I never saw Friedman as a part of the culture war. He was an economist. He championed programs that actually worked. Programs that achieved the results they sought to achieve. It isn’t his fault that rarely of ever did that. Was he supposed to ignore the actual results?
I don’t know how Matt meant this sentence but that is how I read it.…
I never saw Friedman as a part of the culture war. He was an economist. He championed programs that actually worked. Programs that achieved the results they sought to achieve. It isn’t his fault that rarely of ever did that. Was he supposed to ignore the actual results?
I don’t know how Matt meant this sentence but that is how I read it. Friedman or Salinger. One or the other. That is a binary is it not? BTW - individualism, upon which the US was founded, is not neoliberal and the New Deal was a disaster as proven by the economic data. Any New New Deal will be 1,000 times worse.
You do realize that his policies, and their mutations have given rise to the problems we have now economically --- bubbles, fraud, markets seen as all-knowing machines, economics being seen as "scientific", instead of a social science. I could think of 50 different examples of how the economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School have fucked over working families in ways that are irreparable. So, they did not work. Its a fiction.
Using the word "actually" does not miraculously take an inaccurate statement and make it accurate. Keynes is not responsible for this - he died in 1946. He considered himself a socialist and believed in fixing problems in the economy (practical solutions) to economic problems.
He certainly would not have advised the President to unwind anti-trust laws or prosecute air traffic controllers for unionizing, nor would he have allowed Gramm-Leach-Bliley to be passed allowing the single best piece of financial legislation to be gutted (Glass Steagall Act of 1932) which eventually lead to TBTF (too big to fail) banks being bailed out after fucking over just about everyone in our country.
Lastly, he would then not have advised Treasury or the Federal Reserve to allow free, cheap money to prop up the banks as a means of falsely showing profits (allowing executives to make massive bonuses) or fail to regulate home foreclosure policies by banks -- in which we saw such massive bank fraud that there were entire towns or foreclosure mills forging signatures on bank documents --- so that they could foreclose on American homes faster or falsely. So, Keynes is not responsible for Enron, LIBOR rigging, or algorithmic programs which front run trades on exchanges making owners billions. The financialization of the economy would not have happened under his leadership (changing usury laws, and leverage amount for trades).
However, Milton Friedman's argument (Hayek assisted) from the NTC (neoliberal thought collective) founded at Mount Pelerin in 1947 developed over time into "free trade" "smaller government" and the "slow stead increase in the money supply" plus using quantitative and mathematical models to hide the inherent nature of the economic policies that were scoffed at during the 1947-1970. So, yes he is the architect of the problematic economy we have now --- because most industry's have matured, been privatized, the marrow has been sucked out and now we do not produce things as a culture (except weapons, drugs and debt).
Not Germaine to your main argument but....in practical terms, if’n you were King.... would you allow air traffic be subject to the whims of a union like schools currently are? They did take an oath not to strike.
Allow power grids to shut down unexpectedly because of unworkable generation and delivery models?
How do you feel about China’s participation in world trade, publicly traded corps without GAAP compliance and essential products like pharmaceuticals being farmed out to a hostile foreign competitor?
I sometimes believe destroying American exceptionalism is a goal.
That is a lot to unpack Galleta. Seems like you are deep in thought about these issues.
First, the Reagan-Air Traffic Controllers there are a lot of underlying sub-themes in this. Battle group capital v labor (and government signaling to capital - you can do what you want, we've got your back). Reagan's firing of 11.3K workers gave more weight to the legal rights of private employers (in their discretion to both hire and fire workers). That signal was heeded all over the country - in fact you could draw a straight line between corporate reaction and at the end of the decade the S&L crisis - that signal meant we will not come down on you harshly. We started to see more fraud. Btw, when Reagan the candidate was running, he took no oath, but said he would work closely with the union to improve equipment, adjust staff levels and workdays commensurate with making sure the skies are safe.. So both sides felt comfortable challenging previous ideas.
Anywho, on your other questions, I have no idea. :)
The Keynesian models seem to have lost credibility due to stagflation and volckers success by doing the exact opposite of what Keynes would have prescribed for the Fed. I think we can primarily blame this on the switch to monetarism, since Reagan gets all the credit for what volcker did. I think this has a lot to do with abandoning Keynes for neoliberalism and making it tenable to the public.
A couple other factors included Nixon taking us off the goal standard and creating the dollar as the backstop currency for the world. Our rooster came home roost in the middle east too as petrodollars flooded our economy pushing up interest rates and inflation. The economists made sense of this, after the fact, led to the rise of neoliberalism - monetarism gave the field a way to use mathematics and quantitative analysis to push through policies that would have been anathema a decade before.
The funny thing is that they sold it as the market is more knowledgeable than the individual actors in it, giving rise to the idea of market as machine - that will decide the winners and losers in business. What they were really describing is creating the public relations around markets so that they could intervene in markets in hidden ways.
This is in complete opposition to a Keynesian approach where economists intervene in markets when imbalances occur as they look at a couple of economic indicators (like aggregate demand) and try to get as close to maximum employment as possible.
One philosophy says markets are a mess and require some regulation (Keynesianism). And the other economic thought of the time (which was dismissed for 30 years previously) was that markets should determine winners and losers and that they should be free of regulation (at the same time this group of thinkers were to trying to capture government to bend it to its will on trade, globalization and reducing labor rights.)
In the end, I think you have some good points as each economic period is a result of trying to fix the problems the last dominant economic philosophy -- someone who is very good you could on this topic is Mark Blyth (he's Scottish, but is an American scholar on the east coast). He's much less critical than I am about the state of economics but he's a very good resource.
In an email addressed to me you identified bcc recipients and the entire email text. The latter does not bother me; the former does. You evidently have my email address and somehow made your way through what should have been multiple layers of security, or someone forwarded that email to you. Please e-mail me again and identify yourself.
I'm happy to engage in reasoned discourse with you or anyone. We don't appear to disagree on much. I just want/need to know how you got possession of the e-mail. If it was forwarded to you from one of the bcc recipients that's innocent. If not, then there are vulnerabilities to explain.
Not my job to educate you here. Compared to what is the last vestige of someone who knows a little about a lot but does not seem to get beyond the surface level of policy, history, or the areas of conflict (how they came to be etc..). If you want to cling onto your own world view with a modicum of understanding, that is your choice, but do not ask me to constantly edit your work and fill in the gaps please.
Ultimately, you are bullshitting, it needs to be called out. It's your job to post accurately.
What do you think this proves? This is one man’s opinion, nothing else. He even quotes Friedman saying exactly what I assumed Friedman would say to such an accusation.
“Milton Friedman, who is the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy, stated: “In spite of my profound disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile, I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague.””
This author simply supports communism over capitalism. He starts with this thesis, which is political and not economical, and shapes his accusations to conform to his thesis. This is NOT how sound arguments are supported.
