Who Will Drain the Swamp?

Posted on November 12, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown,” said Missouri Dem Senator Claire McCaskill. “None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them.”

NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

Donald Trump will be President and could have control of both the House and Senate again. The same happened in 2017 when he last won on the campaign promise to Drain the Swamp of corruption in Washington.

He didn’t succeed in his first term, actually creating a deeper swamp with rampant corruption at almost all levels of government. Will he do better this time; might he and his Republicans learn from their past mistakes?

Republicans will want more tax cuts, for starters, as well as extend the tax cuts his administration engineered in 2017, The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, that they passed with House and Senate majorities.

I wrote at the time, “The Republicans tax bill has passed, and it is the greatest theft of taxpayer monies in history; even greater than that of Presidents’ Reagan and Bush I and II that began the immense transfer of wealth to the wealthiest in 1980 with their tax cuts starving the government of much needed revenues that would keep the federal deficits under control.”

Why? It was written by the very lobbyists Republicans and the Trump administration had cultivated during his 2017 election.

More than 130 lobbyists were hired to work in his first administration, and 36 of them have blatant conflicts of interest, working on the same issues they were lobbying on, in violation of Trump’s ethics rules, according to MarketWatch economist Jeff Nutting.

“This is so bad. We have just gotten list of amendments to be included in bill NOT from our R colleagues, but from lobbyists downtown,” said Missouri Dem Senator Claire McCaskill. “None of us have seen this list, but lobbyists have it. Need I say more? Disgusting. And we probably will not even be given time to read them.”

The bill cut Medicare and Medicaid benefits by $1.5 trillion and could add $1.5 trillion to the federal deficit in 10 years according to the CBO. That’s a $3 trillion outright theft from U.S. taxpayers for the biggest heist in history.

We know what happened when Republicans tried this taxpayer heist before. President Reagan and congress had to raise taxes 11 times to make up the deficits created by the first ‘trickle-down’ tax cuts in 1981. Two consecutive recessions in 1981 and 1982 followed as Fed Chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to record levels to choke off inflation at the same time.

Then GW Bush did the same in 2001-03, when he cut taxes again while paying for the wars on terror, resulting in the largest federal deficit in history at the time, as well as the Great Recession.

This did not generate enough tax revenue to pay for the additional debt, so foreign governments and individuals will become more reluctant to invest in U.S. debt, as the deficit continues to grow and interest rates rise.

It can happen again. It is suicidal economics. The U.S. won’t declare bankruptcy. But it will saddle future generations with an impossible debt load and prevent much needed public and private investment that would increase productivity and boost growth.

This happened in 2017, and the stench of lobbyists filling the swamp became so overwhelming in Donald Trump’s first term that it was the reason his Republican majority were voted out of office, as I said.

Is there any reason to doubt it will happen again?

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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No Art of the Deal

Posted on November 11, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

“After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously:” Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Huffington Post

Historians will puzzle over the results of our latest presidential election for decades. A majority of Americans have just voted in a con artist and sexual predator for the second time who has failed in most of his business ventures and left investors holding the tab.

One conclusion will be that identity politics won, after all. Enough white women chose Donald Trump over the East-Asian/Black Kamala Harris who advocated more rights for women, while enough Hispanic and Black males put their faith in a misogynist who has sexually assaulted women.

Identity politics has moved much of the Democratic Party to the left with the Black Lives Matter and LBDGQ movements. But most exit polls said it was the economy that decided the vote—everything became too expensive after COVID-19.

My conclusion is that it has taken very special presidents to lead such a diverse populace that will defend the constitution. In modern times it was Roosevelt creating the New Deal to bring America out of the Great Depression and win World War 2.

But post-WWII generations eventually forgot what the New Deal had accomplished and voted in a Republican Party that by 1980 had begun to drain the federal budget by continually cutting taxes for their wealthy supporters creating massive federal deficits; Reagan (-$400 billion), GW Bush (-$1 trillion), and Donald Trump (-$5 trillion).

Democratic presidents wanted government programs that benefited more Americans, so President Clinton created actual budget surpluses in his last four years, President Obama brought America out of the Great Recession spawned by the GW Bush administration’s fiscal mismanagement and created Obamacare.

