Recently our Indian senior leaders at an American company in the USA, told HR recruiters they don't want to see resumes of anyone but indians (from India). That is discrimination. However, the Indian people arriving here from India just want to feed their families and make some money even if it means stepping on the backs of American workers. The true enemy is not your Indian co-worker but your CEO who needs $600 lunches, a private plane and limo service. To get a multi million dollar salary and a huge mansion the leader feels a need import cheap labor and then make up lies about labor shortages.
In any case, whether all retirees earn the funds to buy what we produce or if they all get SS payments instead, it all boils down to whether we have enough goods and services to go around. In either case, with an expanding populace, the Gov't will have to add USD to the system to fuel the demand, if all those presently working hope to keep or add to their savings of the national currency. Not a problem if the national currency is fully fiat and floats on the foreign exchange, as long as you keep the imports under control.
It's not just the Democrats, it's the Republicans too. They're both getting up in front of God and Everybody and saying "America's broke.... We're running out of money"
Neat. How do you manage to accomplish that with a fully fiat currency? By telling people that the Federal Gov't has to "Balance the budget" instead of balancing the economy. And while I'm on the subject, how about this superstitious nonsense that we somehow have to "Pay back the National Debt"? Just up and give our savings back to the Federal Government? Why would you want to do that? To top it off, we have people in tin can costumes running around our nations campuses with their moronic "The Can Kicks Back" campaign, financed by corporations that have NO intention of giving up any of their hoard to "Pay back the National Debt".
It's a fully fiat currency that floats on the foreign exchange. There's nothing to "pay back". If it's a problem of not enough goods and services to go around, then we may need taxes to cool off the economy, but surely NOT while we're seeing numbers like Mr. Oak posted. Republicans - Shut up about cutting spending, Democrats - the next time you want to talk about raising taxes, put a sock in it! What we need is some combination of tax cuts and spending increases until we get the scenario outlined below:
"I just want to say a quick word about what a good economy is because it’s been so long since we’ve had a good economy. You’ve got to be at least as old as I am to remember it. In a good economy business competes for people. There is a shortage of people to work for business. Everybody wants to hire you. They’ll train you, whatever it takes. They hire students before they get out of school. You can change jobs if you want to because other companies are always trying to hire you. That’s the way the economy is supposed to be but that’s all turned around. For one reason, which I’ll keep coming back to, the budget deficit is too small. As soon as they started tightening up on budget deficits many years ago, we transformed from a good economy where the people were the most important thing to what I call this ‘crime against humanity’ that we have today." - W. Mosler
During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt predicted privately, "I’ll be in the White House for eight years. When those years are over, there’ll be a Progressive party. It may not be Democratic, but it will be Progressive."
As a progressive, FDR ended up being elected to 4 terms, including with major support from Southern States.
In January 1935, President Roosevelt sent his "Economic Security Bill" to Capitol Hill. The Act was an attempt to limit the dangers old age, poverty, and unemployment in modern American life.
During a Ways and Means meeting on March 1, 1935 Congressman Frank Buck (D-CA) made a motion to change the name of the bill to the "Social Security Act of 1935". It was passed by Congress as part of FDR's "New Deal" (with 284 Democrats and 81 Republicans in the House --- and 60 Democrats and 16 Republicans in the Senate).
On August 14, 1935 President Roosevelt signed the bill into law. He became the first president to advocate federal assistance for the elderly. And ever since then, Social Security has been under attack by the Republicans.
* It's interesting to note that, since FDR's Social Security Act was passed, and ever since the Civil Rights movement, many people left the Democratic party to become "Dixiecrats" (now the Tea Party) — and now many people in the South (who once supported FDR) now support the Republicans — and many (mostly whites) have since been voting against their own best economic interests.
You raise good points. I do have a question though. What does the fair trader believe will be the final outcome if all measures of fairness are achieve (i.e. environmental law, etc)?
To help illustrate my thinking on the failure of "fairness", I have argued in a previous essay that I believe the Euro will fail because it is a form of free trade, arguable the fairest on the planet (similar wage levels, laws,etc). Yet it is defective for the same reason all free trade is defective: It breaks work mobility. Very simply said if, say, the superior metal industries are in Germany that put Italian industries out of business an Italian worker is hard pressed to move to a new sector due to language barrier. Thus the Euro overlooks the critical aspect of money as a truly domestic phenomenon. I guess time will tell.
"Deep problems persist in the U.S. job market. Businesses are creating jobs, but many of them are part-time or temporary positions. At the same time, the number of people who are able to work but have dropped out of the workforce remains at a historically high level. And the portion of Americans considered to be long-term unemployed remains unusually high."
