In case readers are not familiar, wikipedia, John Galbraith.
I agree damn it, this socialism for corporations and the screw you if you are a regular citizen. If we get sick, in financial trouble, cannot work, the government sure as hell doesn't come along and bail us out! It's our money, we should get a say in what happens with GM and most importantly demand they give back to America in return. The right kind of cars, jobs, plants, here in the states.
On Pharmaceutical R&D (the drugs), they are moving to China and India rapidly! I mention it in this blog post, but the entire sector, the entire pharmaceutical sector looks like this to China and India.
China more so because India has the audacity to consider the social good on medicine. On patents, Big Pharma want an exclusive on their "extensions" of patents where they basically recreate the same damn drug when their original patent runs out just to have exclusive rights, not go to generic and charges very high prices, profit motivator.
This is a very informative post. We're getting some exceptional writing on EP, congrats to everybody, we're doing our homework!
In terms of the oil economy, I note this sure has not made the main stream press.
Great...so if biofuels become ubiquitous does that mean I will have Russians, Norwegians and Americans armed to the teeth ready to blast away over my used cooking oil in my kitchen?
which is why I say we need something a little more this time. By the way, your thing on the North Pole is freaky man. We can't let one country control that much land up there!
One of the few things Bill Clinton got right was his "investing in America" to counter tax and spend Democrats. MI is really tired of being a donor state with no return.
I pretty much payed as I went to college part time out of my own pocket, until I got to a point where I was close to graduating and wanted to get it over with and borrowed the money.
My wife also had thousands of dollars of college debt
We were paying several hundred dollars a month - it was just like paying a credit card you pay and pay and pay - and despite paying extra and doubling up payments the balances never seemed to budge much and after several years it had become a stone around our family finances neck. Fortunateltly we came into a small windfall with the sale of our home and decided to pay them off once and for all.
The root problem of course is that the cost of college tuiton and books has skyrockettted well beyond any rates of inflation, so its almost impossible to go to school without loans. So the loan companies have a captive market and behave like sharks.
"believes that the market works the way that theory says it should"**************************************
This mantra of the free marketeers has a fatal flaw in its logic - it is based on the assumption that people , companies and markets behave rationally all the time.
which of course anyone who has ever worked in the coporate world knows is patently false. Bubble after bubble, and herd mentalities in markets also shine the spotlight on this flawed assumption
I can only think of two real economists who support free trade theory, as implemented, Mankiw and Jagdish Bhagwati out of Columbia University. Paul Samuelson blasted Bhagwati as dead wrong on outsourcing, by the math frankly and Samuelson of course was dead right.
I seriously cannot think of anyone, even the architects of this disaster who have not acknowledged problems, not working, the massive trade deficit. Now of course many of those architects want to prescribe more of the same after they acknowledge the trade deficit. ;)
No doubt they blocked America's Jobs Bank because the DOL with regard to guest worker Visas is notorious to enable literally discrimination against American workers, so they do not have to consider or hire American workers.
I have a side comment. I'm watching the talking heads on cable and they said like a mantra and have been for some time, how there are no policy differences between Clinton and Obama and it's all ego and personality
This is some spin and a complete lie. The reason so many are pissed is because Clinton (now one can debate if she meant any of them) over time came increasingly Progressive/Populist in policy and one thing I note is she had some pretty dramatic action on the housing crisis.
Another thing is now magically, I guess after they are assured their guy is in, decided to count all of the FL/MI delegates.
is that what you are saying about economists is correct, but the sad truth is that there's still a substantial economic fundamentalist set that honestly believes that the market works the way that theory says it should.
Then you have the mainstream that's come to accept that there are substantial informational asymmetries that permeate the market and make it difficult for individuals to make fuly informed and rational decisions. Joseph Stiglitz life work has been in this area, and long before Globalization and its Discontents Stiglitz laid out the deep theoretical work in Whither Socialism? in which he advocated a role for government in reducing these informational asymmetries.
Note that anyone who argues that populism is confined to the angry left has difficulty dealing with the idea that government should step in to provide information, because that's much of the basis of their power. The best example of a policy that I can think of where the government stepped in to reduce informational assymetries, was the intoduction of America's Job Bank by the Clinton administration. This was one site at which the job listings at myriad local and sate agencies where centralized into a single search that allowed the job seeker to see a large number of job openings not listed on other sites. In 2007, the Bush admnistration killed thise site.