President Biden created a second New, New Deal to bail us out of the COVID-19 pandemic and begin to pay down Trump’s massive deficits, thereby creating the fastest economic recovery from the pandemic among developed countries. It is designed to protect Americans from climate change and modernize the economy for decades to come.

And now a peculiar American form of amnesia has set in once again; a majority of Americans have voted in Donald Trump for a repeat performance with the hope he will cure their economic malaise, even with his record of multiple bankruptcies. And Republicans will surely run up massive deficits in their quest to siphon even more of the federal budget as they did in Trump’s first term.

His stated policies will also endanger us because Trump not only wants to weaken America militarily by weakening military alliances such as NATO, but weaken environment protections as well by gutting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency once again for the fossil fuel industry in the face of more frequent and greater hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.

We know this because one of Trump’s first actions when elected in 2017 was to leave the Paris Accord. He has called climate change a hoax.

We currently have the second highest carbon emissions per capita after China, but would become the highest emitter among developed countries if Republicans succeed in rolling back 30 years of environmental regulation.

Why did he leave the Paris Accord I in 2017 when it is a voluntary accord to reduce carbon emissions? It was to help the coal industry, where Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is heavily invested in coal and has already made $millions with the 50 percent bump up in coal stocks since Trump took office.

And the Koch Brothers $millions that were spent to elect Tea Party candidates paid off as Trump initiated an immediate review of President Obama/s Clean Power Plan, which restricts greenhouse gas emissions at coal-fired power plants.

Surrounded by coal miners at the time, the president described the Paris Accord as a “crushing attack” on workers and vowed to nix “job-killing regulations. “We’re going to have safety, we’re going to have clean water, we’re going to have clean air, but so many [regulations] are unnecessary, so many are job-killing,” he said.

And Trump now says he wants Elon Musk to become the efficiency czar, which will cause even more economic damage, since Musk has promised to cut as much as $2 trillion “of waste”—the amount of the current budget deficit—from the next federal budget, at the same time that Trump and Republicans have promised more tax cuts for their wealthy supporters.

But in the words of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in Project-Syndicate, “After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously.”

The next four years of Republican rule will be a measure of how much many Americans have fooled themselves once again, as they did in 2017. For a second time Americans will have the chance to learn from that experience, especially the young who may not have been of voting age, to see how Trump and the Republicans mishandled the economy that mostly profited themselves.

And it will be another bitter lesson for our women, minorities, the poor and even many in the middle class, as well as those that will suffer from the effects of a warming atmosphere.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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What’s Next, Trump Republicans?

Posted on November 7, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

Financial FAQs

“What if conservatives succeeded in repealing Obamacare? “Republicans’ Obamacare repeal bill would leave 17 million more people uninsured next year, and 32 million more in 2026, the Congressional Budget Office said in an estimate Wednesday. It also said premiums would double by 2026. …By 2026, three quarters of the population would live in areas with no insurers participating in the non-group market, due to upward pressure on premiums and downward pressure on enrollment, the report found.”

I wrote a Huffington Post piece in July 2017 during President Trump’s first term that could predict what we might look forward to with Republicans, and Donald Trump’s healthcare policy in his second go-around as president.

Huffington Post

The result for working Americans of Republicans’ repeated attempts to repeal Obama that I wrote about then is shown in the above graph. It compares the soaring death rates of 45-54 white American males with other developed countries (red USW line). Obamacare is the only American universal healthcare plan that covers workers with pre-existing conditions if no employer healthcare, and yet Republicans can be expected to again attempt to replace it with a “concept” in Trump’s words.

Americans had just avoided another health care disaster in voting down the Senate’s ‘skinny’ Obamacare Repeal and Replace bill in 2017. Even though maintaining most of the taxes to pay for the Medicaid portion, it would have made insurance coverage prohibitively expensive for those older and sicker users with the removal of the private and employer mandate requirements that would cause younger and healthier people to leave the insurance markets.

This is just the latest precipice that’s been avoided. Americans already have the worst health outcomes in the developed world, precisely because America is the only developed country—in fact, even of undeveloped countries—that doesn’t have universal coverage.

The result is one of the highest birth death rates, as well as diabetes, heart and other infectious disease rates—which are diseases usually associated with poorer, undeveloped countries.