Just our version of the free dachas and limousines the higher ranking nomenklatura had around Moscow. Corruption is a common factor amongst all governments. The toleration of it is the problem.
Are not all of these programs underfunded? Don’t they make up 2/3rds of the annual budget with that percentage set to skyrocket over the next two to three years if Democrats get their way?
My guess is Friedman would focus on the data showing these programs have not made any significant impact on the problems they claimed to fix. If they did, Democrats would have nothing to run on other than race and class warfare...oh wait. Unless you are saying Democrats lie about the problems? Let me guess. We just need to make these programs bigger and they will finally solve the problems they were created decades ago to fix.
Underfunding is due to the neoliberal order, not because of budgeting. That's the excuse, but power does not want to provide resources for working people. See the Cares Act. See the history of minimum wage. See the attempted privatization of social security by Pete Petersen's think tank. See the Bankruptcy bill of 2006 which made it more difficult to declare bankruptcy for average people.
So are you in support of laws in general being made at the most local level as possible since the people most affected would be making the decisions? Seeing as how we can’t trust the federal government to not steal and be as ineffective and inefficient as possible, wouldn’t that be the best route?
Not a fan of centralized federal power at all. Except in periods of crisis, it is the one entity which can flip the script. Local leadership is important, but they have been more of the lap dogs or the minor leagues to their congressional counterparts (for a large part of the country). But on the other hand, it is important to take the people where they are at -- and perform them at a local level (even if there are deeply embedded conflicts hidden underneath). But no, I am not for a top down administrative, centralized state - that is not really our culture in any way.
Hence the FDR New Deal - which changed the lives of millions and put the business community on its back foot for three decades - even in the midst of the red scare, cold war etc..
But the Powell Memo changed things, the calculus for business, academia, and conservatives. 1970 is when things snapped back and the rise of Neoliberalism was launched (which is really a fancy way of capital started kicking labors ass).
Yeah, it’s silly to ascribe Friedman’s economic policy to killing Commies but the “economic” history mcelrjoy has read, if I had to guess from the comments, has much more to do with politics than economics. It’s not like the entire first world western civilization wasn’t fighting Communism at the time for very good reason. Some just did it more forcefully than others. Of course, the Commies would have murdered Pinochet and anyone that appeared educated. But since they lost it is easy to play victim.
Stop.... you are embarrassing yourself. Here is the relevant part below:
"Nancy MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:
“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”
Sorry. I don’t share any of George Soros’s values. The fact you think everything he does is not for the purpose of creating conflict upon which to profit is bewildering. He single handedly almost destroyed the British economy. You globalists are all the same and are the enemy of every red blooded American.
Yes I read the article and now I have eye cancer. Thanks for that. George Soros is the founder of that organization. Read their mission statement. It is a Leftist wet dream.
Eye cancer? Seems like that came on quick, twitching and then blackouts?
Probably because you see INET (Institute for New Economic Thinking) as some kind of personal propaganda mill for Soros?
Well, not so fast. The same author, as the other article, Lynn Parramore is just confirming the points for us that the old Neoliberal ideas are wrong. She is not alone and Soros has very little to do with it. There is an entire history of academics, journalists home and abroad, novelists, and every day citizens who have talked about the fraud of neoliberal economics.
So, smearing the ideas here because you do not like one billionaire (who is not high on anyone's list) seems like you are giving up the argument. As Paramore states in this article - Freidman and the Chicago School got our anti-trust policy all wrong -- which led to corporate mission creep and oligopoly.
That article was written in 1976! It does not include the subsequent history of Chile. Pinochet saved the country from the communists. If they had maintained control, hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed by the communists. In fact, the people of the country benefited greatly economically as well as socially, going from one of the lowest median incomes in the Americas to one of the highest.
There is absolutely nothing that indicates Allende was going "communist". He was a socialist, and it is a well known fact that Allen Dulles made little distinction between the two (same error as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam asking for US help with French and the errant view that led to millions being killed in Indonesia with the coup of Sukarno and replacing him with a military dictator Suharto). We did this all throughout the southern cone of South America (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). And then we allowed Klaus Barbie to escape to Bolivia and run the drug trade. In addition, we create an entire school US Army School of the America (to educate future dictators in how to torture, control and seize power in the fight against socialism).
Remember there are so many countries that US gave ultimatums to around joining their capitalistic agenda or suffer the consequences of coups, assassinations, or embargos. And what is remarkable about this is that the countries who did decide to embrace the US hegemony and align with their policies were effectively ruined by the debt incurred by using US conduits like IMF, World Bank, and vast Corporate Loans to "build up" the infrastructure of third world countries as they were called.
Funny thing, though, many of those projects just led to more corruption for the military juntas, pocketing huge sums in Swiss bank accounts while they plundered through generations of natural resources to give to US corporations.
So no. The people killed, disappeared, isolated, silenced, and abused (as Eduardo Galleano puts it) so that markets could be free is not benefitting from the fruits of capitalism or their economies --- they became the USA's dog, alerting them to noises, enemies and biting anyone who came inside the fence.
Rfhirsch, the end does not at all justify the means, and in this case the end has been pretty shitty for many of Chilean public.
"Allende had a close relationship with the Chilean Communist Party from the beginning of his political career. On his fourth (and successful) bid for the presidency, the Communist Party supported him as the alternate for its own candidate, the world-renowned poet Pablo Neruda."
First, wikipedia as a source, especially for those who are democratic socialists should not be used as evidence (see Aaron Mate's work on how Wikipedia manipulates their monopoly and as a former professor we would never accept it has a formal reference).
Second, Allende's coalition needed to win and supporters were varied all over the spectrum of political thought. Also, "Allende promised a peaceful revolution through the ballot box. He promised to redistribute wealth. He wanted to end foreign control as well as monopoly control over the Chilean economy. And he wanted to deepen democracy by extending things like worker participation in factories." This made him dangerous to American exploitation schemes but not a full fledge communist --- of which Dulles et al. were trying to do (push them into declaring themselves as either capitalists and communists).
For US intelligence, this made things easy --- everyone who is not with us is a communist. For everyone else on planet earth outside of the US, it meant that independence and going your own was not to be tolerated. Except there was this time where we had a President named Kennedy who believed that the smartest way to avoid Communism (authoritarianistic) was to align with countries need for independence and nurture them even if they have cultural socialist tendencies (as none of these countries were particularly connected to the USSR or China until we (US) pushed them into their arms with ultimatums. Those who tried to play the middle of the road got assassinated - he was one.
So we are talking regional leaders like Arbenz in Guatemala and Torrijos in Panama, Lumumba in the Congo. Naomi Klein's shock doctrine does a good job of covering this period as well and how it relates to Abu Ghraib, and black sites all over Europe where we torture or train people to torture dissidents.
Anywho it is commonly understood that Allende was more of a democratic socialist than a communist firebrand. We must not forget all of the assassination attempt on Castro (and all of the propaganda against him for decades) when at first we thought he'd be our guy after Bastista coup.
