Comes the report from the Grey Lady that the Fed’s habit of pumping obscene amounts of money into the economy has the effect of increasing the profits of large companies while insuring that small businesses stay “dead in the water.” Small businesses simply can’t keep up with the regulatory demands placed on them by the malfeasance of larger corporations and banks.

The fiscal tightening in Washington — primarily the automatic budget cuts imposed by Congress that are now taking effect at government agencies and the increase in Social Security taxes this year — is also poised to fall more heavily on smaller, domestically focused firms than on multinational giants.

Rather than talking about wealth in concrete terms, we are now talking about a “wealth effect” which will further divide America along economic lines.

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Jeffrey Polet
Jeffrey Polet
Jeffrey Polet grew up in an immigrant household in the immigrant town of Holland MI. After twenty years of academic wandering he returned to Holland and now teaches political science at Hope College, where he also grudgingly serves as chair of the department, having unsuccessfully evaded all requests. In the interim, he continues to nurture quirky beliefs: Division III basketball is both athletically and morally superior to Division I; the Hope/Calvin rivalry is the greatest in sports; the lecture is still the best form of classroom instruction; never buy a car with less than 100,000 miles on it; putts will still lip out in heaven; bears are the incarnation of evil; Athens actually has something to do with Jerusalem; and Tombstone is a cinematic classic. His academic work has mirrored his peripatetic career. Originally trained at the Catholic University of America in German philosophy and hermeneutical theory, he has since gravitated to American Political Thought. He still occasionally writes about European thinkers such as Michel Foucault or the great Max Weber, but mostly is interested in the relationship between theological reflection and political formation in the American context. In the process of working on a book on John Marshall for The Johns Hopkins University Press, he became more sensitive to the ways in which centralized decision-making undid local communities and autonomy. He has also written on figures such as William James and the unjustly neglected Swedish novelist Paer Lagerkvist. A knee injury and arthritis eliminated daily basketball playing, and he now spends his excess energy annoying his saintly wife and their three children, two of whom are off to college. Expressions of sympathy for the one who remains can be posted in the comments section. He doesn’t care too much for movies, but thinks opera is indeed the Gesamtkuntswerk, that the music of Gustav Mahler is as close as human beings get to expressing the ineffable, that God listens to Mozart in his spare time, and that Bach is history’s greatest genius.

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7 COMMENTS

  1. Anyone who finds it newsworthy to note that large corporations have increasingly rigged the game on their own behalf hasn’t been paying attention for at least the past 30 years, and anyone who’s just getting around to noticing that Wall Street and Main Street are increasingly disconnected, if not actually at odds, has been similarly unobservant. This is a story because?

  2. If the GOP weren’t The Stupid Party, they would have taken all of their outrage about Chuck Hagel and directed it towards Jack Lew, who they could maybe have even stopped, and could certainly have scored more political points by attacking. His resume of nothing but career cronyism is one that should utterly disqualify someone post-2008.

    Of course, if the Democrat Party weren’t The Evil Party, Lew never could have been nominated in the first place.

    “This is a story because?”
    Because facts are facts, and truth is important. Wall Street and both parties in DC have “rigged the game” to the detriment of all of us. Thirty week old products of gestation are babies. North Korea is evil. The sky is blue. All things worth saying whenever the need arises.

  3. “anyone who’s just getting around to noticing that Wall Street and Main Street are increasingly disconnected, if not actually at odds, has been similarly unobservant. This is a story because?”

    There are many mainstream conservatives who need to hear this — the ones who think that what’s good for Wall St. is somehow good for Main St., i.e., the Limbaugh/Hannity/Fox News types. Because of a rather huge ideological blindspot they have not yet come to see that in the modern economy Big Business and Big Government are joined at the hip.

  4. Any energy expended upon supporting the GOP as being a party of smaller , more efficient government should go the way of the Dodo. Being Dixiecrat, the GOP finds itself in the picturesque position of hating government while it needs government to do what must be done. It sucks money from wealthier precincts while complaining. Some day, it might produce a worthy suggestion.

  6. @D.W.Sabin:

    Both parties are hopelessly corrupt. We are left choosing between the Liberal Party and the Statist Party. Both parties believe that bigger is better. Both parties govern as if bigger is better and if the Republcians are slightly better than the Democrats in this regard, it is worth reminding folks that winning an ugliness parade is no great honor.

  7. (At least that is true on the national level. On the local level, in rural areas, the GOP is actually a pretty good party. Too bad it is a party where the worst rise to the top.)

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