The last time Republicans swept the presidential election in 2017, it was the very white, male Tea Party reacting to our first Black President. But they didn’t replace it with something new. They went back to their base of wealthy Oligarchs formed during the Reagan era, still fighting labor unions and resisting more social programs to help the less fortunate, as Trump’s MAGA nation has promised to do.

Trump’s electorate has been good at wanting to tear down the old institutions, but not good at replacing them with a newer, better system. And if Elon Musk becomes the efficiency czar in Trump’s new administration, and he continues to brag he can cut $2 trillion in waste from the federal budget, we know social programs and maybe much more will suffer in the name of reducing the national debt.

There is another, better way to replace what hasn’t worked for working Americans; but that must be based on science and new technologies that can come from our educated elite (rather than our political and wealthy elite).

If Republicans want to be part of that future, they can’t follow a con artist who doesn’t’ believe in the future, only the past.

Harlan Green © 2024

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Bidenomics Works–Part II

Posted on November 5, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

Popular Economics Weekly

Calculated Risk

September’s unemployment rate remained at 4.1 percent but reported just 12,000 new payroll jobs due to the hurricanes and Boeing aircraft strike of 30,000 machinists.

Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in October (+12,000), following an average monthly gain of 194,000 over the prior 12 months, said the BLS. In October, employment continued to trend up in health care and government. Temporary help services lost jobs. Employment declined in manufacturing due to strike activity.

That makes it a sure thing the Fed will continue to lower short-term rates at their November FOMC meeting. Also that economic growth will continue into the new year.

Health care added 52,000 jobs in October, in line with the average monthly gain of 58,000 over the prior 12 months. Governments added 40,000 jobs but manufacturing lost 46,000 jobs, which is probably because of the Boeing strike.

Calculated Risk’s graph shows us just how good President Biden’s Bidenomics policies have been. More than 16 million jobs have been created since January 2021 as we returned to work from the brief COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

But with the Presidential election upon us, our future prosperity is still in doubt. We should take Elon Musk at his word when he said at the Madison Garden rally that he would cut at least $2 trillion from the federal budget if Trump wins, and he is appointed efficiency czar. It would lead to economic disaster, even for his Billionaire supporters.

“After all, it is mathematically impossible to cut taxes for corporations and billionaires, sustain basic programs like defense and Social Security, and lower the deficit simultaneously,” said Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz in Project-Syndicate.

And we should believe what Trump says, according to Mary Trump, his niece, as Trump becomes more irrational, threatening anyone he now perceives as his enemy, including Taylor Swift, so that her boyfriend Kansas City footballer Travis Kelce has told him not to mess with his girl!

“Donald Trump is offering a vision of crony rentier capitalism that has enticed many captains of industry and finance. In catering to their wishes for more tax cuts and less regulation, he would make most Americans’ lives poorer, harder, and shorter,” said Stiglitz.

Timothy Snyder in the introduction of On Freedom, the sequel to his best-selling On Tyranny, tells us why we have a sociopath bordering on psychopathy as the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States of America.

“Deep into a century that was the stuff of dreams in the 1970s, and the subject of confident predictions in the 1990s, we find ourselves at a turning point. Whether we will be free will depend on us—not just on what we do, but on why we do it: our ideals.”

It’s a sad commentary that one of our political parties chose a leader that wants to tear down those institutions that have preserved our democracy; even attack the Capital on January 6 to overturn the 2020 election.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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The Harris Presidency

Posted on November 4, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

ANSWERING KENNEDY’S CALL

What would it mean for Kamala Harris to be our first female President? It’s a historical turning point that will affirm women have finally attained equal political rights to men, and American citizens confirm they want greater personal rights—to expanded health care, abortion, and environment protection that has been held back by a dominant male culture until now.

Should Harris and the Democrats win it would also signal the end of the Second Gilded Age, an age characterized by record income inequality that began in earnest when President Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economic policies began to transfer massive amounts of wealth from working adults (small business and salaried) to the owners of wealth (capital assets) in the 1980s.

cbpp.org

It would give President-Elect Harris a mandate to begin to reverse the tax structures that were the major cause of the record inequality by raising corporate and personal tax rates back to Reagan-era levels, and thus begin to reduce the massive budget deficits that resulted.

President Reagan and Republicans cut the maximum personal tax rate for the wealthiest from 50 percent to 28 percent and reduced corporate taxes from 34 to 28 percent to initiate what economists call the Second Gilded Age, which resulted in our first massive deficit–$400 billion—by the end of his administration.

