All Life Is Problem Solving

Bill Moyers hosted an interesting conversation the other day among Robert Kuttner, Matt Taibbi, and himself about health care reform, the performance of the Administration to this point, and the relations of progressives with the President. The conversation focused in part on how Taibbi and Kuttner would vote on the Senate’s pending legislation, if it […]

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This is an appeal to all Progressive Senators, whom I, perhaps mistakenly, list as including: Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Russ Feingold, Pat Leahy, Al Franken, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tom Harkin, Ron Wyden, Patty Murray, Dick Durbin, Barbra Boxer, Byron Dorgan, Barbara Mikulski, Ben Cardin, Jay Rockefeller, Chuck Schumer, and Paul Kirk. My apologies to Amy Klobuchar, […]

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The solid front of Democratic Party progressives supporting the Senate’s health care form bill, has now cracked wide open with Howard Dean’s call to kill the Senate bill and start over in the House with reconciliation. Dean’s call hasn’t cracked open the floodgates among the Senate and House Democrats and in recent days people like […]

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When I was young the United States had some liberals of courage in the Senate. People like Estes Kefauver, Paul Douglas, Hubert H. Humphrey, Herbert Lehman, Wayne Morse, Richard L. Neuberger, Maurine B. Neuberger, Eugene McCarthy, Mike Mansfield, Ernest Gruening, Pat McNamara, Phil Hart, Frank Church, George McGovern, Albert Gore, Sr., Ralph Yarborough, Warren Magnuson, […]

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In the previous two posts in this series I’ve examined four ideas that Warren Mosler has called “deadly innocent frauds,” (difs) and that others have variously referred to as myths, scares, and lies. Three of the difs — that Government deficits create a debt burden for future generations, take away non-governmental sector saving, and that […]

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In my last post I introduced Warren Mosler’s notion of “deadly innocent frauds,” (difs) and discussed the idea of fiat monetary systems and its implications for the first dif: “in order to spend money, the Government must first raise it through taxation, or borrow it.” In fiat monetary systems, that idea is false, which is […]

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One characteristic of modern political and economic discourse is frequent asserting of beliefs about economics and money that have been variously described by some observers as ‘myths’, ‘scares‘, ‘lies’, ‘innocent frauds’, and ‘deadly innocent frauds’. ‘Innocent frauds’ was the courteous labeling of such beliefs by John Kenneth Galbraith in his last book, The Economics of […]

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This is an update on my previous diary trying to identify members of the Medicare for All sub-community at Firedog Lake. Again, I’m not sure how many bloggers and commenters are in it, but I think it includes at least:

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Sometime during the past 32 years many prominent Democrats forgot the lessons of the Great Depression, or never learned them, and, instead, absorbed the lessons of Hooverism, in part from Ronald Reagan who believed in the religion of free market capitalism, and also in the derivative idea that real economic growth always come from the […]

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Many progressives, even though they’ve been working for a PO-based health care reform bill, have 1) never given up Medicare for All as the goal of their activity, and 2) decided, in the first quarter of 2009, that Medicare for All could not pass the new Congress. They then reacted to their realization by concluding […]

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