This biggest problem I see here lately involves posters forgetting their history or fabricating a new history to try to bendover backwards into a pretzel to justify the US worldview which is hegemonic and full of constructed myths that no one in the world believes except a few hundred million in the US.
This entire discussion brings back the bad memories of the Cold War. The US had a binary political policy with respect to the smaller countries around the world: your either in our pocket or you are the enemy.
Allende was democratically elected. His downfall was financed by the US and the coup was coordinated with the US intelligence establishment. Chile, until that point had a 150 year history of democracy.
The Pinochet regime was empowered to force an economic and political system on Chileans that the did not choose and would not have chosen with their votes. It became a test lab for libertarian free market economics, mixed with a dictatorship.
As far as people killed is concerned, the Pinochet regime killed and tortured many Chileans, and a few foreigners who happened to be swept up in their reign of terror, the most famous of which was Charles Horman. The regime also plotted and executed an assassination on US soil of a Chilean diplomat and an American friend.
The Chilean regime was corrupt. The secrecy of the regime allowed insiders to deal in the drug trade for their own profit. They also “adopted” many children of those they tortured and killed.
So, engage in all the revisionism and what-ifs that you like, but don’t try to fool those of us who have read, and remember, more than a quick read of a Wiki can give you.
Letelier and Moffatt - had their car blown up by Chilean security service not 15 minutes from where I live... (well out JazzPaw). People forget their history or are blinded by intelligence community propaganda
The point of the link was the Friedman/Chile connection. Point stands. If you think Pinochet was a hero ... well, you are entitled to believe what you want. No matter how repugnant to me.
"The Monroe Doctrine pre-dated communism". Actually the French terror regime predated the Monroe Doctrine, and directly paved the way for socialist and communist regimes.
So basically the history of humanity. As if Communist countries weren’t doing the exact same thing. We just won so you want to pretend Communists were victims. And China is doing the same thing now across the world.
Wouldn’t all the Eastern European countries that Russia took over be included in this answer? Wouldn’t fighting communism by proxy include Greece, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba? I am sure I am leaving some out. Russia/communism was behind all of these and we fought them directly or by proxy for good reason. Because communism is anti human and results in death and misery.
Cuba is a shit hole and anyone that has been there knows it. Why do you think people risk their lives on a rafts trying to escape? Communist countries collapse on their own as history has shown and this process is only slowed by the iron fist of the state that disappears anyone that dare dissent.
Venezuela destroyed their own economy by nationalizing it. The US has no obligation to support this barbarity.
Suggest you read Vladimir Bukovsky's "Judgement in Moscow, the definitive history of the USSR 1970 to 1990. It uses the actual Kremlin documents to show how the USSR intervened in many countries.
Bukovsky was imprisoned in the 1960s, but allowed to leave the USSR in the late 1970s. He came back to Moscow in 1991 and was able to visit the Soviet archives. He was not allowed to take or copy the documents, but he brought a laptop computer with him with a scanner, and so got thousands of pages of documents out for his research. It's quite an amazing story!
He was a chief economic advisor to the Pinochet regime. You know, the one we decided to prop up and remove Allende for, which created mass death in the southern cone (ala Brazil, Argentina, dirty wars). Not sure you could get more cultural than that.
You know, we can separate finance/economics into some anti-septic basket of non-complicity, when it is precisely this group of people who rose from obscurity during the Golden period of economic 1947-1970, to becoming the new masters of the universe (Nobel prizes, U of Chicago and Republican party celebrity). Whitewashing Milton Freidman is not a great start to this thread.
US was not founded upon individualism, it was founded upon the idea a white male democracy -- which because it did not include women until 1920 or African Americans (1965), really morphed into conflictual battle over capital, slaves, and resources. Individualism in the modern sense was ushered in as a particular marketing theme to thwart the anti-authoritarian movements of the 60s and 70s.
Even more, the idea was the people will not argue with their government or leaders if they are so subsumed in the process of individualization -- finding out who one is and then buying a product to fix the deficiencies. It was brilliant and totally neoliberal. If you want some citation of where this comes from, the movie the Corporation is a good start or the book The Road to Mount Pelerin fleshes out the goals of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
Are you seriously arguing we should support government programs that achieve the opposite result of what they claimed they would achieve? Why do you hate poor people?
Well, we have a long history in our country of it lifting people out of poverty, except now the government is captured by business interests and government programs are designed to fail (drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub). This is a feature of neoliberalism --- not public spending.
If one starts with Powell Memo and works forward from 1970, you would find the corporate takeover of institutions, government, thinktanks, and consolidating that power in certain industries like media, healthcare, finance, real estate, pharma, and technology.
And it is no wonder that this consolidation has to led to oligopolies in most industries (Apple, Google, FB, and Amazon) or (Pfizer, JNJ, Merck, LLY) or (Goldman Sachs, BofA, Blackrock) or (Disney/GE/Viacom/Fox).
You have the wrong narrative of what's happened in this country.
So, why don’t you exchange your Social Security for a crackpot private account scheme that Friedman pushed on Chile. All the workers money was chewed up in financial industry fees. It was a complete disaster, except for the fund managers.
I would prefer to do with my earnings what I choose as opposed to a program whose assets have been illegally plundered. I won’t see a dime of what they have taken from me. At least if I lost it through my own actions I would have myself to blame.
And how have those assets been illegally plundered. The program has almost no assets. It is a pay-as-you-go system with a very small trust fund that was temporary. What kind of paranoid nonsense have you been reading.
I spent 10 years as investment advisor at one of the TBTF firms during one of the most profitable periods in world history- so I run into this a lot. People who purport to know more about how the system works than actually really do.
Maybe you price a nice annuity for Commentatorinchief that has all the protections that Social Security offers average wage workers, including disability and survivor benefits. I’ll bet his payments would surprise him.
Actually right now is pretty dangerous time. The bond market is capitulating. The stock market is overinflated with CARES Act and buyback money. And people living off of a fixed income cannot even get 1% in a money market account due the ZIRP - (Zero interest rate policy).
All of this has been constructed to push people into taking on more and more risk. It's a scam. The entire investment field has changed so much over the last 25 years that it is almost unrecognizable.
Yep! My IRA has been booming, but I can’t get squat I’m fixed income. My Schwab guy thinks I’m too much in the market, but how can I buy bonds with these rates?
I don’t see an end to this until average wages start to grow faster, and some real inflation gets going. Maybe then rates will get off zero. Sure the stock market will lag or tank, but people will stop paying 100x revenue for everything under the sun.
I kind of understand what happened. The system has been set up to fund the retirement of the baby boomers off the stock market. There are now many retired boomers who need to have the market juiced to make ends meet. It cannot be allowed to fall, for both political and economic reasons. But the juicing has required that interest rates be suppressed. We have a massive asset bubble, but can’t afford to unwind it, politically.