The massive deficits continued to grow under successive Republican administration tax cuts that resulted in curtailing our social safety net. GW Bush’s deficit grew to $1 trillion, and the Trump administration’s to more than $5 trillion.

A Harris Presidency could also mean an end to our ongoing civil war, a war originally between the industrial North vs. slave-holding South that never really ended with General Lee’s surrender at the Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

Though slave-owning was banned with the Emancipation Proclamation and Abraham Lincoln’s north winning the civil war, southern states found ways to continue to impoverish former slaves by terrorizing them under Jim Crow laws that even the civil rights acts of the 1960s couldn’t completely eradicate.

Today’s manifestation of our civil war has morphed into a battle between red states controlled by Republicans with a white male/Oligarchic culture continuing to impoverish their own citizens vs. more prosperous blue states with a dominant female/minority majority.

Kamala Harris has promised in her platform and speeches that she would be a President for all Americans. That would mean policies benefiting red state citizens as well, such as raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 that was last raised in 2009.

Currently 14 states haven’t raised their minimum wage since then, or at all. Five red states have not even adopted a state minimum wage: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. Two states, Georgia and Wyoming, have a minimum wage below $7.25 per hour, so that in all seven of these states, the federal minimum wage guarantees at least a $7.25 per hour wage. New Hampshire and Pennsylvania are the only blue states still with the federal minimum wage.

There are other ways the red states have kept workers’ salaries lower that Harris should remedy: lobby to repeal so-called right-to-work laws in 26 states that say members of a union aren’t required to pay union dues even though they enjoy the benefits. The result is that membership in unions has declined, along with workers’ rights to bargain collectively. And those 26 states now have a Supreme Court majority to enforce those state laws.

Democratic majorities have always found ways to benefit more Americans since the New Deal. President Obama was able to pass Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, the first universal health insurance that meant insurance companies couldn’t ban clients with existing conditions.

Climate change has become a clear and present danger causing more hurricanes, floods, wildfires threatening Americans that Donald Trump has called a hoax, and would rather “Drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels.

The Biden administration has already begun work on reducing global warming with the Inflation Reduction Act subsidizing alternative energy sources that don’t increase global warming but that the Republican Party vociferously opposes to protect its fossil fuel constituents.

We have lived through a Gilded Age before. The first Gilded Age came in the late 1800s, when the Industrial Revolution made Robber Barons such as railroad titan Cornelius Vanderbilt, banking titan JP Morgan, and Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller the richest men in their time.

It ended with the death of President William McKinley in 1901, and revelations of rampant corruption followed by Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that created government institutions such as the Federal Reserve to regulate banking and social security, as well as empowering labor unions to level the playing field for workers.

If elected, Kamala Harris and Democrats should be able to continue the new New Deal legislation that President Biden’s Bidenomics’ policies have initiated with more than $5 trillion invested in keeping America great and creating 16 million jobs that have benefited all of our citizens, not just Oligarchs such an Elon Musk.

Musk warned, after all, what would happen if he became the efficiency czar Trump says he wants him to be and cuts $2 trillion from the $6.75 trillion federal budget. There would be no money left for social programs, the military, and drastic cuts in social security and Medicare benefits, say economists such as Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

It would also mean Husband Doug Emhoff would become the first, First Gentleman, which wouldn’t diminish the historical record of great First Ladies. Men should take heart that women have equaled men in all ways, not just in intelligence and courage, but have shown a heart large enough to create a United States, not a Divided States of America, when Kamala Harris becomes our new President.

Harlan Green © 2024

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Another ‘Roaring Twenties’?

Posted on October 30, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

Financial FAQs

BEA.gov

The advance estimate of BEA third quarter U.S. economic growth was 2.8 percent, slightly less than the 3 percent growth in Q2 but is showing few signs the post-pandemic recovery has slowed. It has defied the odds of a Federal Reserve engineered slowdown that made the cost of borrowing higher, jacking up the Prime Rate to an 8.5 percent high.

The manufacturing sector slowed down, but not overall economic growth because consumers kept spending on consumer goods, dining out, travel and other leisure activities.