If we really believe in a free market, there must be no information costs, or one of the key assumptions of the market model is violated. As such, efforts like America's Job Bank served a useful purpose by reducing the amount of time that individuals had to spend on job searchs. I honestly believe that the next Democratic administration should revive America's Job Bank, and require that employers with over 25 employees place an ad (at no cost) on the website detailing job skills needed and minimum pay.
And this is only halfway through the economic spectrum. There's a large group of economists who believe that many of the assumptions needed to make the market model work don't exist in reality. Ecological economists believe relative economy levels are often better indicators of the utility of a given good than absolute levels. What this means is that the value of each incremental unit of economic growth may be worth less as economic inequality increases than where income is more equally distributed, because wasteful status competition, i.e. conspicous consumption, is reduced. So it may be that nominally poorer countries with more equal distributions of wealth are in fact better off in utility terms than wealthy nations with high inequality. This calls into question the very nature of economic growth, because in some case economic growth could make a nation less well off.
is what you are referring to. China is absolutely this and even India has socialist rules most of Europe. It's really only the United States that is not addressing social needs or have a national strategy w.r.t. trade, international economy.
Hopefully that is something this site can bring to light. Economists are not saying what this writer is. Now there is way variation in the field but there are so many experts showing current trade policies are not working, recommending policy changes, issuing warnings and talking about global labor arbitrage. It's not the economists here that are the problem. It's multinational corporations, special interests and foreign national influences who are writing legislation, through buying off our government, getting these bills and loopholes passed and so on.
It's not an either/or choice here. How can one be against free trade when current trade policy is anything but resembling the theory of free tree and the variables controlled which imply a win-win?
This is a matter of being logical, to use the statistics, the science, the theory as it was intended as well as model other nations and how they do take into account their citizenry in economic policy.
This is the issue to get regular folks (that's us) to comprehend what kind of policy changes really need to happen.
Trade is a massive, large, multifaceted, multiple sector system. With any system that has thousands of variables one cannot come up with a 2 dimensional answer on how to fix it.
I love your line I went so left I wrapped around and ended up on the far right. ;) Truly the corruption is enough to twist one into a political pretzel.
Is that, as a class, they've yet to learn this one simple truth:
Any system of economics which fails to adequately support human life will eventually crash and be abandoned.
The ENTIRE POINT of economics isn't so this country or that country, or this minority or that minority, can "win".
We don't need to win. We need to be able to feed, clothe, and shelter our population. If it takes complete protectionism, dumping the WTO, firing torpedoes at trade vessels that try to enter our ports, and ending exports to do it, then that's what we should do.
Capitalism is WORTHLESS if it doesn't feed, clothe, and shelter the great majority of the population. Gold is a pretty worthless commodity as well, we'd be better off on the Potato standard than the Gold standard- at least if push comes to shove you can put a potato in the oven, add a little butter and salt, and call it dinner.
This is why I'm so left wing I've wrapped over to the right- and I consider food, clothing, shelter, water, medical care, and transportation to be things that GOVERNMENTS should provide through taxation. Leave the free market to what the free market does best: providing foreign luxuries.
This writer is an idiot. I'm sorry. No one, almost no one is talking about "erecting barriers" who is a Populist at least on the left. They are talking about modifications to policy that at least give the United States a chance to win.
And even worse, many of these ideas, policies are originating from economists.
His line should be more Democrats haven't won so often because they do not propose real solutions for the middle class and dramatic policy change.
There is a host of policy recommendations which I wrote about, Horizon Project, which to me really define a series of policy positions that are very populist.
They assuredly would enable strong growth, private sector, corporations yet modify policy so the US middle class, US national interest, workers is taken into account.
I do not believe tariffs is a Popular Populist position but VAT, BAT probably would be.
I'd say per statistics, per details, per analysis, what would actually work per case yet have a body politic actually acting in the national interest is more Populism than say some black and white answer like "tariffs".
I could say withdraw from the WTO, but I think more it's renegotiation of trade agreements, so it's more of a very tough actor in the national interest versus this broad stroke sorts of answers.
I've already said:
Health: HR. 676 or not for profit. My reasoning is to plain reduce the overall costs for regardless of what any policy happens I think if they do not reduce costs nothing else happens. Somewhere between England, France, Canada solutions.
Guest worker Visas: has to be US citizens first and probably greatly reduced.
Immigration: US citizens first in all things, which doesn't imply "amnesty" or "no amnesty" really but would require some very detailed analysis of policy to ensure US workers are not hurt or being displaced plus other additional costs.