Bond markets have a lot of risk (especially the corporate bond market), where usually bonds are seen as a safe investment.
3 Types: Treasuries (US govt), Corporates, and Municipals. All three have been hard by Covid, and the risk of rising interest rates (normally a fuel for investing in bonds) is now just a fantasy (imo). Capitulating --- I mean people are giving up on them as investment during a very risk time (this should tell us something). Usually people flock to bonds for protection.
I speculate that vendors have little trouble selling these products since the sales forces will push the envelopes of truth to sell product if it is profitable for the bank/advisor, but I do not see how this is going to be very profitable for people. And if demand dropped rates on certain bonds would go up - true.
Another thing is -- we do not really know how bad things are for corporations or municipalities since accounting practices have allowed these institutions a lot of leeway, even before Covid, to hide assets or kick the asset can down the road. So the total amount of risk, is not known.
Ha! That’s just it. None of them worked. That was his point. That doesn’t mean the government isn’t capable of creating public assistance programs that worked. They just never do so.
Social Security has worked as intended, and there is no comparable private program that can achieve the same goal for less.
And before you compare apples and oranges by talking about investment accounts, you should understand that Social Security was never intended to function like an investment account, or it would have required 30+ years of pre-funding before anyone got a check.
Sure, if it’s intention was to create another government revenue steam from which politicians could grift. Other than being mandatory, which is unAmerican, it was not to be touched. That was a LIE. It hasn’t kept up with inflation either. Another LIE. It also was never meant to go to those that didn’t pay into it. Yet another LIE.
When established Social Security ran huge surpluses for years. Then came the baby boom, and the math changed. By 1955 all actuaries knew that the system would barely survive the young workers supporting the retired baby boomers without any changes.
President Johnson was a great politician, just a horrid President. He wanted to be all things to all people, and supported "Guns and Butter." The only way to fund the Great Society was to do it honestly with huge tax increases, or do it covertly by finding new money. So, the trust fund was brought "on budget" where its temporary surplus revenues would hide deficits. Nixon compounded the problem when his lust for power led him astray.
He knew that the trust funds (now including Medicare) needed to be taken back off-budget or they would be bankrupted. If he did so, he'd never be re-elected. Politicians of all stripes passed favors for their constituents. I can forgive Johnson, his version of long-term thinking was tomorrow's breakfast. I cannot forgive Nixon. The actuaries were right. And, instead of looking for cost savings or efficiencies, early retirement age for men was added, Social Security was taxed (huge LIE made evident) and people who had never qualified were given benefits anyway.
I doesn’t go to people who don’t pay into it. And it does keep up with inflation. Even for high income payers of the tax, it provides on average basic inflation protection. Lower income payers get a very good deal. Wall Street, not so much.
Whether you would prefer to keep that money is irrelevant. It’s the law, so you can’t. I would prefer to keep my federal income tax money and not subsidize red states, but I don’t get that wish either.
It absolutely goes to people that do not pay into it and it is not even close to keeping up with real inflation which has skyrocketed. What if they passed a law saying all of your earnings go to other people. Are you going to say you can’t do anything about that?
Somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but due to the carried interest loophole a lot of wall street types aren't paying payroll and social security taxes right? If so then wall street isn't getting a bad deal at all.
It’s not that public assistance programs don’t “work”. They certainly achieve a result that the champions of them sought. It is just usually the opposite of the goal they claim to have sought to get support to pass them. For example, incentivizing single parenthood to “help” families while it destroys families. The politicians pushing this had every intention of destroying families while claiming the goal was the opposite. The data is overwhelming that their “help” did the opposite.
The concept is political, sure and there is always money to be made on a valuable investment. The superior education one receives in a charter school, however, isn’t political. Unless you want more uneducated citizens that is. Teacher’s Unions love uneducated citizens.
Charter schools for inner cities are mostly shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. In the suburbs/rural areas, at least in Ohio, charter schools are non existent, b/c the public schools do a good job.
It is a superior education if only because students learn that the freedom to succeed includes the freedom to fail. Also see https://newmiddleclassdad.com/charter-schools-vs-public-schools-statistics/. The schools are run by teachers and administrators, not by teachers unions. Thus they produce students with better critical thinking skills.
Please provide evidence that charter schools do more cherry-picking than selection by lottery.
You didn’t see Friedman as part of the culture war? I did. He was the face of so-called “free market” economics as it battled against the post-Keynesian model that had been bedrock in the Democratic Party since FDR. Friedman and Ken Galbraith had competing TV shows trying to sway cultural attitudes. Friedman was protested upon receiving the faux Nobel prize in economics. I think Friedman was a huge figure in emerging culture wars.
I never saw Friedman as a part of the culture war. He was an economist. He championed programs that actually worked. Programs that achieved the results they sought to achieve. It isn’t his fault that rarely of ever did that. Was he supposed to ignore the actual results?
I don’t know how Matt meant this sentence but that is how I read it. Friedman or Salinger. One or the other. That is a binary is it not? BTW - individualism, upon which the US was founded, is not neoliberal and the New Deal was a disaster as proven by the economic data. Any New New Deal will be 1,000 times worse.
You do realize that his policies, and their mutations have given rise to the problems we have now economically --- bubbles, fraud, markets seen as all-knowing machines, economics being seen as "scientific", instead of a social science. I could think of 50 different examples of how the economics of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School have fucked over working families in ways that are irreparable. So, they did not work. Its a fiction.
Actually those are mainly due to Keynes
Using the word "actually" does not miraculously take an inaccurate statement and make it accurate. Keynes is not responsible for this - he died in 1946. He considered himself a socialist and believed in fixing problems in the economy (practical solutions) to economic problems.
He certainly would not have advised the President to unwind anti-trust laws or prosecute air traffic controllers for unionizing, nor would he have allowed Gramm-Leach-Bliley to be passed allowing the single best piece of financial legislation to be gutted (Glass Steagall Act of 1932) which eventually lead to TBTF (too big to fail) banks being bailed out after fucking over just about everyone in our country.
Lastly, he would then not have advised Treasury or the Federal Reserve to allow free, cheap money to prop up the banks as a means of falsely showing profits (allowing executives to make massive bonuses) or fail to regulate home foreclosure policies by banks -- in which we saw such massive bank fraud that there were entire towns or foreclosure mills forging signatures on bank documents --- so that they could foreclose on American homes faster or falsely. So, Keynes is not responsible for Enron, LIBOR rigging, or algorithmic programs which front run trades on exchanges making owners billions. The financialization of the economy would not have happened under his leadership (changing usury laws, and leverage amount for trades).
However, Milton Friedman's argument (Hayek assisted) from the NTC (neoliberal thought collective) founded at Mount Pelerin in 1947 developed over time into "free trade" "smaller government" and the "slow stead increase in the money supply" plus using quantitative and mathematical models to hide the inherent nature of the economic policies that were scoffed at during the 1947-1970. So, yes he is the architect of the problematic economy we have now --- because most industry's have matured, been privatized, the marrow has been sucked out and now we do not produce things as a culture (except weapons, drugs and debt).