This has all the signs of another Roaring ‘20s that occurred after the Spanish Flu pandemic in the 1920s. I don’t mean it literally, of course, because the first Roaring Twenties of jazz and the Flapper era for women occurred after World War I. Yet the recovery from WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed an estimated 650,000 Americans also unleashed a spending and investment spree that is also happening after the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’m using the analogy because this Roaring 2020s could also last a decade due to the pent-up demand from government spending that is seeding so much private investment, with the U.S. economy still fully employed and infrastructure and technology investments just beginning to kick in

Consumer spending surged 3.7 percent, and domestic investment grew 11 percent in the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) report. This was mainly because consumer spending was holding up for the holidays and they were still saving. The personal savings rate is holding at 4.8 percent.

Inflation also continues to decline. The price index for gross domestic purchases increased 1.8 percent in the third quarter, compared with an increase of 2.4 percent in the second quarter (table 4). The personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index increased 1.5 percent, compared with an increase of 2.5 percent. Excluding food and energy prices, the PCE price index increased 2.2 percent, compared with an increase of 2.8 percent.

Now that inflation is back to the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent range, Fed officials can concentrate on continuing to bring down their short-term Fed Funds rate, which will bring down the Prime Rate further, causing consumers to be even more confident about their future.

That is why, “Consumer confidence recorded the strongest monthly gain since March 2021, but still did not break free of the narrow range that has prevailed over the past two years,” said Dana M. Peterson, Chief Economist at The Conference Board.

“In October’s reading, all five components of the Index improved. Consumers’ assessments of current business conditions turned positive. Views on the current availability of jobs rebounded after several months of weakness, potentially reflecting better labor market data. Compared to last month, consumers were substantially more optimistic about future business conditions and remained positive about future income,” said Peterson.

ConferenceBoard

Much will depend on Friday’s official U.S. unemployment report but the independent ADP’s private-sector jobs report showed businesses added 233,000 new jobs in October, the biggest gain in 15 months. The report is not as accurate as the government’s nonfarm payrolls report, which comes out on Friday.

The Trade/Transportation, Education/Health sectors added 104,000 jobs, construction added 37,000 jobs (infrastructure), while manufacturing lost 19,000 jobs in the ADP report.

One historian wrote that after the devastation of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic, “Incredibly, the dire post-war economic predictions didn’t come true. At least not immediately. American consumers, who had patriotically scrimped and saved during wartime, began to live it up. Europeans also joined in, purchasing $8 billion in exports from America. Inflation ticked upward, and so did prices, but consumers were willing to pay anything for a taste of freedom.”

Sound familiar? Only this time the Fed’s inflation fight didn’t cause a recession, on the contrary—at least not yet. It’s a good place to be, just in case there might be other surprises in the future.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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Why Does Bidenomics Work?

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

Financial FAQs

FREDrealgdp

Elon Musk told a cheering crowd at Sunday’s MAGA rally in New York that if Donald Trump puts him in charge of government efficiency, as planned, he can cut “at least $2 trillion” from the current federal budget.

This would cause an almost immediate recession. Such is the blindness of the world’s richest Oligarch, who has made no bones about his dislike of government regulations and taxes in the way of his dream of reaching Mars.

MarketWatch’s Brent Arends tells us what would happen. “Either Donald Trump and Elon Musk are planning to cut 85% of all spending on highways, disaster relief, federal bank-deposit insurance and the departments of Agriculture, Homeland Security and Justice; close all U.S. embassies; and abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, NASA and nearly all welfare, income-support, food-stamp and childhood-nutrition programs.”

“Or, they are planning on cutting Social Security and Medicare — despite Donald Trump’s protests to the contrary,” said Arends

That is what is behind Republicans’ dislike of Democrats economic policies since President Biden’s election that has created more than 15 million jobs and 3 percent economic growth as we recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic.

It takes government investments to spur private investments; not just in new technologies (the CHIPS Act) but healthcare and the environment (Inflation Reduction Act), and in modernizing our infrastructure (Infrastructure Act) so that Americans will feel more secure from hurricanes and illness and therefore produce more.

That is the real definition of efficiency, not cutting benefits so that Billionaires can keep more of their wealth.

President Obama was the first to turn the tide on President Reagan’s 40- years of trickle-down economic policies that had transferred $50 trillion in wealth from working Americans to the owners of capital living off their corporate profits, according to a RAND Corporation working paper.

