Daily Clips: October 21st, 2015
BREAKING – BIDEN NOT RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT: Flanked by his wife and the president, Biden told the press corps, “While I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent. I intend to speak out clearly and forcefully to influence as much as I can where we stand as a party and where we need to go as a nation.”
Bernanke is puzzled by the focus on Glass-Steagall: Former Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, says that he is confused by the Democratic field’s focus on Glass-Steagal, a depression-era act that created separation between commercial and investment banking. Bernanke said:
I think that if you look at the actual, what happened a few years ago in the crisis, that Glass-Steagall was pretty irrelevant to it because you had banks like Wachovia or [Washington Mutual] that went bad because they made bad loans, and you had investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman that went bad because of their investment banking activities.
His language mirrors Hillary Clinton’s, who claimed during the last debate, that the elimination of Glass-Steagall did not cause the 2008 financial crisis.
Support for marijuana hits all time high…again: Gallup reports that 58 percent of Americans now support the legalization of the devil’s lettuce. 71 percent of Americans aged 18-34 back pot legalization, a sign that it is only a matter of time until it is legal in all 50 states.
Regressive tax systems: Here’s a friendly reminder that Washington state has “the most regressive state tax system” in the US, where the poorest residents are taxed at 16.8 percent while the top 1 percent is taxed “only 2.4 percent.” Florida and Texas come in a close second and third, respectively. We must do all we can to change this grave injustice.