Wow Coco. just wow!
Not Germaine to your main argument but....in practical terms, if’n you were King.... would you allow air traffic be subject to the whims of a union like schools currently are? They did take an oath not to strike.
Allow power grids to shut down unexpectedly because of unworkable generation and delivery models?
How do you feel about China’s participation in world trade, publicly traded corps without GAAP compliance and essential products like pharmaceuticals being farmed out to a hostile foreign competitor?
I sometimes believe destroying American exceptionalism is a goal.
That is a lot to unpack Galleta. Seems like you are deep in thought about these issues.
First, the Reagan-Air Traffic Controllers there are a lot of underlying sub-themes in this. Battle group capital v labor (and government signaling to capital - you can do what you want, we've got your back). Reagan's firing of 11.3K workers gave more weight to the legal rights of private employers (in their discretion to both hire and fire workers). That signal was heeded all over the country - in fact you could draw a straight line between corporate reaction and at the end of the decade the S&L crisis - that signal meant we will not come down on you harshly. We started to see more fraud. Btw, when Reagan the candidate was running, he took no oath, but said he would work closely with the union to improve equipment, adjust staff levels and workdays commensurate with making sure the skies are safe.. So both sides felt comfortable challenging previous ideas.
Anywho, on your other questions, I have no idea. :)
On our bond convo I think rates are being suppressed in the bond market through Quantitative easing. Ie - Mnuchins unaccountable slush fund
QE is an acknowledgement money isn't worth anything. Spend like a drunken sailor is the signal. Blow and hookers all around.
The Keynesian models seem to have lost credibility due to stagflation and volckers success by doing the exact opposite of what Keynes would have prescribed for the Fed. I think we can primarily blame this on the switch to monetarism, since Reagan gets all the credit for what volcker did. I think this has a lot to do with abandoning Keynes for neoliberalism and making it tenable to the public.
A couple other factors included Nixon taking us off the goal standard and creating the dollar as the backstop currency for the world. Our rooster came home roost in the middle east too as petrodollars flooded our economy pushing up interest rates and inflation. The economists made sense of this, after the fact, led to the rise of neoliberalism - monetarism gave the field a way to use mathematics and quantitative analysis to push through policies that would have been anathema a decade before.
The funny thing is that they sold it as the market is more knowledgeable than the individual actors in it, giving rise to the idea of market as machine - that will decide the winners and losers in business. What they were really describing is creating the public relations around markets so that they could intervene in markets in hidden ways.
This is in complete opposition to a Keynesian approach where economists intervene in markets when imbalances occur as they look at a couple of economic indicators (like aggregate demand) and try to get as close to maximum employment as possible.
One philosophy says markets are a mess and require some regulation (Keynesianism). And the other economic thought of the time (which was dismissed for 30 years previously) was that markets should determine winners and losers and that they should be free of regulation (at the same time this group of thinkers were to trying to capture government to bend it to its will on trade, globalization and reducing labor rights.)
In the end, I think you have some good points as each economic period is a result of trying to fix the problems the last dominant economic philosophy -- someone who is very good you could on this topic is Mark Blyth (he's Scottish, but is an American scholar on the east coast). He's much less critical than I am about the state of economics but he's a very good resource.
In an email addressed to me you identified bcc recipients and the entire email text. The latter does not bother me; the former does. You evidently have my email address and somehow made your way through what should have been multiple layers of security, or someone forwarded that email to you. Please e-mail me again and identify yourself.
I'm happy to engage in reasoned discourse with you or anyone. We don't appear to disagree on much. I just want/need to know how you got possession of the e-mail. If it was forwarded to you from one of the bcc recipients that's innocent. If not, then there are vulnerabilities to explain.
Bill, do you mean me?
Not unless you also have an account as Coco McShevitz.
No, I do not - these threads sometimes are hard to follow.
Compared to what?
Not my job to educate you here. Compared to what is the last vestige of someone who knows a little about a lot but does not seem to get beyond the surface level of policy, history, or the areas of conflict (how they came to be etc..). If you want to cling onto your own world view with a modicum of understanding, that is your choice, but do not ask me to constantly edit your work and fill in the gaps please.
Ultimately, you are bullshitting, it needs to be called out. It's your job to post accurately.
Seriously? You claim Friedman’s policies are the cause of all our problems and you can’t even say what would work in its place?
Also, still waiting to hear if you think we should support government programs that result in the opposite of what they claim to fix.
Medicare/Medicaid - government program
Social security is government program
TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is too
SNAP (Supplemental Nutrion Assistance Program)
GI Bill was a government program
Morrill Act of 1862 - Land Grant Colleges
Head Start - 1 million children per year
Used to have large numbers of Federal Pell Grants - privatized
However, Congress get some governmental programs too and woo boy do they work well:
1. Annual base salary of $174000 (lowest members)
2. Free Airport parking & Congress flies free
3. Free on-site Gym (preferably used to infect others)
4. Weakened insider trading rules (Wall Street)
5. 239 days off
6. Government healthcare (incomes do not qualify?)
7. Retirement plan (reduced management fees)
8. Death benefits (standard - 1 year's salary)
9. 1.2-3.3 mil allowance (staff and budget)
10. Shuttle to transport members of congress around
11. On site beauty salon...
So we know government works. But for whom?
On this, we agree 100%.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/02/china-isnt-the-problem-neoliberalism-is/
What do you think this proves? This is one man’s opinion, nothing else. He even quotes Friedman saying exactly what I assumed Friedman would say to such an accusation.
“Milton Friedman, who is the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists now running the Chilean economy, stated: “In spite of my profound disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile, I do not consider it as evil for an economist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague.””
This author simply supports communism over capitalism. He starts with this thesis, which is political and not economical, and shapes his accusations to conform to his thesis. This is NOT how sound arguments are supported.
Just our version of the free dachas and limousines the higher ranking nomenklatura had around Moscow. Corruption is a common factor amongst all governments. The toleration of it is the problem.
Are not all of these programs underfunded? Don’t they make up 2/3rds of the annual budget with that percentage set to skyrocket over the next two to three years if Democrats get their way?
My guess is Friedman would focus on the data showing these programs have not made any significant impact on the problems they claimed to fix. If they did, Democrats would have nothing to run on other than race and class warfare...oh wait. Unless you are saying Democrats lie about the problems? Let me guess. We just need to make these programs bigger and they will finally solve the problems they were created decades ago to fix.
Underfunding is due to the neoliberal order, not because of budgeting. That's the excuse, but power does not want to provide resources for working people. See the Cares Act. See the history of minimum wage. See the attempted privatization of social security by Pete Petersen's think tank. See the Bankruptcy bill of 2006 which made it more difficult to declare bankruptcy for average people.
Read more.
