Sunday, August 18, 2019

"A.O-C" subconsciously channeling the spirit of FDR??


#AOCintercept-> was she channeling FDR's words, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself..."
AOC @Intercept-> https://youtu.be/JU-SE5eNt04 

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Arquebus countered, "I'll see your video with another video on one of the reasons I dislike AOC."

This is why I never understand why unions always back Democrats . democrats always attack unions as soon as they are elected. Bobby Kennedy prime example Bobby Kennedy attacked the largest union there was ,?the Teamsters union. As so as they got his bother elected . It will never stop until unions are all gone . Wake up union leaders -Truthful 1,

I think they're starting to.-Arquebus,
 Does not matter what union. They are told to vote Democrat only. . And it never works out for the worker . Or for the Kennedys lol --Truthful 1

Ya know the mob (La Cosa Nostra-version) was all into many of the unions, and particularly the Teamsters (of where are you Jimmy Hoffa??). -OlDogger



Unions typically lean left. That's a correct generalization to make, I reckon.
What's telling of the left's current ideological stance is how they're willing to throw their supporters under the bus in the name of bills that promote identitarianism and authoritative socialism. -Arquebus 



It's a valid critique of the Green New Deal, while the excerpt on AOC, she was giving a response to a person asking what should and can an individual do to go forward with the change they seek. In light of my allusion to FDR's preamble for the original New Deal, "The only thing we have to fear is FEAR, itself.." which was a boon to organized labor and its present legacy, your clip makes the fine point of the myopic hubris AOC has made with her assertions to date..

As one who had a voyeurs seat of those whose legacy has become the critique of your video, I agree with the video... BUT my cynical radar tells me you had more reasons than your sympathies for the AFL-CIO's disagreements with the policy consequences for the present iteration of the Green New Deal.. (Am I wrong???) Has 'noble principle', except when used as a platitude or homily in existential crises, ever been a tool of those with power and leverage??
The abuses documented by the "identarians" challenge the more moderate and right-leaning homily abstractions of rectitude as compelling motivations for themselves in this more internet, socially connected world.. (Remembering the times when I had to go to the public library magazine archives to find in the classifieds of niche magazines people and topics off the popular and public narrative) -OlDogger,
Well, but Shooter seriously doubts that AOC even knows who FDR was, or what he was famous for.
She probably thinks its a rap group.


FYI on AOC
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known by her initials, AOC, is an American politician and activist.Representative for New York's 14th congressional district since January 3, 2019. Wikipedia
Office: Representative (D-NY 14th District) since 2019
Education: Boston University (2011) --OlDogger

Education lol. Boston university lol Is that really a school -Truthful 1, 

Boston University's ranking in the 2019 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, 42nd. (Feb 22, 2019) -OlDogger

Are you sure is not 1042nd . Check again this chick has set them way back.  -Truthful 1
 


Bwahhhhhhh!  -OlDogger,  

Shooter how do you know that song lol. I wouldn't think that's you're kind of music -Truthful 1,

Arquebus->OlDogger
You're not wrong. I despise identity politics and the Justice Democrats. Any extremist ideology gets under my skin, and AOC is the physical embodiment of everything wrong with the Democratic party. When I was younger I had always thought the Democrats where the party of science and enlightenment, but as I got a little older I realize I was naive. They're just people like anyone else. I think it's foolish to hold any ideology in such a high esteem that you'd you vilify others who don't follow it. As a young man, and teenage that's why I rebelled against the church, and I still think that that mindset is justified.

I can still have my own faith, just as I can hold my own political beliefs. No one would ever call me a heretic for my own personal holding of beliefs and interpretations of Jesus Christ and God.

However, people will all to quickly label me a bigot, an idiot, a Nazi, an Uncle Tom, or a spic for my political ones.
The regressive left specifically. The archaic ree-gressives that say all these words that all mean the same thing.

Heretic. That's what those words mean, and it was just as ridiculous when Catholics used it in medieval times, as it is now when the AOC types, the ree-gressives, use it.

They have a dogma, and dogmas are incredibly gay. So fuck their dogma. Fuck their establishment. Fuck the society they perceive. Fuck their little religion they've made for themselves.
I'm fully capable of making my own life with my family and friends, and I'm fully capable of thinking for myself.
AOC embodies that rebelliousness that I felt when I was younger, and I know she's full of shit. 

