Mike Norman Economics

President Trump presented his infrastructure plan last week. If you’re keen on the idea of out-of-control privatized utilities gouging customers and manipulating energy markets, or consortia building overpriced, expensive toll roads (until they go bust), then you’ll love the president’s proposals. His mooted public-private partnerships are another variant of socialism for the rich and free market discipline for the rest of us. PPPs are like a religion that offers its adherents the promise...

The U.S. Treasury's top diplomat accused Beijing of "patently non-market behavior" and said that the United States needed stronger responses to counter it.  David Malpass, Treasury's undersecretary for international affairs, said that market-oriented, democratic governments were awakening to the challenges posed by China's economic system, including from its state-owned banks and export credit agencies. He reiterated his view that China had stopped liberalizing its economy and was actually...

All Mueller has found is a bait-click commercial marketing scheme that had nothing to do with election interference.… When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a bait-click commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world. After done a significant amount of research on this, I have come to this conclusion, too.  Paul Craig...

Paybacks are hell:Hunger is hastening the ruin of Venezuelan’s oil industry as workers grow too weak and hungry for heavy labor. https://t.co/2zjM7vO4SU— Tina Davis (@tina_davis) February 22, 2018 Let's see what this new coin thing they released does...

Let's see...  "immediately fire back... at much less costs than guards..."1.  "counter puncher" i.e. "eye for an eye" i.e. "get even"...AND2.  "save money!"What's not to like??? ....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A “gun free” school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END! — Donald J. Trump...

In advanced nations, poverty used to be a thing of old age, once income had stopped due to retirement and savings depleted. Old-aged pension systems were intended as Welfare States emerged to prevent that fall into poverty. The pension systems reduced the incidence of extreme poverty and the full employment era that followed the Second World War, where governments committed to using their fiscal capacities (spending and taxation) to ensure there were sufficient jobs for all, allowed workers...

Jimmy Dore hits home again, Washington is a laughing stock. If only Americans knew what the content of the Russian Twitter adverts, then they would be rolling about with laughter too. Congress and the CIA are so upset about some silly, nonsense adverts. [embedded content]   

[embedded content] I'm a sort of liberal but I was really surprised by this. I expected Deeyah Khan to say how Muslims and Europeans can get along easily if we stop being prejudiced. I thought it would be a warm, nice lecture but I got a big surprise when it turned out to be the absolute opposite.Deeyah Khan has a Muslim father and a Norwegian mother and her father told her she that even as an academic the white people won't properly accept her so she would have to become a top musician or...

Progressive universalism versus targeting the poor and forgetting the struggling middle class and working poor — the precariat.EconospeakDivide and RulePeter Dorman | Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College

Since the end of the first Cold War and the collapse of the USSR the US has treated Russia with overbearing contempt and hostility. The Russians appealed to the US to be allowed a more open role in European affairs. The response was to drive the borders of NATO far to the east, to the borders of what is but a rump of the Russian Empire before WW1. The Russian response is to use what they see as a legitimate instrument of statecraft against us. This instrument seeks the weakening of...