So are you in support of laws in general being made at the most local level as possible since the people most affected would be making the decisions? Seeing as how we can’t trust the federal government to not steal and be as ineffective and inefficient as possible, wouldn’t that be the best route?
Not a fan of centralized federal power at all. Except in periods of crisis, it is the one entity which can flip the script. Local leadership is important, but they have been more of the lap dogs or the minor leagues to their congressional counterparts (for a large part of the country). But on the other hand, it is important to take the people where they are at -- and perform them at a local level (even if there are deeply embedded conflicts hidden underneath). But no, I am not for a top down administrative, centralized state - that is not really our culture in any way.
Hence the FDR New Deal - which changed the lives of millions and put the business community on its back foot for three decades - even in the midst of the red scare, cold war etc..
But the Powell Memo changed things, the calculus for business, academia, and conservatives. 1970 is when things snapped back and the rise of Neoliberalism was launched (which is really a fancy way of capital started kicking labors ass).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/sports/soccer/in-chiles-national-stadium-dark-past-shadows-copa-america-matches.html
Yeah, it’s silly to ascribe Friedman’s economic policy to killing Commies but the “economic” history mcelrjoy has read, if I had to guess from the comments, has much more to do with politics than economics. It’s not like the entire first world western civilization wasn’t fighting Communism at the time for very good reason. Some just did it more forcefully than others. Of course, the Commies would have murdered Pinochet and anyone that appeared educated. But since they lost it is easy to play victim.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america
LOL. I knew it. George Soros “Great Reset” globalist communism. You are anything if not predictable.
Stop.... you are embarrassing yourself. Here is the relevant part below:
"Nancy MacLean observes that the Virginia school, as Buchanan’s brand of economic and political thinking is known, is a kind of cousin to the better-known, market-oriented Chicago and Austrian schools — proponents of all three were members of the Mont Pelerin Society, an international neoliberal organization which included Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. But the Virginia school’s focus and career missions were distinct. In an interview with the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), MacLean described Friedman and Buchanan as yin and yang:
“Friedman was this genial, personable character who loved to be in the limelight and made a sunny case for the free market and the freedom to choose and so forth. Buchanan was the dark side of this: he thought, ok, fine, they can make a case for the free market, but everybody knows that free markets have externalities and other problems. So he wanted to keep people from believing that government could be the alternative to those problems.”
Hence, Friedman had this persona --- but he was a crucial architect of the NL order...
Sorry. I don’t share any of George Soros’s values. The fact you think everything he does is not for the purpose of creating conflict upon which to profit is bewildering. He single handedly almost destroyed the British economy. You globalists are all the same and are the enemy of every red blooded American.
I have not mentioned him once and have no idea why you are bringing him up now. What the fuck are you talking about with Soros?
Did you read the article?
Yes I read the article and now I have eye cancer. Thanks for that. George Soros is the founder of that organization. Read their mission statement. It is a Leftist wet dream.
Eye cancer? Seems like that came on quick, twitching and then blackouts?
Probably because you see INET (Institute for New Economic Thinking) as some kind of personal propaganda mill for Soros?
Well, not so fast. The same author, as the other article, Lynn Parramore is just confirming the points for us that the old Neoliberal ideas are wrong. She is not alone and Soros has very little to do with it. There is an entire history of academics, journalists home and abroad, novelists, and every day citizens who have talked about the fraud of neoliberal economics.
So, smearing the ideas here because you do not like one billionaire (who is not high on anyone's list) seems like you are giving up the argument. As Paramore states in this article - Freidman and the Chicago School got our anti-trust policy all wrong -- which led to corporate mission creep and oligopoly.
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/chicago-school-economists-got-it-wrong-strong-antitrust-policy-boosts-the-economy
Do your homework before you smear someone.
Was is single handedly or did he have consultations with a cabal?
Just practicing my new religion of testing theories I am told are too odious to posit.
Good question. He’s a big gambler and a good gambler always has an inside track.
It’s not silly to connect Friedman to Chile/Pinochet. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/
That article was written in 1976! It does not include the subsequent history of Chile. Pinochet saved the country from the communists. If they had maintained control, hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed by the communists. In fact, the people of the country benefited greatly economically as well as socially, going from one of the lowest median incomes in the Americas to one of the highest.
This is inaccurate.
There is absolutely nothing that indicates Allende was going "communist". He was a socialist, and it is a well known fact that Allen Dulles made little distinction between the two (same error as Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam asking for US help with French and the errant view that led to millions being killed in Indonesia with the coup of Sukarno and replacing him with a military dictator Suharto). We did this all throughout the southern cone of South America (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). And then we allowed Klaus Barbie to escape to Bolivia and run the drug trade. In addition, we create an entire school US Army School of the America (to educate future dictators in how to torture, control and seize power in the fight against socialism).
Remember there are so many countries that US gave ultimatums to around joining their capitalistic agenda or suffer the consequences of coups, assassinations, or embargos. And what is remarkable about this is that the countries who did decide to embrace the US hegemony and align with their policies were effectively ruined by the debt incurred by using US conduits like IMF, World Bank, and vast Corporate Loans to "build up" the infrastructure of third world countries as they were called.
Funny thing, though, many of those projects just led to more corruption for the military juntas, pocketing huge sums in Swiss bank accounts while they plundered through generations of natural resources to give to US corporations.
So no. The people killed, disappeared, isolated, silenced, and abused (as Eduardo Galleano puts it) so that markets could be free is not benefitting from the fruits of capitalism or their economies --- they became the USA's dog, alerting them to noises, enemies and biting anyone who came inside the fence.
Rfhirsch, the end does not at all justify the means, and in this case the end has been pretty shitty for many of Chilean public.
"Allende had a close relationship with the Chilean Communist Party from the beginning of his political career. On his fourth (and successful) bid for the presidency, the Communist Party supported him as the alternate for its own candidate, the world-renowned poet Pablo Neruda."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
First, wikipedia as a source, especially for those who are democratic socialists should not be used as evidence (see Aaron Mate's work on how Wikipedia manipulates their monopoly and as a former professor we would never accept it has a formal reference).
Second, Allende's coalition needed to win and supporters were varied all over the spectrum of political thought. Also, "Allende promised a peaceful revolution through the ballot box. He promised to redistribute wealth. He wanted to end foreign control as well as monopoly control over the Chilean economy. And he wanted to deepen democracy by extending things like worker participation in factories." This made him dangerous to American exploitation schemes but not a full fledge communist --- of which Dulles et al. were trying to do (push them into declaring themselves as either capitalists and communists).
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/09/salvador-allende-chile-coup-pinochet
For US intelligence, this made things easy --- everyone who is not with us is a communist. For everyone else on planet earth outside of the US, it meant that independence and going your own was not to be tolerated. Except there was this time where we had a President named Kennedy who believed that the smartest way to avoid Communism (authoritarianistic) was to align with countries need for independence and nurture them even if they have cultural socialist tendencies (as none of these countries were particularly connected to the USSR or China until we (US) pushed them into their arms with ultimatums. Those who tried to play the middle of the road got assassinated - he was one.