(Just to save space) I have empathy for your rebellious skepticism for the litmus-test correctness that seems to drive many to have us culturally conform to their way of thinking and behaving.. I know that I'd be dragged before such inquisitors, if what I did was a profiling concern for them. That's why one of my email names is "LucifersHeretic".. To that extent I get what your thinking and feel your reaction..
Also I go back to what Teddy Roosevelt said of protagonists, in general. For AOC to be so out front in the way she audaciously is and being an earnest zealot in her service, I give her that much credit..
 OlDogger


It is interesting that the moderator condemns progressives for being affluent and well educated. The story I usually get from the right is that progressives are losers who can't find good jobs, and who resent people who can.

Also, the moderator does not quote a single poll to indicate that the Green New Deal is unpopular.
---------
Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, Dec 14, 2018

[W]e surveyed a nationally-representative sample of registered voters in the United States.

In the survey, we showed respondents a brief description of the Green New Deal, which was identical to the first paragraph of this report (above). The description was followed by the question “How much do you support or oppose this idea?”

The survey results show overwhelming support for the Green New Deal, with 81% of registered voters saying they either “strongly support” (40%) or “somewhat support” (41%) this plan...

These data were produced by the bi-annual Climate Change in the American Mind survey — a nationally-representative analysis of public opinion on climate change in the United States conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication.


Arquebus responded  Tim Pool is not on the right. He's on the left. He wasn't condemning the left for being affluent, perhaps you should rewatch the video?

He was pointing out a disconnect between these new Democrats and middle Americans that would be hurt by the Green New Deal. A disconnect you seem to have, which is one of the main factors of why Trump won the presidency.

And I have already debunked the validity of that garbage survey you've peddled. It has wording that is unethically misleading and information that is intentionally skewed as a result.

Let me simplify why that is.

If I asked someone of they support alternative energy and funding for that alternative. Most people would say yes.

However, if I were to ask if they support a plan to eliminate jobs that contribute to emissions within 12 years and fund alternative energy efforts. That would be very different. I don't think you'd see as many yeses.

Have you read the Green New Deal? Most people haven't. The wording in that survey, which is there for everyone to see is misleading in that it doesn't specify that the survey results were being used as a show of support for the Green New Deal, and it doesn't use the information within the Deal itself. Because of that the information is skewed.

Edit: I'm also pretty sure that Tim Pool touched on this in a separate video, but I can't find it. Irrespective of that, it is irrelevant to the point of the video. The video was meant to show that the AFL-CIO does not support the Green New Deal, and they typically lean left.

CS natureboy posted this pic..

I, OlDogger, observed:

AS FAR AS I'VE SEEN OF THE POSTS, NONE HAS ADDRESSED WHAT I ASSERTED-"AOC subconsciously channeling FDR's , "The only thing we have to fear is FEAR, itself...". I found the subconscious channeling ironic, since she mentioned earlier in the dialogue that the 'New Deal' was functionally racist. But there she is channeling FDR's (?-wondering if Eleanor composed that phrase??)

I have seen all kinds of anti-AOC and a few pro-AOC on side and tangent issues, plus unrelated ad hominems.. And it had me wondering, "How could a 29+ (nearly 30, this spring) year old woman could arouse such a psyche eruption of verbal disparagments. Isn't it that she is as was admitted by @Arquebus "the living embodiment" of a threatening narrative that's more than the Green New Deal, which could be said to be the metaphorical 'foot-in-the-door' of a structural change more substantial than what Obama could have but didn't pursue? Is she the younger version with more potential shelf-life than Elizabeth Warren, who gives an homaging nod to the benefits of capitalism which Ocasio-Cortez sneers at?

It's more than just work and pocket book issues, IMNHO. I think that she is presenting a questioning of the aspirations that go to defining the identity of her detractor's meaning of themselves, which the nature of their posts are revealing. That questioning is more a contra-narrative that is the very FEAR, which FDR exhorted against 76 years ago at his inauguration.. I smile that 60-70 years after Malik el Shabazz (Malcolm X) and MLKJr.-both cultural figures who became the bogeymen of fearful projections upon them, but who weren't political actors within the system- did not have the political potential that this 29-30 year old Latina presents in her own way as the asymmetric political force for a populism that could resurrect those who've been part of the apathetic, non-voters. Because in the past those non-voters had skeptically and cynically dismissed other institutional pols as all-talk, but no-heart. With AOC, they just MIGHT end their electoral invisibility by the end of her prospective 3rd-term, six year from now; when she could be the embodiment of a political movement for her own White House aspirations...