He did it by creating Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) and making government the protector of people, not of profits, as Republicans had done. This resulted in economic growth accelerating to 4 percent during the Obama years continuing into Trump’s years, even with a Republican-engineered shutdown. It was the longest economic recovery since World War Two, and the reason Trump could brag that growth has been so good just prior to COVID-19.

The economy unfortunately shrank -7.5 percent in 2020 as businesses shut down due to the pandemic. It roared back to life in the second quarter of 2021 as congress acted quickly to put money back into Americans’ pockets.

In fact, the U.S. economy will continue to provide most of the thrust for global growth through the balance of this year and in 2025, led by robust consumer spending “that has held up through a wrenching bout of inflation and the high interest rates used to tame it,” the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday.

Such economic policies requiring government investments have worked before. It was Roosevelt’s New Deal that employed more than 8 million people, built 650,00 miles of roads, 120,000 bridges, created the minimum age, 8-hour workdays and started up social security.

Now more than half of the living US recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics signed a letter that called Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic agenda “vastly superior” to the plans laid out by former President Donald Trump.

“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’ economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump,” the economists write in the letter obtained by CNN.

Top this off consumers are now joining the Harris economic bandwagon. The Conference Board’s latest consumer confidence survey surged to 108.7 in October from a revised 99.2 reading in the prior month, the Conference Board said Tuesday.  This is highest level of confidence since January.

“Consumer confidence recorded the strongest monthly gain since March 2021, but still did not break free of the narrow range that has prevailed over the past two years,” said Dana M. Peterson, Chief Economist at The Conference Board. “In October’s reading, all five components of the Index improved. Consumers’ assessments of current business conditions turned positive. Views on the current availability of jobs rebounded after several months of weakness, potentially reflecting better labor market data.” 

Is Bidenomics finally catching on with ordinary Americans, not just economists?

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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The Bully Mentality–III

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

ANSWERING the KENNEDYS CALL

Why has the bullying behavior of one political party intimidated some of our most powerful men? Reports say that billionaires like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and JP Morgan’s Jamie Diman won’t publicly endorse Kamala Harris, even though they have donated to her campaign and say privately they will vote for her?

Timothy Snyder in his latest book, On Freedom, tells us what is necessary to actively preserve and expand freedom, rather than remain quiet, which is the choice for American voters in this Presidential election. One must put also their body, not just their words, on the line to successfully oppose authoritarians, as Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi has done in opposing Putin’s invasion of his land.

Snyder meant one must take a public stand, however dangerous it might seem, because freedom itself is on the line. When Snyder asked Zelens’kyi why he didn’t flee when Russian first invaded the Ukraine as many thought he would do, Zelens’kyi replied, “I could not have done otherwise.”

“He was in the company of others who were also taking risks,” said Snyder. “He understood the situation, he said, because of what it meant to represent others. A president, he said, was only the first grain of sand in a turning hourglass.”

Reuters–January 6

The news that some of our wealthiest men won’t publicly endorse Harris highlights the stakes in this Presidential race, and how fearful even powerful men can be before someone who threatens retaliation, including bodily harm, against anyone who opposes him.

These men don’t understand what underlies the bully mentality of one political party that has no regard for election outcomes. Trump’s own niece has called Trump a coward, and in fact bullies do pick on the weakest who will stand down when opposed by those who stand up to them, say psychologists and psychiatrists.

I first wrote about a certain political party’s Bully Mentality in 2012. “Why do Americans have such a problem with bullies? Whether in schools, in politics, or on Internet social media? The result has been teenage suicides, horrendous school shootings by students who felt bullied or belittled, and now a whole political party that opposes anything that smacks of aiding the poorest, seniors, and less educated.”

Donald Trump’s threats of retaliation have only intensified so close to November 5. Trump aides such as General John Kelley, his Chief of Staff, says he is acting like a fascist who openly supports Russian’s Putin in his Ukraine invasion and has said he wanted “Generals like Hitler had” to put down demonstrations.

The real lessons Americans should take from such tactics of a wannabe dictator was first spelled out in Timothy Snyder’s best-seller On Tyranny:

  • #1) “Don’t obey in advance—Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.”
  • #2) “Defend Institutions—It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.”
  • #3) “Above all believe in truth,” as without truth there is no trust, and without trust there are no effective laws, which leads to tyranny.