So we are talking regional leaders like Arbenz in Guatemala and Torrijos in Panama, Lumumba in the Congo. Naomi Klein's shock doctrine does a good job of covering this period as well and how it relates to Abu Ghraib, and black sites all over Europe where we torture or train people to torture dissidents.
Anywho it is commonly understood that Allende was more of a democratic socialist than a communist firebrand. We must not forget all of the assassination attempt on Castro (and all of the propaganda against him for decades) when at first we thought he'd be our guy after Bastista coup.
This biggest problem I see here lately involves posters forgetting their history or fabricating a new history to try to bendover backwards into a pretzel to justify the US worldview which is hegemonic and full of constructed myths that no one in the world believes except a few hundred million in the US.
Speaking of close relationships - US and Latin American leaders https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/02/tens-of-millions-in-florida-properties-linked-to-ecuadorian-presidential-candidate-guillermo-lasso/
This entire discussion brings back the bad memories of the Cold War. The US had a binary political policy with respect to the smaller countries around the world: your either in our pocket or you are the enemy.
Allende was democratically elected. His downfall was financed by the US and the coup was coordinated with the US intelligence establishment. Chile, until that point had a 150 year history of democracy.
The Pinochet regime was empowered to force an economic and political system on Chileans that the did not choose and would not have chosen with their votes. It became a test lab for libertarian free market economics, mixed with a dictatorship.
As far as people killed is concerned, the Pinochet regime killed and tortured many Chileans, and a few foreigners who happened to be swept up in their reign of terror, the most famous of which was Charles Horman. The regime also plotted and executed an assassination on US soil of a Chilean diplomat and an American friend.
The Chilean regime was corrupt. The secrecy of the regime allowed insiders to deal in the drug trade for their own profit. They also “adopted” many children of those they tortured and killed.
So, engage in all the revisionism and what-ifs that you like, but don’t try to fool those of us who have read, and remember, more than a quick read of a Wiki can give you.
Letelier and Moffatt - had their car blown up by Chilean security service not 15 minutes from where I live... (well out JazzPaw). People forget their history or are blinded by intelligence community propaganda
The point of the link was the Friedman/Chile connection. Point stands. If you think Pinochet was a hero ... well, you are entitled to believe what you want. No matter how repugnant to me.
"The Monroe Doctrine pre-dated communism". Actually the French terror regime predated the Monroe Doctrine, and directly paved the way for socialist and communist regimes.
See, there's another point the left and right should be able to agree on: the frogs have caused quite a few of the global problems we were stuck with.
So basically the history of humanity. As if Communist countries weren’t doing the exact same thing. We just won so you want to pretend Communists were victims. And China is doing the same thing now across the world.
Wouldn’t all the Eastern European countries that Russia took over be included in this answer? Wouldn’t fighting communism by proxy include Greece, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba? I am sure I am leaving some out. Russia/communism was behind all of these and we fought them directly or by proxy for good reason. Because communism is anti human and results in death and misery.
Cuba is a shit hole and anyone that has been there knows it. Why do you think people risk their lives on a rafts trying to escape? Communist countries collapse on their own as history has shown and this process is only slowed by the iron fist of the state that disappears anyone that dare dissent.
Venezuela destroyed their own economy by nationalizing it. The US has no obligation to support this barbarity.
Suggest you read Vladimir Bukovsky's "Judgement in Moscow, the definitive history of the USSR 1970 to 1990. It uses the actual Kremlin documents to show how the USSR intervened in many countries.
Bukovsky was imprisoned in the 1960s, but allowed to leave the USSR in the late 1970s. He came back to Moscow in 1991 and was able to visit the Soviet archives. He was not allowed to take or copy the documents, but he brought a laptop computer with him with a scanner, and so got thousands of pages of documents out for his research. It's quite an amazing story!
He was a chief economic advisor to the Pinochet regime. You know, the one we decided to prop up and remove Allende for, which created mass death in the southern cone (ala Brazil, Argentina, dirty wars). Not sure you could get more cultural than that.
You know, we can separate finance/economics into some anti-septic basket of non-complicity, when it is precisely this group of people who rose from obscurity during the Golden period of economic 1947-1970, to becoming the new masters of the universe (Nobel prizes, U of Chicago and Republican party celebrity). Whitewashing Milton Freidman is not a great start to this thread.
US was not founded upon individualism, it was founded upon the idea a white male democracy -- which because it did not include women until 1920 or African Americans (1965), really morphed into conflictual battle over capital, slaves, and resources. Individualism in the modern sense was ushered in as a particular marketing theme to thwart the anti-authoritarian movements of the 60s and 70s.
Even more, the idea was the people will not argue with their government or leaders if they are so subsumed in the process of individualization -- finding out who one is and then buying a product to fix the deficiencies. It was brilliant and totally neoliberal. If you want some citation of where this comes from, the movie the Corporation is a good start or the book The Road to Mount Pelerin fleshes out the goals of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
we "cannot" separate (2nd paragraph) - I hate not being able to edit.
Can Substack just add an edit function already?
Are you seriously arguing we should support government programs that achieve the opposite result of what they claimed they would achieve? Why do you hate poor people?
Well, we have a long history in our country of it lifting people out of poverty, except now the government is captured by business interests and government programs are designed to fail (drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub). This is a feature of neoliberalism --- not public spending.
If one starts with Powell Memo and works forward from 1970, you would find the corporate takeover of institutions, government, thinktanks, and consolidating that power in certain industries like media, healthcare, finance, real estate, pharma, and technology.
And it is no wonder that this consolidation has to led to oligopolies in most industries (Apple, Google, FB, and Amazon) or (Pfizer, JNJ, Merck, LLY) or (Goldman Sachs, BofA, Blackrock) or (Disney/GE/Viacom/Fox).
You have the wrong narrative of what's happened in this country.
So, why don’t you exchange your Social Security for a crackpot private account scheme that Friedman pushed on Chile. All the workers money was chewed up in financial industry fees. It was a complete disaster, except for the fund managers.
I would prefer to do with my earnings what I choose as opposed to a program whose assets have been illegally plundered. I won’t see a dime of what they have taken from me. At least if I lost it through my own actions I would have myself to blame.
And how have those assets been illegally plundered. The program has almost no assets. It is a pay-as-you-go system with a very small trust fund that was temporary. What kind of paranoid nonsense have you been reading.
I spent 10 years as investment advisor at one of the TBTF firms during one of the most profitable periods in world history- so I run into this a lot. People who purport to know more about how the system works than actually really do.
Maybe you price a nice annuity for Commentatorinchief that has all the protections that Social Security offers average wage workers, including disability and survivor benefits. I’ll bet his payments would surprise him.