Budget deficits: balance the budget
Taxes: heavily Progressive, redistribution of wealth to a degree
Investment, R&D incentives: some public-private works like NASA, DARPA modeled from what was successful in the past.
Labor: enable management to join unions is one thing. Assuredly major, major stronger labor organization, representation. I would add some sort of legislation requiring corporations to stop these layoffs. They know use layoffs to raise their stock price in a quarter, it's like throw away workers and they see it as something to maintain their profits...that's just not right to treat workers as temporary and disposable. Someone somewhere has to make it very difficult for companies to fire workers.
Pension: return to the old pension system, not this privatization scheme or just 401k. Protect pensions. Al Gore's Lock box" on social security so the funding off it cannot be siphoned off to pay for other things in the budget.
There is a real danger democrats will once again snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, and not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity as the sad but true cliches go.
And if so does it allow right wing populism and its social and religious agenda to dominate?
So what happens in an Obama defeat - does the left finally get a clue and gain some real populism?, or does an Obama vicotry set the stage for right wing populism?
This constant mixing of religious and social agenda into economic policy agendas muddles the waters completely. That's why on this site at least, social agenda is a no no. Anything valid, based on fact gets immediately lost since the social agenda is so extreme.
I think there was a poll recently that the majority of the country wants religion and these social views completely out of politics and to me, they really cloud corporate agenda and bad economic policies so often.
In many ways Pat Buchanan is one of the righties that recognizes the problem.
His recent book not only is a great page turning read, but is loaded with facts, statistics and possible solutions to problems with trade, globalization, foreign interventionism, national sovereignity and security, and illegal immigration.
Unfortunately like most on the right does go off the rails a bit on taxes, govt size and cultural and religious matters
In case readers are not familiar, wikipedia, John Galbraith.
I agree damn it, this socialism for corporations and the screw you if you are a regular citizen. If we get sick, in financial trouble, cannot work, the government sure as hell doesn't come along and bail us out! It's our money, we should get a say in what happens with GM and most importantly demand they give back to America in return. The right kind of cars, jobs, plants, here in the states.
On Pharmaceutical R&D (the drugs), they are moving to China and India rapidly! I mention it in this blog post, but the entire sector, the entire pharmaceutical sector looks like this to China and India.
China more so because India has the audacity to consider the social good on medicine. On patents, Big Pharma want an exclusive on their "extensions" of patents where they basically recreate the same damn drug when their original patent runs out just to have exclusive rights, not go to generic and charges very high prices, profit motivator.
This is a very informative post. We're getting some exceptional writing on EP, congrats to everybody, we're doing our homework!
In terms of the oil economy, I note this sure has not made the main stream press.
Great...so if biofuels become ubiquitous does that mean I will have Russians, Norwegians and Americans armed to the teeth ready to blast away over my used cooking oil in my kitchen?
Hey DK, your blog post looks very nice!
some sort of UN Mandate or something?
which is why I say we need something a little more this time. By the way, your thing on the North Pole is freaky man. We can't let one country control that much land up there!
Fanny Mae and Fredie Mac? Bear Sterns? Exxon?
One of the few things Bill Clinton got right was his "investing in America" to counter tax and spend Democrats. MI is really tired of being a donor state with no return.
I am convinced student loans have become a scam.
I pretty much payed as I went to college part time out of my own pocket, until I got to a point where I was close to graduating and wanted to get it over with and borrowed the money.
My wife also had thousands of dollars of college debt
We were paying several hundred dollars a month - it was just like paying a credit card you pay and pay and pay - and despite paying extra and doubling up payments the balances never seemed to budge much and after several years it had become a stone around our family finances neck. Fortunateltly we came into a small windfall with the sale of our home and decided to pay them off once and for all.
The root problem of course is that the cost of college tuiton and books has skyrockettted well beyond any rates of inflation, so its almost impossible to go to school without loans. So the loan companies have a captive market and behave like sharks.
"believes that the market works the way that theory says it should"**************************************
This mantra of the free marketeers has a fatal flaw in its logic - it is based on the assumption that people , companies and markets behave rationally all the time.
which of course anyone who has ever worked in the coporate world knows is patently false. Bubble after bubble, and herd mentalities in markets also shine the spotlight on this flawed assumption
I can only think of two real economists who support free trade theory, as implemented, Mankiw and Jagdish Bhagwati out of Columbia University. Paul Samuelson blasted Bhagwati as dead wrong on outsourcing, by the math frankly and Samuelson of course was dead right.