In a truly healthy economic climate, an unemployment rate of 5.6% means that pretty-much everybody that wants to work is working. In a truly healthy economic climate, stocks are being purchased by our working middle-class; and corporations do't have to purchase their own stocks to keep their share prices falsely inflated. In a truly healthy economic climate, average people take vacations and save money for their future. In a truly healthy economic climate, the number of people on welfare, food stamps and disability doesn't increase each and every month. In a truly healthy economic climate, suicide rates don't quadruple within a six year period. Tear the wool off of your eyes and see the destruction of Obama and his Globalist handlers.
I agree and when labor units are put into this equation, we get the race to the bottom for workers and we see this happening right now as the U.S. middle class disappeared.
I disagree with the idea that fair trade and balanced trade are the same thing. Fair trade is the notion that trade barriers should be lifted with countries that have similar (or even more strict) labor and environmental laws as we do and should charge tariffs to the countries that do not. This allows our country to influence other countries in their labor and environmental policies (among others) with the enticement that they will be able to trade freely with our country - assuming they also lift trade barriers to our products. If the trading partner refuses to match our policies, they are assessed tariffs on their imports so that it is not cheaper or beneficial for manufacturing to move off shore to take advantage of lax labor and environmental laws. There could be other reasons to move manufacturing but it removes the labor and environmental arbitrage that occurs now.
This also removes the argument that our environmental and labor policies force manufacturing to leave our shores and increases outsourcing. This is a common argument against labor and environmental policy changes.
Finally, it increases revenue for the government by charging tariffs to many of the countries who choose not to play be the same rules. This was a valuable source of income for the country at one time but has dried up due to poorly written and one sided 'free trade' agreements.
From ExxonMobil’s report: The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040 -- "Over the next few decades, population and income growth—and an unprecedented expansion of the global middle class—are expected to create new demands for energy."
The Nation writes, "The report estimates the world will need 35 percent more energy in 2040 than it does today ... If there is one overarching theme to the new Exxon ethos, it is that we are witnessing the emergence of a new global middle class with glittering possibilities — and that this expanding multitude, constituting perhaps one-half of the world’s population by 2040, will require ever greater quantities of oil, coal and natural gas ... China and India will be the two countries adding most substantially to the global middle class, with each acquiring hundreds of millions of newly affluent citizens ... According to [ExxonMobil’s report], virtually none of the expected increase in global energy demand will come from the older industrialized countries ... The new global middle class will want more computers, flat-screen TVs, air-conditioners and other appliances, stoking a soaring demand for electricity."
I am agreeing with you that someday an uprising of some sort will happen an
economic dispruptions in a sense between the local middle class and the very poor.
The sad part of the world now it is an aging population and the youth aspiring for jobs
are being replaced by technology or robots at work. Thank you
Stan Thank you for the comment. In other writings, I go much further and argue that "fair trade" is impossible to achieve because wealth content cannot be measured. I also provide an example (extreme theoretical case) where balanced trade can result in 90% unemployment. Perhaps I should consider this topic for my next essay. best regards
Economics, as a profession, aspires to scientific rigor. What economics lacks in that pursuit is the ability to falsify an assertion. That is, anyone can assert a key principle in economics. That statement lives forever, independent of lived experience or rational argument to the contrary.
Two generations ago, economics, as a profession, was known as political economy. The profession recognized a larger context for human behavior. Economics, as a profession, purposely dropped political and social context. From that point on, economics willingly isolated itself from the real world, and precluded itself from functioning as a science.
Most of the frustrations real people feel with economics, as a profession, can be resolved by ignoring any economic statement of the form "A causes B." Instead, translate any such statement to "what is the interest in A, and the interest in B?" Most modern American economic thought is focused on the more primitive question of how to enable the rich and powerful to acquire more moral, social, political and economic power, and claim a larger share of any new gains from productivity, technology or the work of others.
By the way, a closed economy looks a lot like an open economy with balanced trade. Just sayin'.
The Atlantic: "The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.
China is not a good partner for one big reason, China protects North Korea, NK is one bad country, you can be killed there for being a Christian, they are very cruel to anyone who doesn't worship the Leader of the Country, and China helps them, you know in the old days of the USA we had strong principles, we didn't help Tyrants or those who did, we should reevaluate our relations with China.
the provision to deregulate derivatives owned by banks was written by Citigroup and inserted into the bill by Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas, effectively repealing the "Lincoln amendment" section of the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation that required the big banks to spin off the most risky portion of their derivatives business into non-FDIC-insured subsidiaries....as a result of this bill's passage, banks are now allowed to leave the riskiest derivatives in the same corporate entity as other banking functions such as savings that are insured by the FDIC...saver's deposits up to $250,000 are supposed to protected by the FDIC, but the FDIC fund has just $46 billion to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits, which itself is an amount dwarfed by the derivatives outstanding, and under the bankruptcy reform act of 2005, should a bank fail, derivatives get paid first...and while the bank's derivatives are normally hedged against one another such that overall profits and losses are minimal; the models the banks used when building these financial products (which are traded automatically based on quant algorithms) may not account for the 50% downward price move in oil prices, and should they fail, we'd have another unpredictable and unresolvable financial crisis on our hands, and likely another bank bailout..