History shows the character of a culture.. Fear of the abstract, the straw-person, the cultural 'bogeyman' still thrives in its different manifested projections.. I wonder if those projections fear the ultimate degeneration of an attitude of existence, taken as an assured-given during the height of materialistic aggrandizement from the 80's-to-the late '00's, but now is besieged by not only its unresolved shortcomings of this form of materialism, but by the tangible 'embodiments' and voices formerly cloistered in places dismissed as dens of ineffectual, social dysfunction? Those places of dysfunction now have their own contra-narrative with a political base of articulation within the halls of power where there had been, at the least, a rhetorical collegiality with the processes of resistance and incrementalism to their 'special interests'.

There are now those, who can no longer find docile satisfaction with the trappings of material security and affluence. They are finding meaning in a social structural change for which the type of material affluence historically aspired for is no longer relevant as the ends for their tangible identity or their aesthetic meaning for themselves plus fellow citizens.. Accommodation is no longer desired as patronized clients, but a political leverage based on their own terms and political base.


ace's n 8's     Yeah...scare tactics...misinformation....government is the solution. With that said....yeah, I would also say that FDR and AOC have commonalities. In both instances a majority GOP in Congress have stopped and will stop both.

tallnfit responded  The only thing that stopped FDR was death but keep fooling yourself while you further policies and ideals that are in fact anti-American and were originally enacted and employed here by the imperial British. 

CS natureboy emgaging with tallnfit's comments,
Proves that corruption in the Democrat party has been going strong for decades... 
 
tallnfit reacted, You obviously didn't read the article. You parrot BSC propaganda and further their long-dead (I assume) covert political warfare that sought to destroy Americans who opposed them by any means.

I read it. I just came to a different conclusion than you....CS natureboy,

No, you clearly didn't. The BSC did the exact same things to try to get a Republican elected in case Roosevelt couldn't be trusted.
It is spelled out clear as day.tallnfit,
Me, OlDogger chiming-in It very much substantiates that WWII was the engine that pulled the country out of the moribund state of depression and recession. Plus the bonus of having both Europe and Asia lying in their devastation and the U.S. being the logistical warehouse for the world for the next 25-to-30 years until countries (Germany & Japan) had regained enough industrial footing to undermine the monopolistic (capitalistic) market grip the US had leveraged itself in the prior decades..

tallnfit replying to me  This may be partially true but his New Deal and WPA is what created the modern US and especially the highways and other pro-Sunbelt things Republicans love so much.

Well, but the new deal also created Hoover dam.
And that, Shooter can flatly state, is not something Shooter loves.
Hates it in fact. So does Mexico.
But, the great state of Kaliforniastan loves Hoover dam. Cause without Hoover dam, Los Angeles would be a dusty little wide spot in the road. And without Hoover dam Las Vegas would be a one pump one light grease spot on the highway.
And Shooter is pretty sure the number of deplorables in those places is not high enough to bother with.shootersa,

So was the Golden Gate Bridge, among other major works.tallnfit

Nope. Also not deplorable country  -shootersa,


BigSuzyB posted: I am very pleased that AOC is the tail that is waging the Democrat Dog.

Considering the tails and tales that have been wagging that dog-assed party, so far it's a refreshing change to see AOC as a non-accommodating, non-triangulating, forthright voice who's more than a 'lifer-careerist' going along with the program for their own feather-bed comfort..

What we're witnessing is a good example of xenophobic tribalism.. Not wanting to see (in a pluralistic society) the paradigm narratives change from the orientation it has been.. Any dog-whistle racialism or racism, of 'shading' is just a subtext of the xenophobia which is provincially myopic..   -OlDogger,

Nah. it's about having the main five planks in the Bernie platform enacted and that's it, that's all for me. Has been since before AOC was born and Bernie was a young man. Anything else coming from what is now known as the left is foreign to me and is of little import. If you wish to talk to me about the the Johnny come lately leftist ideals. I say shut up sit down or get up and help with the real fight. The policies that float the most boats. Not Feminism, transgenderism, metoo, antifa, occupy, gay rights or any of the other crap that has done nothing but muddy the waters.  -BigSuzyB

Agreed
All those 'side-issues' were different buttresses to the maligned and defamed precepts of democratic socialism, that those 'side-issues' highlighted the different personal and subjective effects of the aggrandizing capitalism, which formally and informally, plus directly and indirectly enabled the abuses which those fragmented issues of identity became visceral realities, than abstract platitudes. Bernie had a political base he'd been nurturing in VT for the past 40+ years of like-minded souls, which before Vermont were just the random and ad hoc voices in the wilderness.