I seriously cannot think of anyone, even the architects of this disaster who have not acknowledged problems, not working, the massive trade deficit. Now of course many of those architects want to prescribe more of the same after they acknowledge the trade deficit. ;)
No doubt they blocked America's Jobs Bank because the DOL with regard to guest worker Visas is notorious to enable literally discrimination against American workers, so they do not have to consider or hire American workers.
I have a side comment. I'm watching the talking heads on cable and they said like a mantra and have been for some time, how there are no policy differences between Clinton and Obama and it's all ego and personality
This is some spin and a complete lie. The reason so many are pissed is because Clinton (now one can debate if she meant any of them) over time came increasingly Progressive/Populist in policy and one thing I note is she had some pretty dramatic action on the housing crisis.
Another thing is now magically, I guess after they are assured their guy is in, decided to count all of the FL/MI delegates.
is that what you are saying about economists is correct, but the sad truth is that there's still a substantial economic fundamentalist set that honestly believes that the market works the way that theory says it should.
Then you have the mainstream that's come to accept that there are substantial informational asymmetries that permeate the market and make it difficult for individuals to make fuly informed and rational decisions. Joseph Stiglitz life work has been in this area, and long before Globalization and its Discontents Stiglitz laid out the deep theoretical work in Whither Socialism? in which he advocated a role for government in reducing these informational asymmetries.
Note that anyone who argues that populism is confined to the angry left has difficulty dealing with the idea that government should step in to provide information, because that's much of the basis of their power. The best example of a policy that I can think of where the government stepped in to reduce informational assymetries, was the intoduction of America's Job Bank by the Clinton administration. This was one site at which the job listings at myriad local and sate agencies where centralized into a single search that allowed the job seeker to see a large number of job openings not listed on other sites. In 2007, the Bush admnistration killed thise site.
If we really believe in a free market, there must be no information costs, or one of the key assumptions of the market model is violated. As such, efforts like America's Job Bank served a useful purpose by reducing the amount of time that individuals had to spend on job searchs. I honestly believe that the next Democratic administration should revive America's Job Bank, and require that employers with over 25 employees place an ad (at no cost) on the website detailing job skills needed and minimum pay.
And this is only halfway through the economic spectrum. There's a large group of economists who believe that many of the assumptions needed to make the market model work don't exist in reality. Ecological economists believe relative economy levels are often better indicators of the utility of a given good than absolute levels. What this means is that the value of each incremental unit of economic growth may be worth less as economic inequality increases than where income is more equally distributed, because wasteful status competition, i.e. conspicous consumption, is reduced. So it may be that nominally poorer countries with more equal distributions of wealth are in fact better off in utility terms than wealthy nations with high inequality. This calls into question the very nature of economic growth, because in some case economic growth could make a nation less well off.
is what you are referring to. China is absolutely this and even India has socialist rules most of Europe. It's really only the United States that is not addressing social needs or have a national strategy w.r.t. trade, international economy.
Hopefully that is something this site can bring to light. Economists are not saying what this writer is. Now there is way variation in the field but there are so many experts showing current trade policies are not working, recommending policy changes, issuing warnings and talking about global labor arbitrage. It's not the economists here that are the problem. It's multinational corporations, special interests and foreign national influences who are writing legislation, through buying off our government, getting these bills and loopholes passed and so on.
It's not an either/or choice here. How can one be against free trade when current trade policy is anything but resembling the theory of free tree and the variables controlled which imply a win-win?
This is a matter of being logical, to use the statistics, the science, the theory as it was intended as well as model other nations and how they do take into account their citizenry in economic policy.
This is the issue to get regular folks (that's us) to comprehend what kind of policy changes really need to happen.
Trade is a massive, large, multifaceted, multiple sector system. With any system that has thousands of variables one cannot come up with a 2 dimensional answer on how to fix it.
I love your line I went so left I wrapped around and ended up on the far right. ;) Truly the corruption is enough to twist one into a political pretzel.
Is that, as a class, they've yet to learn this one simple truth:
Any system of economics which fails to adequately support human life will eventually crash and be abandoned.
The ENTIRE POINT of economics isn't so this country or that country, or this minority or that minority, can "win".
We don't need to win. We need to be able to feed, clothe, and shelter our population. If it takes complete protectionism, dumping the WTO, firing torpedoes at trade vessels that try to enter our ports, and ending exports to do it, then that's what we should do.
