Tag Archives: politics

In August 2014, I wrote this post arguing that harsh austerity during the Depression caused Hitler's rise to power. At the time, my argument seemed controversial, at least in Germany. There, it is not the austerity of 1930-32 that is blamed, but the debt-driven hyperinflation of a decade earlier. Germans remain terrified of both inflation and debt to this day.I am certainly not the only person to identify a causative link between austerity and Hitler. Here is Paul Krugman slapping down...

By Steve Roth (2015) Did Money Evolve? You Might (Not) Be Surprised You probably won’t be surprised to know that exchange, trade, reciprocity, tit for tat, and associated notions of “fairness” and “just deserts” have deep roots in humans’ evolutionary origins. We see expressions of these traits in capuchin monkeys and chimps (researchers created a “cash economy” where chimps were trained to exchange inedible tokens for food, then their trading behaviors...

Worth a discussion at the least: By Masha Gessen Gessen is the author of nine books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia. The New Yorker  23 December 17 Donald Trump has scored a legislative victory with staggering costs. The price of the tax bill has to be measured not only in the loss American society will face in the increase in inequality, in the impact on public health, and the growth of the deficit, but also in the...

Other than a small number of fiscal conservatives who are ignored by their own party, it doesn’t seem like anyone really cares about the National Debt any more. That’s a relatively new thing. Doing something about the Debt was one of the platforms of the GW Bush campaign in 2000. Of course, what he actually did to the Debt was the precisely the opposite of what he told us he was going to do. Then came Obama, whose economic policies – certainly with...

By Steve Roth (2016) How Perfect Markets Concentrate Wealth and Strangle Growth and Prosperity The winners have us all playing a loser’s game Capitalism concentrates wealth. Ridicule Marx and his latter-day disciples all you like (I’ll help); he definitely got that right. But capitalism is a big word with lots of meanings, and enough ideological baggage to fill a Lear Jet. Let’s talk about something more precise: perfect markets, with ownership, in which...

Even though most states have done little to improve access to healthcare, it is ok for states to regulate ACA and Medicaid as states are supposedly closer to their constituent’s needs. If the Federal government steps in and tries to regulate voting registration requiring ID, planned parenthood, ACA, etc. because certain state(s) give a damn about discrimination, children, and human rights; then, it is a supposed violation of state rights. For once, states...

by Hale Stewart  (originally published at Bonddad blog) Why Would Anybody Invest When Capacity Utilization is This Low? A central selling point of the tax bill is that it will encourage investment.  But that assumes that high tax rates were the primary reason why business wasn’t investing.  Instead, the data says business investment is weak because the U.S. has a ton of spare capacity. First, let’s look total capacity utilization: It has peaked at...

Black Mirror Big Data Becomes Big Brother In China And maybe coming soon to the US as well, enough to make Orwell sit up and take notice. The first show of the 2016 season of the sci fi TV show, “Black Mirror,” called “Nosedive,” showed a future society where people have overall social scores (1-5) that are constantly being changed based on what they do and who they interact with and how.  Access to many things is based on one’s rating.  The female lead...

The 2021 Omnibus Repealer and Clawback Act A saving grace of 2017 — up until now — is that Trump and the GOP have been the Keystone Kops of Kleptocracy, consistently faceplanting in attempts at regressive domestic legislation. With the passage of the GOP tax bill, that all changes. Not only is it a massive giveaway to the corporations and the wealthy who least need assistance, it actually raises taxes over time over many if not most lower and middle class...

From Employer Coverage to Single Payer Health Insurance This holiday season I’ve heard several tales of woe from working class acquaintances, mostly self-employed, about Obamacare: how they are just above the subsidy cutoff and would rather pay the fine than buy expensive individual policies, or how they are just below and can’t afford to put in more hours per week. I can understand why there is a lot of disappointment with the Democrats. So what about...