Everyone has their own meandering path. My eventual reply to @tallnfit is not one that puts AOC on a sui generis pedestal but has her, subconsciously, as an extension of the nearly exact words of FDR, whose New Deal she slammed as functionally racist.   --OlDogger,
Tallnfit responded, "No. FDR was a rich kid from a legacy NY family. They couldn't possibly be any more different."

I, OlDogger enjoined, Let me refocus your attention to the theme of this topic FDR's words, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself..."; as well as AOC's words in this excerpt..

Tallnfit re-enjoined, @OlDogger I don't think you can remove a person's words and beliefs from the context in which they came to exist. That's why I feel it is important to make that very big distinction between somebody who came into these ideals and this world of struggle and working class rebellion through the side door like FDR did and somebody who was born into it and has been around it most of her life like AOC. I understand what @Arquebus is saying about her youthful rebellion because I was there myself to an extent once even if I disagree that she is completely full of shit. That's my point is this is something that is ingrained into her and exists within every fiber of her being thanks to her background and life experience whereas it's just an ideal that a rich kid like FDR in all honesty basically got himself disowned by the very establishment he came from for embracing.
I haven't been able to research the claims made in this link but I think you'll find it quite interesting and I think it's definitely related to this topic.  As for her being a part of these in all honesty hypocritical and dishonest and self-unaware self-appointed agents of political change that always somehow manage to put privileged white issues to the forefront, my hope is that like many from her background who reach such heights she is simply using them.
Me, OlDogger, continuing, What was my own subconscious subtext to my assertion regarding "AOC channeling FDR" was that despite her "ingrained background" of first-hand experience, being an abused individual and 'community member' of the neo-liberal "New Deal' she channeled, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" (which could've been to Eleanor Roosevelt-of "It's better to light one candle than curse the darkness" credit than what is noted as a classic FDR-ism). That "channeling", I perceive, ties in to my latest post to which @shootersa has responded:. We are a continuum of energy that incarnates for its own end, coincidental to whatever conduit it uses. 

Well hold on now. She is not a victim of the New Deal. She is the product of a background that exists largely because of everything the New Deal was against.  -tallnfit,
 [Not a victim, but] an involuntary Hegelian historical extension, which as you said, "She is the product of a background that exists largely because of everything the New Deal was against..."-Me, OlDogger



CS natureboy posted,

FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression


The Great Depression of the 1930s was by far the greatest economic calamity in U.S. history. In 1931, the year before Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, unemployment in the United States had soared to an unprecedented 16.3 percent. In human terms that meant that over eight million Americans who wanted jobs could not find them. In 1939, after almost two full terms of Roosevelt and his New Deal, unemployment had not dropped, but had risen to 17.2 percent. Almost nine and one-half million Americans were unemployed.

On May 6, 1939, Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s treasury secretary, confirmed the total failure of the New Deal to stop the Great Depression: “We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!” (For more information, see "What Caused the Great Depression?")

In FDR’s Folly, Jim Powell ably and clearly explains why New Deal spending failed to lift the American economy out of its morass. In a nutshell, Powell argues that the spending was doomed from the start to fail. Tax rates were hiked, which scooped capital out of investment and dumped it into dozens of hastily conceived government programs. Those programs quickly became politicized and produced unintended consequences, which plunged the American economy deeper into depression.

More specifically, Powell observes, the National Recovery Administration, which was Roosevelt’s centerpiece, fixed prices, stifled competition, and sometimes made American exports uncompetitive. Also, his banking reforms made many banks more vulnerable to failure by forbidding them to expand and diversify their portfolios. Social Security taxes and minimum-wage laws often triggered unemployment; in fact, they pushed many cash-strapped businesses into bankruptcy or near bankruptcy. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers not to produce, raised food prices and kicked thousands of tenant farmers off the land and into unemployment lines in the cities. In some of those cities, the unemployed received almost no federal aid, but in other cities — those with influential Democratic bosses — tax dollars flowed in like water.

