Republicans have no interest in doing anything sensible ... To understand modern Republican thinking on fiscal policy, we need to go back to perhaps the most politically brilliant (albeit economically unconvincing) idea in the history of fiscal policy: "supply-side economics". Supply-side economics liberated conservatives from any need to insist on fiscal rectitude and balanced budgets.BONUS
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer at a staggering rate. Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace.Is America Facing an Increase in Structural Unemployment, and If So, What Should be Done About It?
So why are we witnessing such fundamental changes? Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects. It turns out that they didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few regulations. The big global corporations have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found things to be very tough.
The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world. After all, what corporation in their right mind is going to pay an American worker ten times more (plus benefits) to do the same job? The world is fundamentally changing. Wealth and power are rapidly becoming concentrated at the top and the big global corporations are making massive amounts of money. Meanwhile, the American middle class is being systematically wiped out of existence as U.S. workers are slowly being merged into the new "global" labor pool.
Reviving the ghost of the great John Maynard Keynes, economists from Paul Krugman, to Brad DeLong, to Martin Wolf, to Bruce Bartlett, are chalking up a jobless recovery to a lack of aggregate demand. I'd like to advance a suggestion: it's not just the quantity of demand that's problematic — it's also the quality of demand.The Real Tea Party Begins Here - "Find out the REAL cause of the Boston Tea Party (it wasn't tea taxes) & learn how a public state bank could remove our debt, permanently. There IS enough money to meet our needs, it is just held by monopoly powers who falsely claim the country is broke. Understand the lie, then do something about it. Support state banks." [video]
So let's talk about jobs — how they're created, and, conversely, how they vanish ... Every time I buy something from your local big-box retailer, it's not that, as protectionists and "patriots" often claim, that I'm destroying an American job. In fact, it's worse: I just might be helping stamp out the idea that there should be jobs as we know them.
Consider: the bulk of that stuff is made, when we cut through the triumphant rhetoric of globalization, by people who are "sub(sub-sub)-contractors," enjoying few, if any, of the benefits we associate with "jobs" — security, tenure, benefits, labor standards, etc. And, of course, when those privileges are gained, production is simply moved to countries, regions, and cities where they haven't been.
Low quality demand, then, means that we buy cheap, but the price is invisibly steep: it ignites a global race to the bottom, what a complexity economist might call a dynamic equilibrium of negative consumption externalities, consumption that results not just in joblessness but a loss in the quality of jobs. The quality of a job is sparked by higher quality demand; or, valuing more than just the dollar price of a thing, but also its human and social impact. When we have low-quality demand, we have low-quality jobs. When we value McDonalds, the result is McJobs.
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Contrast it, then, with what you might call high-quality demand. Every so often, I take my own step, in a little experiment I started about a year ago: I buy specific items in my own little budget from a (preferably local) artisan — made with love, care, and respect — but which cost 20-30% more.
Now, my friends, folks, and colleagues seeing only the cost differential, think I'm going a little nuts. Here's what they don't see: that I'm deliberately attempting to see if I can also factor in a different set of benefits: the benefit I enjoy from helping support something and someone I actually care about, the benefits of having a trusted, ongoing relationship with them, instead of merely mutely, anonymously consuming mass-made "product."
Now, maybe I'm just a soft-hearted fool. But my little experiment is changing how, what, and where I buy — and what kinds of benefits I enjoy. In short, my preferences are changing radically: I do enjoy the stuff above, and often, I enjoy it more than the generic, disconnected, alienating stuff I used to "consume." I'm learning to value not just the financial cost of stuff, but, more deeply, its often-invisible, yet still very real, human and social benefits. I suspect that if we are to create tomorrow's jobs, it will require a sea change in preferences.
Note, here, a key nuance. Shifting jobs to lower-wage countries is a tremendous boon to the impoverished. But it would be an even bigger boon if it weren't a double whammy: if, sneakily, we didn't also denude jobs of quality as they were shifted overseas; if the wage differential itself was enough, instead of exploiting a lack of governance and legislation as well; if that which makes a job more than just mere work didn't get, ever so conveniently, lost in translation.
Were that not to have happened already, people around the globe might have had more to spend, and more time to invest in spending it, with less risk — and so perhaps the global economy's problem of aggregate quantity of demand might currently be less severe. As Ford presciently saw a century ago: "well-managed business pays high wages and sells at low prices. Its workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment."
Yet, even that depends on a more fundamental cause: higher quality demand. Because to generate higher wages, more leisure, better standards, work that affords space for passion, care, and respect — to offer that to, well one another — we might just have to learn to value the human, natural, and social more, first.
"A CIA report has determined with "relative certainty" that Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was not involved in the taking of U.S. hostages 26 years ago, three government officials told CNN ... Another U.S. official said the tone of the report is that there is no evidence to date that the new Iranian president was among those who held U.S. diplomats hostage.[9]"It's always fun to take media myths and lies that support a regime of propaganda and use them in arguments, even when evidence refutes them...
Terrorists come from cultures that understand the use of terrorism and would be impressed by it if we used it against them. We are not speaking to people in their own language.
If people today are still angry about the policies dating back to the administration of Theodore Roosevelt...
The US does not do everything wrong, but it receives no credit for what it does right.
As far as my supposed advice to sow terrorism, we don't need to sow terrorism, we already have it in abundance...
And you still have offered no better alternatives.
I considered from the beginning that it was a horrendous error for Yeltzin to refuse to recognize the democratic vote of the people of Chechnya to secede from Russia, and the consequences have consistently been disastrous. Secession is not terrorism! These are entirely different cases. The World Trade Center did not secede from the US, it was destroyed. The same analysis applies to the Uighurs in China.
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posted by Joe Beese at 11:33 AM on July 26, 2010 [49 favorites]