“I told the country and I told the world, ‘if it feels good, do it’.”
NB: we know this is obviously not Dubya’s State of the Union address — not nearly enough verbal missteps.
The much-venerated King of Comedy Central consistently delivers solid commentary on the American political scene, but so did a lot of his predecessors.
The Article: Gay or straight, marriage should be out of the hands of the state by Sam Bowman in The Guardian.
The Text: Last night’s vote to allow same-sex marriage was an unequivocally good thing. The classical liberal principle of equality before the law demands that the state treats gay couples the same way it treats straight ones. Giving gay couples the same recognition as straight couples will be good for them, their children, and society at large.
But there is a bigger question that has largely been ignored – whether the government should be involved in marriage at all. The debate over gay marriage has, fortunately, been won by the right side, but why is it any business of parliament who we may and may not marry at all?
Historically, marriage as a state-defined institution is a relatively new phenomenon. It was only in 1837 that the state began to register marriages, and less than 100 years before that that it made legislation concerning marriage at all. Before then, marriage was a contractual arrangement agreed upon by two individuals, upheld in the common law.
The more you know…the less frequently you pirate “Game of Thrones”?
The Article: Our Economic Pickle by Steven Greenhouse in The New York Times.
The Text: FEDERAL income tax rates will rise for the wealthiest Americans, and certain tax loopholes might get closed this year. But these developments, and whatever else happens in Washington in the coming debt-ceiling debate, are unlikely to do much to alter one major factor contributing to income inequality: stagnant wages. For millions of workers, wages have flatlined. Take Caterpillar, long a symbol of American industry: while it reported record profits last year, it insisted on a six-year wage freeze for many of its blue-collar workers.
Wages have fallen to a record low as a share of America’s gross domestic product. Until 1975, wages nearly always accounted for more than 50 percent of the nation’s G.D.P., but last year wages fell to a record low of 43.5 percent. Since 2001, when the wage share was 49 percent, there has been a steep slide.
“We went almost a century where the labor share was pretty stable and we shared prosperity,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “What we’re seeing now is very disquieting.” For the great bulk of workers, labor’s shrinking share is even worse than the statistics show, when one considers that a sizable — and growing — chunk of overall wages goes to the top 1 percent: senior corporate executives, Wall Street professionals, Hollywood stars, pop singers and professional athletes. The share of wages going to the top 1 percent climbed to 12.9 percent in 2010, from 7.3 percent in 1979.