Powell notes that the process of capturing tax dollars from some groups and doling them out to others quickly politicized federal aid. He quotes one analyst who discovered that “WPA employment reached peaks in the fall of election years. In states like Florida and Kentucky — where the New Deal’s big fight was in the primary elections — the rise of WPA employment was hurried along in order to synchronize with the primaries.” The Democratic Party’s ability to win elections became strongly connected with Roosevelt’s talent for turning on the spigot of federal dollars at the right time (before elections) and in the right places (key states and congressional districts).

Powell’s book is well researched and well organized. His chapter titles are a delight. He synthesizes a mass of secondary sources (and some primary sources) in making a strong and persuasive case that the New Deal was a failure and that the Roosevelt presidency, at least in its first two terms — was a disaster. Powell covers all the major New Deal programs; he draws on the research of historians both “liberal” and conservative; and he is nuanced — this is no hatchet job — in that he concedes that some of Roosevelt’s policies, such as tariff revision, were more economically sound than, say, his industrial and agricultural policies.
To which BigSuzyB posted Published by EH.NET (March 2004)

Jim Powell, FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. New York: Crown Forum, 2003. xvi + 336 pp. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-7615-0165-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Ellis W. Hawley, Department of History, University of Iowa.

In FDR’s Folly Jim Powell, editor of Laissez Faire Books and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, resurrects the libertarian critique of the New Deal initially expounded by the period’s business fundamentalists, conservative economists, and American Liberty Leaguers. The work is also in line with the libertarian revisionism articulated by Murray Rothbard in the 1960s, and its recovery arguments closely resemble those subsequently made by historians Gary Dean Best, Robert Higgs, and Gene Smiley. More than they, however, Powell pulls together and draws upon recent studies highlighting the New Deal’s contradictions and political abuses, recent work stressing its unintended consequences, and especially the relatively recent and growing literature on regulatory costs produced by Chicago School and public choice economists. His intended audience, moreover, is less one of specialists in the period than of current policy makers who lack the information to critique and reject the New Deal model. The work is engagingly written for general readers and should provide a variety of “talking points” for conservative political activists.

Powell begins with three introductory chapters, in which he provides sketches of leading New Dealers, embraces Milton Friedman’s monetary theory of the Depression’s origins, and depicts President Herbert Hoover’s interventionism as making things worse. He concludes with chapters on the New Deal’s legacy and implications for current policy. And in the fifteen intervening chapters he examines the New Deal in action, organizing the discussion by policy areas and arguing that in each area efforts to bring recovery through reform “backfired” and brought continued depression instead. Business policy vacillated from fostering cartels to disruptive harassment, both becoming obstacles to renewed investment. Labor and farm policies fostered arrangements preventing the market system from working. Financial policy perpetuated a defective banking system, hampered potential investors, and facilitated monetary mismanagement. Welfare, public works, and tax policies deprived the private sector of resources that could have been better utilized there, and constitutional innovation worked to reduce the liberty needed for economic revival. In developing his case, Powell pushes the ideas of “crowding out” and “regime uncertainty” farther than some economists would go. But he offers compelling evidence for what most historians of the period would now concede, namely that New Deal recovery efforts failed and often had perverse consequences.

Powell is less persuasive, however, in arguing that smaller and less intrusive government was the appropriate route to speedy recovery. To bolster this argument he cites the experiences of 1893-1894 and 1920-1921. But he never addresses a considerable economic literature concerned with industrial development and attributing “delayed recovery” to systemic structural impediments that had not existed earlier. Michael Bernstein’s The Great Depression, for example, is cited only to document criticism of the National Recovery Administration, and Joseph Schumpeter only as a critic of “business bashing.” One is never convinced that the system had not changed in ways that precluded speedy recovery through private-sector adjustments or that the vicious cycle at work in early 1933 might not have continued downward and become even more socially destructive in the absence of a New Deal. More recent experience with the austerity and laissez-faire policies imposed upon sick economies abroad also makes one wonder about their curative powers.