Capitalism is WORTHLESS if it doesn't feed, clothe, and shelter the great majority of the population. Gold is a pretty worthless commodity as well, we'd be better off on the Potato standard than the Gold standard- at least if push comes to shove you can put a potato in the oven, add a little butter and salt, and call it dinner.
This is why I'm so left wing I've wrapped over to the right- and I consider food, clothing, shelter, water, medical care, and transportation to be things that GOVERNMENTS should provide through taxation. Leave the free market to what the free market does best: providing foreign luxuries.
This writer is an idiot. I'm sorry. No one, almost no one is talking about "erecting barriers" who is a Populist at least on the left. They are talking about modifications to policy that at least give the United States a chance to win.
And even worse, many of these ideas, policies are originating from economists.
His line should be more Democrats haven't won so often because they do not propose real solutions for the middle class and dramatic policy change.
......really....
Maybe Americans really are too stupid to survive in a modern society. Depressing thought not in keeping with this post but....
Maybe.
I think what happens with Obama's campaign will tell us quite a bit.
Pass that popcorn!
ps. I like the Italian model...okay? Put me down for that one....
There is a host of policy recommendations which I wrote about, Horizon Project, which to me really define a series of policy positions that are very populist.
They assuredly would enable strong growth, private sector, corporations yet modify policy so the US middle class, US national interest, workers is taken into account.
I do not believe tariffs is a Popular Populist position but VAT, BAT probably would be.
I'd say per statistics, per details, per analysis, what would actually work per case yet have a body politic actually acting in the national interest is more Populism than say some black and white answer like "tariffs".
I could say withdraw from the WTO, but I think more it's renegotiation of trade agreements, so it's more of a very tough actor in the national interest versus this broad stroke sorts of answers.
I've already said:
Health: HR. 676 or not for profit. My reasoning is to plain reduce the overall costs for regardless of what any policy happens I think if they do not reduce costs nothing else happens. Somewhere between England, France, Canada solutions.
Guest worker Visas: has to be US citizens first and probably greatly reduced.
Immigration: US citizens first in all things, which doesn't imply "amnesty" or "no amnesty" really but would require some very detailed analysis of policy to ensure US workers are not hurt or being displaced plus other additional costs.
Budget deficits: balance the budget
Taxes: heavily Progressive, redistribution of wealth to a degree
Investment, R&D incentives: some public-private works like NASA, DARPA modeled from what was successful in the past.
Labor: enable management to join unions is one thing. Assuredly major, major stronger labor organization, representation. I would add some sort of legislation requiring corporations to stop these layoffs. They know use layoffs to raise their stock price in a quarter, it's like throw away workers and they see it as something to maintain their profits...that's just not right to treat workers as temporary and disposable. Someone somewhere has to make it very difficult for companies to fire workers.
Pension: return to the old pension system, not this privatization scheme or just 401k. Protect pensions. Al Gore's Lock box" on social security so the funding off it cannot be siphoned off to pay for other things in the budget.
Consumer protections: heavily yes, credit cards, loans heavily regulated.
I'd say this one is beyond Populist: get corporate money, lobbyists out of DC
Taxes progressive regressive
Tariffs and VATS
Economic incentives, penalties for R&D, capital equipment so forth
medical care
infrastructure
education
pensions
social safety nets - unemployment, social security, medicare so on
specific issues that capture the two axes.
I see that trade, living wages, unionization all need questions.
That's where I'd like suggestions.
It really begs the question.
There is a real danger democrats will once again snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory, and not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity as the sad but true cliches go.
And if so does it allow right wing populism and its social and religious agenda to dominate?
So what happens in an Obama defeat - does the left finally get a clue and gain some real populism?, or does an Obama vicotry set the stage for right wing populism?
This constant mixing of religious and social agenda into economic policy agendas muddles the waters completely. That's why on this site at least, social agenda is a no no. Anything valid, based on fact gets immediately lost since the social agenda is so extreme.
I think there was a poll recently that the majority of the country wants religion and these social views completely out of politics and to me, they really cloud corporate agenda and bad economic policies so often.
In many ways Pat Buchanan is one of the righties that recognizes the problem.
His recent book not only is a great page turning read, but is loaded with facts, statistics and possible solutions to problems with trade, globalization, foreign interventionism, national sovereignity and security, and illegal immigration.
Unfortunately like most on the right does go off the rails a bit on taxes, govt size and cultural and religious matters
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