The hits just keep on coming, except.....for workers, wages and middle class, although things have improved, just not in line with Wall Street and now GDP.
"Self-employment might become the new normal. The challenge for economic policy is to create an environment that rewards and encourages more entrepreneurial risk taking."
That was from Scientific American, not Bud Meyers.
"Self-employment might become the new normal. The challenge for economic policy is to create an environment that rewards and encourages more entrepreneurial risk taking." says Bud Meyers
Self-employment is about all too many now have. Unfortunately for the vast majority, their intended customer base has little income themselves to purchase any output from such a one.
As for that desired entrepreneur-friendly economic environment, it already exists. All anyone needs to do is check out the tax code, which has so many giveaways for those who take up a side business -the ONLY reason to have ever done AMWAY- they can trim thousands from their taxable income without resorting to exotic or illegal tricks.
But to conduct a self-business to the point one can live on it, requires a cushion of capital. How does one raise that cushion without gainful employment at a good wage? Not from the banks, which require one's detailed economic history to determine eligibility. No good income, no loan.
Many of today's "conservatives" got their starts from the massive spending for WWII. If one had a working lathe or drill press in the shed, one could win a contract to make parts. Some of these start-ups later became large companies with contracts funded by the taxpayers long after the hot war ended and the Cold War took over. Just don't expect any Peace Dividend from those who use their public connections to ensure private profit. In otherwords, what we now have in the US. They got theirs, and you can get lost.
Recently our Indian senior leaders at an American company in the USA, told HR recruiters they don't want to see resumes of anyone but indians (from India). That is discrimination. However, the Indian people arriving here from India just want to feed their families and make some money even if it means stepping on the backs of American workers. The true enemy is not your Indian co-worker but your CEO who needs $600 lunches, a private plane and limo service. To get a multi million dollar salary and a huge mansion the leader feels a need import cheap labor and then make up lies about labor shortages.
It was the corporate moderates:
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/social_security.html
Long read, but good.
In any case, whether all retirees earn the funds to buy what we produce or if they all get SS payments instead, it all boils down to whether we have enough goods and services to go around. In either case, with an expanding populace, the Gov't will have to add USD to the system to fuel the demand, if all those presently working hope to keep or add to their savings of the national currency. Not a problem if the national currency is fully fiat and floats on the foreign exchange, as long as you keep the imports under control.
It's not just the Democrats, it's the Republicans too. They're both getting up in front of God and Everybody and saying "America's broke.... We're running out of money"
Neat. How do you manage to accomplish that with a fully fiat currency? By telling people that the Federal Gov't has to "Balance the budget" instead of balancing the economy. And while I'm on the subject, how about this superstitious nonsense that we somehow have to "Pay back the National Debt"? Just up and give our savings back to the Federal Government? Why would you want to do that? To top it off, we have people in tin can costumes running around our nations campuses with their moronic "The Can Kicks Back" campaign, financed by corporations that have NO intention of giving up any of their hoard to "Pay back the National Debt".
It's a fully fiat currency that floats on the foreign exchange. There's nothing to "pay back". If it's a problem of not enough goods and services to go around, then we may need taxes to cool off the economy, but surely NOT while we're seeing numbers like Mr. Oak posted. Republicans - Shut up about cutting spending, Democrats - the next time you want to talk about raising taxes, put a sock in it! What we need is some combination of tax cuts and spending increases until we get the scenario outlined below:
"I just want to say a quick word about what a good economy is because it’s been so long since we’ve had a good economy. You’ve got to be at least as old as I am to remember it. In a good economy business competes for people. There is a shortage of people to work for business. Everybody wants to hire you. They’ll train you, whatever it takes. They hire students before they get out of school. You can change jobs if you want to because other companies are always trying to hire you. That’s the way the economy is supposed to be but that’s all turned around. For one reason, which I’ll keep coming back to, the budget deficit is too small. As soon as they started tightening up on budget deficits many years ago, we transformed from a good economy where the people were the most important thing to what I call this ‘crime against humanity’ that we have today." - W. Mosler
During the 1932 presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt predicted privately, "I’ll be in the White House for eight years. When those years are over, there’ll be a Progressive party. It may not be Democratic, but it will be Progressive."