Unpersuasive as well is Powell’s depiction of the political and intellectual contexts in which the New Deal acted. He insists that there was much room for wisdom or folly, since there were virtually no political constraints on Roosevelt’s policy choices. In doing so, he largely ignores what other historians have had to say about ideological commitments, administrative resources, constitutional considerations, a changing political base, and the contemporary state of economic knowledge. In addition, he does not fully appreciate the revulsion against and fear of market forces that gripped the United States and other industrial nations at the time, and he says little about the extent to which perceptions of a natural business cycle had by 1929 given way to perceptions that it was unnecessary. The New Deal recovery measures emerged from these contexts as well as from Roosevelt’s prejudices and misperceptions, and they make it unlikely that libertarian prescriptions could have been followed, either by him or by anyone else who could have been elected president.

As Powell sees it, FDR’s greatest folly was to seek recovery by undertaking reform, which, he argues, was needless and often detrimental. In support of this he cites recent analyses claiming that investment institutions performed better before being reformed, that economic progress was actually retarded in the Tennessee Valley and other areas allegedly benefiting from new infrastructures, that regulatory expansion discouraged needed innovation and underwrote inefficiency, and that collective bargaining, fair labor standards, and parity price floors were harmful to those most in need, especially the African-American minority. Yet the system as reformed, partly by the New Deal and partly by a carry-over of wartime measures, did perform wonderfully well in the two decades after World War II, a fact that Powell tends to skip over rather than seek to explain. In that period the business community finally adjusted to institutional reforms, an enlarged public sector, and altered “social contracts” that much of America believed to be necessary steps toward a more humane and equitable order. Hence, Roosevelt’s real “folly” may have been his undue delay in finding an appropriate temporary offset for the reform-induced but temporary decline in private investment.

In his concluding chapter, Powell draws “lessons” from the New Deal’s recovery failures, arguing that an understanding of them should help current and future policy makers to avoid burdensome and “soak-the-rich” taxes, public-sector “jobs” programs that inevitably turn into vote buying, laws that prevent needed price and wage adjustments, measures restricting freedom of trade, and monetary authorities with undue discretionary powers. One suspects, however, that he has produced mostly a treatise for the converted, not one that will lead to many political conversions or extensive historical revision. It may provide a history useful to conservative argumentation and the strengthening of conservative folk wisdom but, given its weaknesses, seems unlikely to be very persuasive or influential in other circles.

Ellis W. Hawley is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Iowa. He recently published “The Great Depression in the Midwest,” in Robert S. McElvaine, editor, Encyclopedia of the Great Depression (Macmillan, 2004), 619-625, and is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Herbert Hoover and the Search for a Nonstatist Progressivism, 1914-1933.”
----

BigSuzyB

Fair and balanced.BigSuzyB,
----------------
I, OlDogger, interjected: Could it be said that the over-hyped 'virtues' of capitalism in the Post-War ('45-'65) and the ('84-'08) eras were both times when capitalists benefited by extreme circumstances and very favorable government policies that allowed them to have the basis for their profits and wealth. Only Truman's Fair Deal extension of New Deal social programs (GI Bill and the later-controversial Housing Program), plus Eisenhower having noted the autobahns of Nazi Germany gave populist approval to the post-war boom. 20 years after Eisenhower capitalism needed Reaganomics to bring back the post-war monopoly, windfall, prosperity boom equivalent that collapsed on its own avarice in 2008-just in time to blame a non-traditional White House occupant for his arguable short-comings attempts for reviving the economy in its recovery from its 'social pathologies' of its past...
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Missed this post!
An involuntary Hegelian historical extension, which as you said, "She is the product of a background that exists largely because of everything the New Deal was against..."

Missed this post!
An involuntary Hegelian historical extension, which as you said, "She is the product of a background that exists largely because of everything the New Deal was against..."












MMT ECONOMICS



MMT and full employment

So if MMT prescribes various regulations (and, where necessary, taxes) to control inflation, while keeping interest rates at zero, how does it plan to achieve full employment?

Simple: a job guarantee.

This is an idea that predates and transcends MMT as a school of thought, with advocates among non-MMT economists like William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton, and a history of support from American labor unions and civil rights leaders. The basic concept is that the government would offer, as a right of citizenship, a job at minimum wage (usually $15 an hour for these purposes) with benefits, working for the government or a nonprofit, to any adult who wants one.

This is different from subsidized employment, which exists in limited forms now, and even from the massive public works programs of the New Deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration, which employed millions but did not guarantee jobs to all.