Actually right now is pretty dangerous time. The bond market is capitulating. The stock market is overinflated with CARES Act and buyback money. And people living off of a fixed income cannot even get 1% in a money market account due the ZIRP - (Zero interest rate policy).
All of this has been constructed to push people into taking on more and more risk. It's a scam. The entire investment field has changed so much over the last 25 years that it is almost unrecognizable.
Yep! My IRA has been booming, but I can’t get squat I’m fixed income. My Schwab guy thinks I’m too much in the market, but how can I buy bonds with these rates?
I don’t see an end to this until average wages start to grow faster, and some real inflation gets going. Maybe then rates will get off zero. Sure the stock market will lag or tank, but people will stop paying 100x revenue for everything under the sun.
I kind of understand what happened. The system has been set up to fund the retirement of the baby boomers off the stock market. There are now many retired boomers who need to have the market juiced to make ends meet. It cannot be allowed to fall, for both political and economic reasons. But the juicing has required that interest rates be suppressed. We have a massive asset bubble, but can’t afford to unwind it, politically.
I don't think we agree on much, but all of this is spot on.
What does that mean, the bond market is capitulating?
Bond markets have a lot of risk (especially the corporate bond market), where usually bonds are seen as a safe investment.
3 Types: Treasuries (US govt), Corporates, and Municipals. All three have been hard by Covid, and the risk of rising interest rates (normally a fuel for investing in bonds) is now just a fantasy (imo). Capitulating --- I mean people are giving up on them as investment during a very risk time (this should tell us something). Usually people flock to bonds for protection.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonmoore/2021/03/02/could-2021-be-one-of-the-worst-years-on-record-for-the-bond-market/?sh=818c530f47d4
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4413979-great-2021-bond-market-collapse
Thanks. That makes sense.
Are they actually having trouble selling them? That would drive up the rates, wouldn’t it?
I speculate that vendors have little trouble selling these products since the sales forces will push the envelopes of truth to sell product if it is profitable for the bank/advisor, but I do not see how this is going to be very profitable for people. And if demand dropped rates on certain bonds would go up - true.
Another thing is -- we do not really know how bad things are for corporations or municipalities since accounting practices have allowed these institutions a lot of leeway, even before Covid, to hide assets or kick the asset can down the road. So the total amount of risk, is not known.
And while he was paying those premiums, who would pay for his parents and grandparents?
Please provide "programs that worked" that uncle Milton championed..............
Ha! That’s just it. None of them worked. That was his point. That doesn’t mean the government isn’t capable of creating public assistance programs that worked. They just never do so.
Social Security has worked as intended, and there is no comparable private program that can achieve the same goal for less.
And before you compare apples and oranges by talking about investment accounts, you should understand that Social Security was never intended to function like an investment account, or it would have required 30+ years of pre-funding before anyone got a check.
Sure, if it’s intention was to create another government revenue steam from which politicians could grift. Other than being mandatory, which is unAmerican, it was not to be touched. That was a LIE. It hasn’t kept up with inflation either. Another LIE. It also was never meant to go to those that didn’t pay into it. Yet another LIE.
When established Social Security ran huge surpluses for years. Then came the baby boom, and the math changed. By 1955 all actuaries knew that the system would barely survive the young workers supporting the retired baby boomers without any changes.
President Johnson was a great politician, just a horrid President. He wanted to be all things to all people, and supported "Guns and Butter." The only way to fund the Great Society was to do it honestly with huge tax increases, or do it covertly by finding new money. So, the trust fund was brought "on budget" where its temporary surplus revenues would hide deficits. Nixon compounded the problem when his lust for power led him astray.
He knew that the trust funds (now including Medicare) needed to be taken back off-budget or they would be bankrupted. If he did so, he'd never be re-elected. Politicians of all stripes passed favors for their constituents. I can forgive Johnson, his version of long-term thinking was tomorrow's breakfast. I cannot forgive Nixon. The actuaries were right. And, instead of looking for cost savings or efficiencies, early retirement age for men was added, Social Security was taxed (huge LIE made evident) and people who had never qualified were given benefits anyway.
I doesn’t go to people who don’t pay into it. And it does keep up with inflation. Even for high income payers of the tax, it provides on average basic inflation protection. Lower income payers get a very good deal. Wall Street, not so much.
Whether you would prefer to keep that money is irrelevant. It’s the law, so you can’t. I would prefer to keep my federal income tax money and not subsidize red states, but I don’t get that wish either.
It absolutely goes to people that do not pay into it and it is not even close to keeping up with real inflation which has skyrocketed. What if they passed a law saying all of your earnings go to other people. Are you going to say you can’t do anything about that?
You're ignoring SSDI.
Somebody correct me if i'm wrong, but due to the carried interest loophole a lot of wall street types aren't paying payroll and social security taxes right? If so then wall street isn't getting a bad deal at all.
It’s not that public assistance programs don’t “work”. They certainly achieve a result that the champions of them sought. It is just usually the opposite of the goal they claim to have sought to get support to pass them. For example, incentivizing single parenthood to “help” families while it destroys families. The politicians pushing this had every intention of destroying families while claiming the goal was the opposite. The data is overwhelming that their “help” did the opposite.
Freidman making possible valid criticism of certain programs is not him championing programs that worked
He liked something similar to the earned income tax credit.
I suppose charter schools would be one I would concede actually work. But most of those are locally originated.
This is a dubious point. Charter schools are very political and their worth depends on your politics. Hedge fund scumbags love charter schools....https://www.ansaroo.com/question/how-do-hedge-funds-make-money-from-charter-schools
The concept is political, sure and there is always money to be made on a valuable investment. The superior education one receives in a charter school, however, isn’t political. Unless you want more uneducated citizens that is. Teacher’s Unions love uneducated citizens.
Please provide evidence that a charter school education is superior. Please account for charter schools cherry picking their students.
Charter schools for inner cities are mostly shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. In the suburbs/rural areas, at least in Ohio, charter schools are non existent, b/c the public schools do a good job.
It is a superior education if only because students learn that the freedom to succeed includes the freedom to fail. Also see https://newmiddleclassdad.com/charter-schools-vs-public-schools-statistics/. The schools are run by teachers and administrators, not by teachers unions. Thus they produce students with better critical thinking skills.
Please provide evidence that charter schools do more cherry-picking than selection by lottery.
You didn’t see Friedman as part of the culture war? I did. He was the face of so-called “free market” economics as it battled against the post-Keynesian model that had been bedrock in the Democratic Party since FDR. Friedman and Ken Galbraith had competing TV shows trying to sway cultural attitudes. Friedman was protested upon receiving the faux Nobel prize in economics. I think Friedman was a huge figure in emerging culture wars.
ChiCom Official-Look at our glorious 100k peasant dam building project!
Milton Friedman-Why are they all using wooden shovels and wheelbarrows instead of bulldozers!?!
ChiCom-We are committed to providing full employment for our people!!!
MF-If it’s job security you are after, why not give them spoons to dig with instead!!!!!