Curious what you make of these suggestions from economist Dan Kervick?
Dan Kervick said…
Left Progressive Agenda:
- Single payer health care.
- The Rebuild America Act or its equivalent: a $1 trillion+ infrastructure and national redevelopment program.
- Implementation of Keynes’s “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment.”
4.Combination of higher marginal income tax rates, capital gains taxes & related salary and compensation caps to create 10/1 maximum income differential ratio.
- Elimination of defined contribution plans, with expansion of social security into a universal and fully adequate national pension program.
- Socialization of post-secondary education.
- Creation of a sovereign wealth fund.
- Use of wealth & inheritance taxes to carry out broad based wealth redistribution and capital reform.
- Restoration of the government gross investment share of GDP to 1950s/60’s levels.
- Communities first: Use of industrial policy and a public sector jobs program to channel new capital & jobs to communities suffering capitalist dislocations due to trade and innovation.
- A public option in banking including post office banks.
- Movement toward a global capital registry, organized under international law.
- Use of the global capital registry to restrict and eliminate capital flight, tax havens, income shelters, etc.
- Supply side “stick” policies: tax penalties for excessive extraction of firm wealth as shareholder income, thus incentivizing re-investment and returns to labor.
- Expansion of ongoing adult education opportunities, including mandated periodic employer-granted sabbaticals across the adult lifespan.
- An education policy geared toward the amelioration and elimination of class divisions.
- Share our work: distribution of whatever amount of work we need to do as a nation as evenly as is practicable across the population.
- Reduce commercial pollution: endeavor to expand the reach and scope of cultural and social interaction spaces that are free of commercial communication.
- Reduce the size of the financial sector and target a much lower private debt-to-GDP ratio.
- Simplify our lives: reduce the time and needless redundancy and complexity of personal and household financial management.
As opposed to this eventuality…http://www.keeptalkinggreece.com/2016/06/14/imf-germany-to-legalize-slavery-in-greece-with-single-mi
nimum-wage-system/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KeepTalkingGr
eece+%28Keep+Talking+Greece%29
More economists are ratting out the current neoliberal economic policies as a complete failure. The Federal Reserve can do no more, since they are holding about $4.5 trillion of created $$. Last week at a press conference, Janet Yellen was looking like a deer in headlights when she had to justify not raising the interest rate .25% due to a weak job market. The U.S. is almost $20 trillion in debt and state and local debt could be as high as $7 trillion.
This article provides some interesting figures for how much damage the financial industry has done to the U.S. and world economies. When there are few makers and may takers, the system collapses:
http://evonomics.com/makers-and-takers-adam-smith/
“If you think about it, capitalism as defined by Adam Smith was a system by which the capital markets would take the deposits that you and I put in the bank, and invest it in real businesses that create real jobs and growth.
But only 15 percent of all the money flowing through financial institutions today ends up in businesses. The rest of it is staying within the closed loop of the market itself. It’s being traded.”
“In the last few years, you’ve seen this disconnect with the stock market at record highs, and yet income growth being flat, and overall GDP growth being flat.
Markets now create these asset bubbles, but the money going into new businesses; the hairdresser down the street, my dad starting a small manufacturing company in Indiana; that’s 15 percent of what comes out of financial institutions right now. That is totally a broken system.”
“The entire model has switched. Finance, as envisioned by Adam Smith, as it existed for the most part until the 1970s, was a helpmeet to business. It was not the main event. We have since gotten this idea that finance is somehow the natural highest point on Maslow’s hierarchy of the economy.
You’ve gotten 40 years of policy decisions that have encouraged that, that have protected this industry, and that’s one reason why this industry creates 4 percent of jobs and takes 25 percent of the corporate profit pie. That is just breathtaking. If you need one number to sum up where the problem is, it’s that.”
“
When Time magazine reports that capitalism is broken, it’s broken.
http://time.com/4327419/american-capitalisms-great-crisis/
Stock prices are basically expected corporate earnings divided by the safe interest rate. When you divide by zero…
I think we are more likely to adopt some of those proposed progressive economic policies, rather than the draconian ones proposed for Greece. The main reason is because many people in this country remember a fairer economic system, rather than the gross income inequality of today. The current political climate is indicative of this group memory. Both establishment parties are blowing up, even if some people are in denial.
Of course it will be difficult to achieve some of these progressive economic policies, since political donations flow from Wall Street to both political parties. Here is a summary of the political donations given to both the Democrats and the Republicans for the years 1990-2012. Be sure and hover over each data point to get the exact amount of $$ donated each election cycle. The bloggers source is opensecrets.org.
https:/dqydj.com/occupy-wall-street-follow-the-money-to-see-which-political-party-benefits
Yeah, my primary objections to Blue Dogs is economic (though Stupak holds a special place). And I fear to see the DNC even more in their toils as the RParty declines. We have one-party state in Texas–it is never good, cause that party is ALWAYS bidness.
The flip side of Illinois. And maybe California after seeing that cocked up primary.
Not with you know who as President and neoliberals in firm control of the (D) Party.
Had you seen this? Systematic lying in plain sight and no one reports it.
Why this Economy Feels Even Crummier than the Data
$271 billion in total business sales officially disappear:
Turns out, the Census Bureau had revised total business sales going back to Adam and Eve. Normally, we would just compare a month or two of the revisions to the old data to get a feel for the direction.
But on March 15, we’d lamented that total business sales for the period through January, based on data the Census Bureau had released at the time, had once again fallen sharply. We still have that data set. So we did something nasty just now: we overlaid the two data sets in one chart.
(Check out that graph of the Sales Swoon! Odd how they got so inaccurate in their data so suddenly, no?)
It gets worse:…Since April 2012, the US population has grown by 3.1%. So figure in the additional people plus 4.2% inflation over the period, to get real per-capita business sales.
That’s why the economy feels so terrible for tens of millions of Americans who’ve not been able to scramble on the Fed’s wealth-effect gravy train — the real per capita who experience the economy as it really is.
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/06/15/economy-feels-crummier-total-u-s-business-sales-revisions/
Might explain some of the 2014 election results.