As a progressive, FDR ended up being elected to 4 terms, including with major support from Southern States.
In January 1935, President Roosevelt sent his "Economic Security Bill" to Capitol Hill. The Act was an attempt to limit the dangers old age, poverty, and unemployment in modern American life.
During a Ways and Means meeting on March 1, 1935 Congressman Frank Buck (D-CA) made a motion to change the name of the bill to the "Social Security Act of 1935". It was passed by Congress as part of FDR's "New Deal" (with 284 Democrats and 81 Republicans in the House --- and 60 Democrats and 16 Republicans in the Senate).
On August 14, 1935 President Roosevelt signed the bill into law. He became the first president to advocate federal assistance for the elderly. And ever since then, Social Security has been under attack by the Republicans.
* It's interesting to note that, since FDR's Social Security Act was passed, and ever since the Civil Rights movement, many people left the Democratic party to become "Dixiecrats" (now the Tea Party) — and now many people in the South (who once supported FDR) now support the Republicans — and many (mostly whites) have since been voting against their own best economic interests.
Ira
You raise good points. I do have a question though. What does the fair trader believe will be the final outcome if all measures of fairness are achieve (i.e. environmental law, etc)?
To help illustrate my thinking on the failure of "fairness", I have argued in a previous essay that I believe the Euro will fail because it is a form of free trade, arguable the fairest on the planet (similar wage levels, laws,etc). Yet it is defective for the same reason all free trade is defective: It breaks work mobility. Very simply said if, say, the superior metal industries are in Germany that put Italian industries out of business an Italian worker is hard pressed to move to a new sector due to language barrier. Thus the Euro overlooks the critical aspect of money as a truly domestic phenomenon. I guess time will tell.
best regards
International Business Times:
"Deep problems persist in the U.S. job market. Businesses are creating jobs, but many of them are part-time or temporary positions. At the same time, the number of people who are able to work but have dropped out of the workforce remains at a historically high level. And the portion of Americans considered to be long-term unemployed remains unusually high."
http://www.ibtimes.com/despite-falling-us-unemployment-numbers-long-term...
In a truly healthy economic climate, an unemployment rate of 5.6% means that pretty-much everybody that wants to work is working. In a truly healthy economic climate, stocks are being purchased by our working middle-class; and corporations do't have to purchase their own stocks to keep their share prices falsely inflated. In a truly healthy economic climate, average people take vacations and save money for their future. In a truly healthy economic climate, the number of people on welfare, food stamps and disability doesn't increase each and every month. In a truly healthy economic climate, suicide rates don't quadruple within a six year period. Tear the wool off of your eyes and see the destruction of Obama and his Globalist handlers.
I agree and when labor units are put into this equation, we get the race to the bottom for workers and we see this happening right now as the U.S. middle class disappeared.
I disagree with the idea that fair trade and balanced trade are the same thing. Fair trade is the notion that trade barriers should be lifted with countries that have similar (or even more strict) labor and environmental laws as we do and should charge tariffs to the countries that do not. This allows our country to influence other countries in their labor and environmental policies (among others) with the enticement that they will be able to trade freely with our country - assuming they also lift trade barriers to our products. If the trading partner refuses to match our policies, they are assessed tariffs on their imports so that it is not cheaper or beneficial for manufacturing to move off shore to take advantage of lax labor and environmental laws. There could be other reasons to move manufacturing but it removes the labor and environmental arbitrage that occurs now.
This also removes the argument that our environmental and labor policies force manufacturing to leave our shores and increases outsourcing. This is a common argument against labor and environmental policy changes.
Finally, it increases revenue for the government by charging tariffs to many of the countries who choose not to play be the same rules. This was a valuable source of income for the country at one time but has dried up due to poorly written and one sided 'free trade' agreements.
From ExxonMobil’s report: The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040 -- "Over the next few decades, population and income growth—and an unprecedented expansion of the global middle class—are expected to create new demands for energy."
The Nation writes, "The report estimates the world will need 35 percent more energy in 2040 than it does today ... If there is one overarching theme to the new Exxon ethos, it is that we are witnessing the emergence of a new global middle class with glittering possibilities — and that this expanding multitude, constituting perhaps one-half of the world’s population by 2040, will require ever greater quantities of oil, coal and natural gas ... China and India will be the two countries adding most substantially to the global middle class, with each acquiring hundreds of millions of newly affluent citizens ... According to [ExxonMobil’s report], virtually none of the expected increase in global energy demand will come from the older industrialized countries ... The new global middle class will want more computers, flat-screen TVs, air-conditioners and other appliances, stoking a soaring demand for electricity."
http://www.thenation.com/article/194481/big-energy-says-future-bright-an...
