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[...] if Barack Obama found himself caving in to the lobbyists and watering down his reform of the health care system, it’s because his preelection promises were not sufficiently specific. He hadn’t really been elected on a program, hence his current weakness. Looking on from Europe, where we’re mo…

Let’s also recall that no taxes are paid by businesses: ultimately, every euro of tax is always paid by households. In this fallen world, there is unfortunately nobody except physical, flesh-and-blood people who can pay taxes. The fact that businesses are technically required to remit some of them—…

It’s easy to denounce the idiocy of a tax. For a simple reason: all taxes are more or less idiotic, in the sense that they all tax people and activities that, in the abstract, it would be desirable not to tax. Things get complicated when, having proudly announced the elimination of an idiotic tax, …

Taking depreciation into account allows us to see, for instance, that French companies are currently in a situation of negative saving: they distribute more to their shareholders than they actually have to distribute, so that what they have left over is not even enough to replace used-up capital.

So how could inequality rise so sharply since the 1990s, despite the stability of the wage-profit split? First, because the wage structure has shifted markedly in favor of very high wages. While the vast majority have seen most of their wage increases absorbed by inflation, very high salaries—espec…