The idea behind such a sweeping and universal program, in the context of MMT, is to ensure full employment no matter what policies the government is adopting to fight inflation. Indeed, the job guarantee is in part a way to keep wages down, or at least keep them from continually rising, to prevent an inflationary spiral.

Absent a job guarantee, raising taxes excessively could slow economic activity and cost jobs, as could regulations that attempt to crack down on certain industries. A job guarantee would be able to enroll anyone hurt by those measures and make sure they’re still employed somewhere.

In the Mitchell/Wray/Watts textbook, the authors argue that both the MMT approach and the mainstream approach fight inflation in ways that generate “buffer stocks” of workers. In the mainstream approach, inflation is controlled by raising interest rates, which slows economic growth (sometimes to the point of recession) and puts people out of work, creating a buffer stock of unemployed people. That buffer stock, that increase in unemployment, is the cost of fighting inflation. This trade-off is often represented through a relationship known as the Phillips curve.

In MMT, people in the job guarantee serve as a similar buffer stock. When the government slows aggregate demand, through higher taxes or regulations or some other means, that forces people out of private sector work and onto the job guarantee — not the unemployment rolls.

“Instead of a person becoming unemployed when aggregate demand falls below the level required to maintain full employment, that person would enter the JG workforce,” the authors write.

By contrast, during downturns, a JG would work as an automatic stabilizer, putting spending money in the pockets of laid-off workers and helping mitigate recessions.

Setting the JG wage at the minimum wage is important for anchoring inflation. In tight labor markets, employers sometimes choose to increase wages and pay for the change with higher prices, setting off inflation. But if the JG wage is tethered to the minimum, then employers always have the option of hiring workers from the JG pool, who, under the theory, can be hired at the low fixed wage given to them in the JG program. That gives them a way to avoid raising wages and setting off price increases. “There can be no inflationary pressures arising directly from a policy where the government offers a fixed wage to any labor not wanted by other employers,” the textbook authors write.

It may be surprising to think of the job guarantee as a way to control, rather than bid up, wages, but this is the explicit intention described in the textbook. The authors write, “Would the incumbent workers use the decreased threat of unemployment to pursue higher wage demands? That is unlikely. … [T]here might be little perceived difference between unemployment and a JG job for a highly paid worker, which means that they will still be cautious in making wage demands.”

This vision of the job guarantee as a tool for controlling workers’ wages is somewhat at odds, at least rhetorically, with MMT’s messaging that a job guarantee is a humanitarian measure. JG jobs are probably better than involuntary unemployment, sure — but the macroeconomic role they’re playing here, in part, is in the interest of price stability, not worker well-being.

Matt Bruenig, a vocal MMT critic from the left, has argued that using a job guarantee to discipline worker wages bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the “workfare” efforts of the 1990s, a characterization that MMT advocates have vocally disputed. “The program is based on the principle of ‘fair work’ not ‘workfare,” Pavlina Tcherneva, a Bard economist and arguably the leading MMT researcher on job guarantee policy, writes. “It does not require people to work for their benefits. It is instead an alternative to existing workfare programs.” But there’s nonetheless a tension between using the job guarantee to provide good, desirable jobs and ensuring that it sets a low enough fixed wage that it’s not inflationary.
The political impact of MMT

That was a lot of theory, and frankly, a lot of it is much more nuanced than how MMT is likely to be employed in practice. Barring a radical shift in the culture of central banking, and the dominant views of both major political parties, I don’t see some of the key operational recommendations of MMT being adopted anytime soon.

Committing to a zero interest rate policy permanently, for instance, would be a dramatic move by the Fed, effectively a repudiation of its statutory commitments to ensure price stability and full employment. Indeed, it’s unimaginable to me that that could happen without an act of Congress repealing those statutory obligations and mandating a zero rate.

Similarly, a US decision to stop issuing Treasury bonds would disrupt a key part of the international financial system, where US government bonds are used as a go-to risk-free asset to which other bond interest rates are linked. That feels similarly inconceivable.

Where I could see MMT having an impact is in the realm of domestic policymaking. Already, multiple 2020 candidates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, have embraced a job guarantee, in various forms.

And more generally, I think it’s likely that MMT will help give intellectual respectability to the notion that Democrats don’t have to pay for everything they want to do, be that a Green New Deal or Medicare-for-all or a big middle-class tax cut.