I am agreeing with you that someday an uprising of some sort will happen an
economic dispruptions in a sense between the local middle class and the very poor.
The sad part of the world now it is an aging population and the youth aspiring for jobs
are being replaced by technology or robots at work. Thank you
Stan Thank you for the comment. In other writings, I go much further and argue that "fair trade" is impossible to achieve because wealth content cannot be measured. I also provide an example (extreme theoretical case) where balanced trade can result in 90% unemployment. Perhaps I should consider this topic for my next essay. best regards
Economics, as a profession, aspires to scientific rigor. What economics lacks in that pursuit is the ability to falsify an assertion. That is, anyone can assert a key principle in economics. That statement lives forever, independent of lived experience or rational argument to the contrary.
Two generations ago, economics, as a profession, was known as political economy. The profession recognized a larger context for human behavior. Economics, as a profession, purposely dropped political and social context. From that point on, economics willingly isolated itself from the real world, and precluded itself from functioning as a science.
Most of the frustrations real people feel with economics, as a profession, can be resolved by ignoring any economic statement of the form "A causes B." Instead, translate any such statement to "what is the interest in A, and the interest in B?" Most modern American economic thought is focused on the more primitive question of how to enable the rich and powerful to acquire more moral, social, political and economic power, and claim a larger share of any new gains from productivity, technology or the work of others.
By the way, a closed economy looks a lot like an open economy with balanced trade. Just sayin'.
The Atlantic: "The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-...
China is not a good partner for one big reason, China protects North Korea, NK is one bad country, you can be killed there for being a Christian, they are very cruel to anyone who doesn't worship the Leader of the Country, and China helps them, you know in the old days of the USA we had strong principles, we didn't help Tyrants or those who did, we should reevaluate our relations with China.
the provision to deregulate derivatives owned by banks was written by Citigroup and inserted into the bill by Rep. Kevin Yoder of Kansas, effectively repealing the "Lincoln amendment" section of the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation that required the big banks to spin off the most risky portion of their derivatives business into non-FDIC-insured subsidiaries....as a result of this bill's passage, banks are now allowed to leave the riskiest derivatives in the same corporate entity as other banking functions such as savings that are insured by the FDIC...saver's deposits up to $250,000 are supposed to protected by the FDIC, but the FDIC fund has just $46 billion to cover $4.5 trillion worth of deposits, which itself is an amount dwarfed by the derivatives outstanding, and under the bankruptcy reform act of 2005, should a bank fail, derivatives get paid first...and while the bank's derivatives are normally hedged against one another such that overall profits and losses are minimal; the models the banks used when building these financial products (which are traded automatically based on quant algorithms) may not account for the 50% downward price move in oil prices, and should they fail, we'd have another unpredictable and unresolvable financial crisis on our hands, and likely another bank bailout..
The hits just keep on coming, except.....for workers, wages and middle class, although things have improved, just not in line with Wall Street and now GDP.
...and these jobs are usually union and better-paying jobs. They also have a greater "multiple effect" (especially in the tech industry).
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerry-jasinowski/jobs-multiplier_b_4002113...
"Self-employment might become the new normal. The challenge for economic policy is to create an environment that rewards and encourages more entrepreneurial risk taking."
That was from Scientific American, not Bud Meyers.
"Self-employment might become the new normal. The challenge for economic policy is to create an environment that rewards and encourages more entrepreneurial risk taking." says Bud Meyers
Self-employment is about all too many now have. Unfortunately for the vast majority, their intended customer base has little income themselves to purchase any output from such a one.
As for that desired entrepreneur-friendly economic environment, it already exists. All anyone needs to do is check out the tax code, which has so many giveaways for those who take up a side business -the ONLY reason to have ever done AMWAY- they can trim thousands from their taxable income without resorting to exotic or illegal tricks.
But to conduct a self-business to the point one can live on it, requires a cushion of capital. How does one raise that cushion without gainful employment at a good wage? Not from the banks, which require one's detailed economic history to determine eligibility. No good income, no loan.
Many of today's "conservatives" got their starts from the massive spending for WWII. If one had a working lathe or drill press in the shed, one could win a contract to make parts. Some of these start-ups later became large companies with contracts funded by the taxpayers long after the hot war ended and the Cold War took over. Just don't expect any Peace Dividend from those who use their public connections to ensure private profit. In otherwords, what we now have in the US. They got theirs, and you can get lost.
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