All Life Is Problem Solving

Orszag’s maiden voyage at the New York Times entitled “One Nation, Two Deficits,” is full of myths, and that’s the polite way to say it. I’ll review these and comment on each of them one-by-one. [Read more →]

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been seriously tweeting, building a following and my tweeting activity. In the process, I’ve come across a number of people who are simply tweeting D-party talking points. The chief among these is a variety of versions of the fear card. The formula is “if you don’t like X, then just vote R or, at least not for the Ds, and you’ll get a lot more of it.”

I’ve engaged a number of the tweeters involved. Most ignore me, but in two cases I’ve had reasonably extensive exchanges, and in one case, I’ve had an exchange where I kept getting the fear card played. I replied by pointing out that Ds weren’t behaving very well in relation to the specific fear my correspondent was pointing to. [Read more →]

Substituting for the vacationing Ed Schultz on MSNBC today, Cenk Uygur delivered a pretty good narrative on the Democrats mistakes in bailing out Wall Street, but not Main Street. He let people know about the shift in wealth distribution over the past 3 decades, and he was very direct and forthright in telling us about the Democrats’ sell-outs to business over the past year and a half. Cenk’s directness and plain-spoken style is very effective in this kind of show, and he has been a very good fit to its format during Ed’s absence. [Read more →]

By

Joseph M. Firestone and Nancy Bordier

We think most people agree that money has corrupted our politics. Some even think that we now live in a Plutocracy, and not in a Democracy, and that both parties are corrupted and now represent only the financial oligarchy. So, the central issue of our time is how can we break its hold? How can we overcome the influence of money in politics and make our political system more responsive to most Americans once again?

[Read more →]

By

Marshall Auerback

Hint: it’s not Republicans.

Social Security remains one of the greatest achievements of the Democratic Party since its creation 75 years ago. Although Republicans have historically fulminated against the program (Ronald Reagan once likened it as something akin to “socialism”), they have actually made little headway in touching this sacred “third rail” in American politics. President Bush pushed for partial privatization of the program in 2005, but the proposal gained no policy traction (even within his own party) because Social Security continues to be hugely popular with American voters. It’s a universal program that benefits all Americans, not a government handout to a few privileged corporations.

Which is why it’s odd that Democrats seem almost embarrassed to continue to champion the legacy of FDR. The party frets about long-term deficits and the corresponding need to “save” Social Security from imminent bankruptcy and, in doing so, opens the gate to radical cuts in entitlements that will do nothing but further destroy incomes and perpetuate our current economic malaise. It is true that some Republicans have signed on to the idea of privatization, notably a proposal championed by Rep. Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee. But only a handful of GOP lawmakers have actively embraced the measure and, in the aftermath of the worst shock to the financial system since the Great Depression, many Republican lawmakers would just as soon see the idea forgotten. [Read more →]

By

Nancy Bordier and Joseph M. Firestone

Overview

The two of us met recently at an AmericaSpeaks event in Fairfax, VA, on June 26th. We decided independently to attend the event, but for the same reason. We wanted to protest the undue attention being given the federal budget deficit compared to the far more critical need to restore job-creating economic growth. Increasing tax revenues by getting the unemployed into new jobs is a more effective way to reduce the deficit than self-defeating cuts in entitlement expenditures. We also wanted to protest the bias built into the event, which Joe later analyzed in a seven part series, The Procrustean Democracy of AmericaSpeaks.

After the AmericaSpeaks event, we discussed the problem of powerful special interests that mislead the public, distort U.S. priorities and deform public policies. A prime example is the billionaire deficit hawk who is advocating entitlement cuts and funded the event. We agreed that the increasing enfeeblement of the electorate is part of the problem. Voters’ influence over the agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties and their elected representatives grows weaker as the influence of the business and financial interests that finance the parties and the campaigns of their candidates grows stronger.

[Read more →]

Given the problems the United States has been having and the unnecessary, misplaced, and wrong-headed, but very real angst of people about becoming insolvent if we continue to increase the size of the deficit, I find myself wondering why we have not turned to another time-tested and very effective New Deal solution to the problem of growing employment. That solution is the Fair Labor Standards Act.

[Read more →]

Laurence Kotlikoff has been making waves by using “inter-generational accounting” and CBO and IMF data, to compute a fiscal gap of $202 Trillion in present value. He concludes that this gap shows that the US is “bankrupt” as of now. Evidently, publications like Bloomberg take this sort of thing seriously since they publish it. But Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists, think it’s nonsense, due to the inapplicability of inter-generational accounting to Governments sovereign in their own currency.

Mike Norman an MMT economist with a very good blog, got the chance to comment on Kotlikoff’s views, and also some nonsense of Tim Geither’s and President Obama’s at RT.com.

[Read more →]

This is a reply I wrote to Bryce Covert, MJ, and Richard Kirsch, formerly of HCAN, at the New Deal 2.0 (ND20) site.

MJ expressed the view that both the private sector and Government are corrupt these days and that neither can be trusted. I agree with MJ about corruption in Government these days, but I think one has to distinguish among the branches of Government when it comes to corruption, and also the kind of corruption involved. The most corrupt branch of Government is Congress, because its members need huge contributions for re-election,and the sources of those funds are now drafting legislation in many cases.

[Read more →]

I urge all Real Democrats to declare war on the Democratic Party and this Administration by

— refusing all appeals for financial contributions to Democratic candidates,

— refusing to do any work at all for the Party,

— refusing to go to Party functions,

— going to meetings held by Congresspersons and Senators and

— demonstrating at the meetings against the President’s Catfood Commission,

until he dismisses that Commission. [Read more →]