To be sure, it is not the only force pushing in that direction. Perhaps the most important influence is the behavior of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan exploded the budget deficit by enacting massive tax cuts and defense spending increases, which his cuts to welfare spending couldn’t hope to match. George W. Bush blew up the first balanced budget in a generation with two rounds of tax cuts and two immensely expensive foreign wars — as well as a massive financial crisis at the end of his tenure. And in barely two years in office, Donald Trump has passed his trillion-plus-dollar tax cut package, with proposals for lower spending existing mostly as an annual pledge in his budget proposal, never to be actually enacted.

Game theorists have known for decades that one of the best ways to generate cooperative behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma-type game is a tit-for-tat strategy: If your opponent cooperated last time, you cooperate, and if they defected last time, you defect.

Democrats have effectively been offering to cooperate and pay for all their budget proposals, or even entertain (as under Obama) and enact (as under Clinton) big bipartisan balanced budget deals — even as Republicans repeatedly defect and show no interest in paying for anything. The rational move in such a game is to start defecting yourself, and declare that you’re not going to pay for anything either.

So even if you want to generate balanced budgets in the future, Democratic deficit spending might be a way to get Republicans more on board with that going forward. And MMT just strengthens Democrats’ bargaining position in this regard, as it lets them send a credible signal that they don’t even think it’s a good idea to pay for everything.

What’s more, many mainstream economists are starting to conclude, given the persistently low interest rates the US and other countries have experienced this decade, that deficits may not be particularly costly, even within a mainstream framework.

“The current US situation in which safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, is more the historical norm than the exception,” Olivier Blanchard, the former IMF chief economist, said in his presidential lecture at the American Economics Association this year. “Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost.”

The speech sent shock waves through the economic profession. “To people who follow the IMF, it was as if a former pope came out with an endorsement of the devil,” the New York Times’s Neil Irwin quipped.

In an essay for Foreign Affairs, Larry Summers and former Obama chief economist Jason Furman made a similar point about the effect of low interest rates, though they cautioned that debt still has costs. “Although politicians shouldn’t make the debt their top priority, they also shouldn’t act as if it doesn’t matter at all,” they conclude. As Furman has said elsewhere, “MMT may have the wrong model, but it may get you the same thing as the right model if you have the right parameters.”

It’s not clear how far just how much deficit financing of new programs the Democratic Party is now willing to countenance. Something on the scale of the Republican tax cuts, like a $3,000 child allowance costing around $1 trillion over 10 years, can probably be financed exclusively with debt, without causing any problems. You could make a good argument for financing a Green New Deal, as a one-time transitional measure, mostly with deficit spending.

Single-payer health care, which probably costs in the realm of $32 trillion over 10 years, is a totally different story. Most mainstream economists would argue that transferring that spending to the federal government, without imposing any kinds of taxes or premiums to replace the premiums currently paid to the private health system, would create huge problems, crowding out investment and sparking large-scale inflation.

MMT rejects the idea of crowding out in general, but it’s not clear whether they think single-payer can be financed entirely through deficit spending.

In a podcast debate that Vox’s Ezra Klein hosted between Furman and MMTer Stephanie Kelton, Klein asked what Kelton would do if her former boss Bernie Sanders were elected president and how much of a single-payer plan he had to pay for with taxes. She replied, “I’d tell him, ‘Give me a team of economists and about six months and I’ll let you know.’ … I think that is an extremely important question that would require some very serious, time-consuming, patient analytical work to try to arrive at the right answer.”

Other MMTers are more optimistic. Warren Mosler, a hedge funder who’s helped popularize MMT especially within the finance world, has argued that the government doesn’t need to levy any taxes to pay for Medicare-for-all. Laying off the millions of people doing health care administration for private insurers and hospitals would be a major deflationary event, he argues, so if anything, the government should offer a tax cut or another spending increase to “pay for” Medicare-for-all in inflation terms:

Mosler’s view isn’t universal even among MMTers, so I don’t think MMT will single-handedly solve the problem of financing Democrats’ 2021 (or 2025, or 2029, depending on how the elections go) agenda. But it might help solve it by making Democrats comfortable with paying for a sizable portion of their program with debt.

Thanks to JW Mason for helpful comments on a draft of this piece.