Dean Baker, DC Report @ Raw Story

A friend sent me a new study showing that the top five executives of major corporations pocketed between 15 and 19 cents of every dollar their companies gained from two recent tax cuts. This paper, by Eric Ohrn at Grinnell College, should be a really big deal.

The basic point is one that I, and others, have been making for a long time. CEOs and other top executives rip off the companies they work for. They are not worth the $20 million or more that many of them pocket each year.

Again, this is not a moral judgment about their value to society. It is a simple dollars-and-cents calculation about how much money they produce for shareholders, and this piece suggests that it is nothing close to what they pocket....

How will our children know they face a crushing debt burden?

The question above may seem silly.

Of course, they will know because there are a number of well-funded policy shops that will be spewing out endless papers and columns telling them that they are facing a crushing debt burden....

The vaccine rollout process has been painfully slow in the United States. More than 40 days after the first vaccine was approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration, just over 6.0 percent of our population has been vaccinated. And that is with just the first shot, very few having gotten the two shots needed to hit the targeted levels of immunity. Thankfully the pace of the vaccination program is picking up, both as kinks are worked out and now that we have an administration that cares about getting people vaccinated.

But we still have to ask why the process has been so slow. We have an obvious answer in the United States, the Trump administration basically said that distribution wasn't its problem. As Donald Trump once tweeted, he considered the distribution process the responsibility of the states and gave the order "get it done."

As bad as the U.S. has done so far, we have vaccinated a larger share of our population than any country in Europe with the exception of the United Kingdom.

If we can explain the failure to have more rapid distribution in the United States on Trump's Keystone Cops crew, what explains the failures in other wealthy countries? As bad as the U.S. has done so far, we have vaccinated a larger share of our population than any country in Europe with the exception of the United Kingdom. That's right, countries like Denmark, France, and even Germany have done worse in vaccinating their populations than the United States. And these countries ostensibly have competent leaders and all have national health care systems. Nonetheless, they have done worse far worse in the case of France and Germany, than Donald Trump's clown show....

A few weeks back I did a post noting that states governed by Republicans had the highest positive test rates, while the states with the lowest positive rates were mostly governed by Democrats. I argued that positive test rates are a good measure of how serious the governors are in trying to bring the pandemic under control.

Are red state governors getting their people killed to help Donald Trump’s re-election chances?