chosen guest Jeff Madrick. But it wasn't coverred in either  the  Times or FT and it should be read. 

What happened? The Secretary of Treasury flouted the laws against insider trading by telling a room full of investors that the Government intended to let  Fannie and Freddie go into bankruptcy.  

And maybe the whole Supercommittee was a clever TeamObama plan.

That's contrary to Occam's razor but hey who says Occam's so great?

The outcome of the whole affair is that Obama holds a slightly better hand today because the Republicans can't abide the idea of a $400Bn DOD cut. 

Not because of patriotism, forget that. But because DOD cuts means a loss of jobs. And you can believe there'll be jobs in every  key district. Because as presumably nearly every one here  knows, that's how Govt procurement works.

Ohio repealed the anti union law by a margin of more than 20 points

Mississippi defeated the "personhood" law which would have banned abortions

Maine defeated the law attempting to prevent same day registration

Brad Delong leads today with a piece in which he says that Felix Salmon says, the David Leonhardt says Timothy Geithner says  that ......you get the idea.Here's an excerpt

DELONG STARTS HERE

Felix Salmon writes:

 Eric Alterman the Nov 14th Nation

" Lisa Simeone was..the host of Soundprint, ....produced  independently ...and World of Opera,produced by SDAV, a classical-music ...station-both of which aired nationally  on NPR stations. Simeone is not a network employee but when NPR....discovered ..Simeone ...was part of the steering comittee for a protest group similar to Occupy ,,,,,,Simeone [was] fired.  ....World of Opera-who...refused to fire her got booted off NPR's schedule." .............................Mara Liaason is a paid pundit for Fox's news channel

When it suited their purposes  the Koch Bros  touted the benefits of social security. 

As described in the Oct 17th Nation , in 1973 Charles Koch wanted to hire Friedrich Hayek (Road to Serfdom).  He ,sensibly, afraid of giving up the benefits of Austria's health and retirement programs, turned Koch down. Koch's operatives responded  by trying to convince Hayek of the virtues of  social security  and Medicare.

Brad Delong tries to answer Black's question of why Obama has been maundering on about the long run deficit when that is not only not the problem but when pretending it is the problem makes it less likely that we'll fix the problem.

Delong's best effort was to try and guess at what team Obama thought and it looked like this.

Ezra Klein thinks Obama could have handled the financial crisis better.

He says so in many thousands of words

If Romer, Summers et al had read their R& R (Reinhart and Rogoff),starved all other initiatives and rifle shot at a go-for- broke stimulus maybe unemployment would be 7% today instead of 9% (my words , not Klein's or RR's)

And pigs could fly.

of my understandably unread blog on marginal tax rates. (Yawn)

1952: tax table  Adjusted for Inflation

 

Marginal Tax Rate: 

22.2% up to $16.9K

24.6% up to $33.9K

The marginal tax rate was

91% under Ike starting at $400,000

70% from  Nixon to Carter, at $200,000

28% under Reagan at  $300,000.

40% under Clinton at $288,000. Which became 35%, under the famous Bush  tax cuts.

(remind me why we can't afford social security!)

If you were an AIG trader collecting $6 million in 2004 after taking a risk which might -and did- bankrupt your employer you'd have kept $3,900,000 to comfort you if your social security was inadequate. 

... is reviewed by Brad Delong . The link is below in the first comment(don't ask!)

It (the review) is worth reading. Whether you agree or disagree with Brad, it sort of provides a check list of the issues you have to consider in trying to come to a rational position about Obama's record on the economy.

As to the book itself, well whether or not you disagree with Suskind, it's impressive in all the stuff it covers. But not in its manipulative argument by adjective or anecdote. From Brad's review:

after Nov 2012.

On Countdown last night Nate Silver explained that this week's special congressional elections were even worse than they had seemed on the surface. We knew that the Republican carried Anthony Weiner's Brooklyn  seat and won in the open  Nevada seat.

Brooklyn was  discounted as Netanyahu's revenge: the district's large Jewish electorate punishing Obama for being insufficiently pro Israel.  No reason to expect that to change between now and Nov 2012 when Ed Koch will presumably endorse Rick Perry or whomever the Tea Party anoints.

Here's the report that's going viral today.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-ron-paul-gop-debate-20110913,0,3161863.story?track=rss

I deeply disagree with those who applauded the idea of letting the uninsured die.

But of course that's what we do already,  but we can hide it from ourselves by not looking very hard.

And it's why I back Obamacare.

Here's Juan Cole's summary of why he thought in March we/Obama were right to support the Libyan rebels.

And still does.

http://www.juancole.com/

The New Yorker

I fondly remember a cartoon a decade ago. A blackboard full of equations.  Two elderly physicists. One, pointing at a spot on the board., which says “then a miracle occurs”.

The Financial Times

 Aug 18 2011

Jeffrey Sachs

 …….. No need to blame the rating agencies: governments.. have been unable to cope with the realities of global capital markets and competition from Asia…

Tuesday. In Wisconsin . By the two Dems against whom the Reps had organized a Recall. Well publicized by NPR in a sucky piece a week before the election introducing us to Patriotic Wisconsin Housewife, out there fighting the Good Fight and organizing one of the Recalls. Yawn.

Not saying NPR didn't have the right. Just pointing out that anyway the Dems got 54% and 58% of the vote.Which sounds like an improvement over the General judging by the absence of Republican claims of an improved share.