This Real News Network interview with Bill Black provides an overview of why Wall Street and the Administration are so keen to gut well loved and socially valuable safety nets for the elderly, in particular, Social Security. This talk is a good introduction for people who may not understand how high the stakes in the budget fight are and why the economic arguments used to justify it are bogus.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
President Obama gave a major speech today on his legislative agenda. He said that the overriding national priority had to be jobs. We agree.
The problem is that Republicans and Democrats are pushing a “Grand Bargain” that would reduce jobs.
Read more...The word is that Erskine Bowles, who most recently headed the so-called “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” which might more accurately be called the “National Commission to Increase Unemployment and Make Old People Die Faster” is the top pick on the short list of candidates for the next Treasury Secretary.
This is a very bad idea. Please sign this petition and make your objections known.
Read more...By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City, and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College,. His latest book is “The Bubble and Beyond.”
The Democrats could not have won so handily without the Citizens United ruling. That is what enabled the Koch Brothers to spend their billions to support right-wing candidates that barked and growled like sheep dogs to give voters little civilized option but to vote for “the lesser evil.”
Read more...As we discussed last weekend, two Federal Reserve Board economists shot gaping holes the CBO’s health care cost increase assumptions in CBO’s long term fiscal forecasts. As technical as this sounds, these long-term cost increase assumptions are the big driver of the much ballyhooed deficit explosion. And as the Fed economists’ paper discussed in considerable detail, the CBO’s assumptions on the rate of increase look indefensibly aggressive, which in turn means the hysteria about entitlements eating the economy deserves far more scrutiny than it is getting.
Some evidence on the pressures against health care cost trees growing to the sky comes in a new post by Wolf Richter.
Read more...The Obama victory was less than 24 hours old when the Rubinite faction of the Democratic party was out full bore selling “reforming” Social Security as the adult solution to the coming budget impasse, giving it higher priority than any other measure on the table while simultaneously admitting that this is not even a pressing (let alone real) problem.
And the worse is that this snakeoil salesmanship, which comes from former OMB director, now Citigrgoup vice chairman of corporate and investment banking Peter Orszag, is almost certainly an Obama trial balloon.
Read more...Nobody has wanted to heed the lesson of post bubble Japan until way too late.
Read more...In pursuing its dream, the EU has created a ballooning superstructure of governance manned by 41,000 bureaucrats and mostly unelected politicians. In 2011, they spent €129 billion of taxpayer money. But now, the European Court of Auditors released its audit report for that year—a damning document that outlines how up to 4.8% of the EU budget seeped through the cracks and disappeared.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from Benzaga
Wall Street’s leading “false flag” group, the Third Way, has responded to the warnings that Robert Kuttner, AFL-CIO President Trumka, and I have made that if President Obama is re-elected our immediate task will be to prevent the Great Betrayal – the adoption of self-destructive austerity programs and the opening wedge of the effort to unravel the safety net (including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid).
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2012/10/eggs-and-veal-at-the-eu-summit/“>MacroBusiness.
I’ve spoken previously that apart from the economic and social fallout from the European financial crisis, the other major issue I see is the loss of political capital on both sides of the economic divide.
Read more...Michael Hoexter is a policy analyst and marketing consultant on green issues, climate change, clean and renewable energy, and energy efficiency. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives
We have come to accept in the Orwellian world of mass communication and media spin that pressure groups and political organizations name themselves in ways that contradict their actual mission. We have become cynical about truth and about good intentions, trusting only after long observation certain political actors and then only reservedly. There is now such an alphabet soup of organizations in Washington, a veritable smorgasbord of lobbyists that only political junkies and Washington insiders will know every acronym and player.
However there is a constellation of particularly influential groupings in Washington that should be known by every American for what they are and what they are not. These groups form a powerful hub at the center of the fiscal austerity campaign.
Read more...A remarkably important and persuasive paper that calls into question the need for “reforming” Medicare has not gotten the attention it warrants. “An Examination of Health-Spending Growth In The United States: Past Trends And Future Prospects” (hat tip nathan) by Glenn Follette and Louise Sheiner looks at the model used by the Congressional Budgetary Office to estimate long term health care cost increases. Bear in mind that this model is THE driver of virtually all forecasts of future budget deficits.
This paper, although written in typically anodyne economese, is devastating in the range and nature of its criticisms.
Read more...By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain. Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net. The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.
Read more...It’s peculiar to have been in the midst of the superstorm and have suffered pretty much nada in the way of immediate effects.
Read more...By Delusional Economics, who is determined to cleanse the daily flow of vested interests propaganda to produce a balanced counterpoint. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
The economic and political troubles of Greece appear to have no end.
Read more...