Candidate Donald Trump, has made a point of blatant lying, meaning he wants his followers to believe whatever he says rather than objective facts such as global warming, or size of the audience that attended his inauguration.

What better example is there of real freedom and the preservation of our democracy than President Zelens’kyi and the Ukrainian people who are literally putting their own bodies on the line in opposing the Russian bully next door; for those Americans who remain silent?

Harlan Green © 2024

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On Preserving Freedom

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

Popular Economics Weekly

Random House

Freedom is not just an absence of evil but a presence of good.

Timothy Snyder in the introduction of On Freedom, the sequel to his best-selling On Tyranny, tells us why we have a sociopath bordering on psychopathy as the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States of America.

“Deep into a century that was the stuff of dreams in the 1970s, and the subject of confident predictions in the 1990s, we find ourselves at a turning point. Whether we will be free will depend on us—not just on what we do, but on why we do it: our ideals.”

We will need to return to those ideals that are the basis of our democracy to counter the nihilism displayed by a political party and candidate that is a product of the past 40 years of wealth concentration in an economic system that has led to many Deaths of Despair in the Midwest and rustbelt.

It’s a sad commentary that one of our political parties chose a leader that wants to tear down those institutions that have preserved our democracy; even attack the Capital on January 6 to overturn the 2020 election results.

I lived that ‘stuff of dreams’ in the 1970s in public service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, with Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers Union, the US Environmental Protection Agency and serving in my own community. I experienced the heady optimism and can-do spirit that prevailed and supported my efforts.

It was because I believed in the Peace Corps motto, Service Above Self, that its first President Sergeant Shiver adopted from Rotary International.

But citizens without that spirit have turned to leaders that promise they will serve them, if they obey their leader’s rules, says Dr. Snyder.

What happened to those enduring ideals we lived by and are the foundation of our democracy? Nationalism, a relic of the past, is finding favor because many have lost faith in their democratic institutions that haven’t done enough for those that have felt disenfranchised. They no longer trust their institutions.

They have lost faith in those ideals as well, yet having faith in ideals enables one to fulfill them.

Snyder uses Russia as an example of what America could become if we don’t reaffirm our ideals this November. “In Russia, we see the transitions from the definition of freedom as the lack of barriers to a politics of fascism in which there are no barriers to the Leader’s whims.”

He faults what has happened to the American economy. “American capitalism has been driven toward monopoly, wealth concentration and decadence. Without ideals, it is impossible to be a realist. If you forget about freedom, you misunderstand the world and change it for the worst.”

Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz has said as much: “The rise of authoritarian populism has been most pronounced in countries where governments have done too little (to address poverty, inequality, insecurity, and so forth), not where they have done too much.”

Dr. Snyder’s antidote to the rising authoritarianism is live by our enduring values that all Americans hold—Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness—rather than succumb to the fears and prejudices that divide us.

On Freedom is an expanded sequel to On Tyranny because he tells us not only how to recognize tyranny but how to protect and expand the freedoms we already enjoy because we live in a democracy whose institutions protect fact from fiction, truth from lies; which Dr. Snyder labels as positive freedom vs. negative freedom; the value of values, vs. just the absence of barriers; a sense of togetherness rather than partisan divide.

Positive freedom is the most important value of all.

Nobel Prize-Winners Daren Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in their new book, Why Nations Fail, have studied which countries grow and nurture a greater equality of opportunity for its citizens. It is because they have strong democratic institutions.

Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences, in awarding the latest Nobel memorial prize in economics to them, and Simon Johnson, said “Reducing the vast differences in income between countries is one of our time’s greatest challenges. The (Nobel) laureates have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for achieving this.”

It is a case of the exploiters; wealthy individuals who would limit freedoms to prevent the sharing of their wealth equitably, vs. those who want to expand equal opportunities for all.

Weakening those constraints on the wealthiest is how the Reagan administration and Big Business in 1980 began the deregulation of whole industries as well as financial markets. The wall was breached between commercial FDIC guaranteed banks and much more loosely regulated investment banks that enabled sophisticated investors to gamble with federally insured deposits.

Government oversight was so weakened that another Republican administration failed to carry out its core mandate of protecting Americans. The GW Bush administration failed to anticipate the 9/11 Twin Towers attack and the Great Recession that followed in the same decade.

Republican economic policies have performed badly because they have lobbied for weaker institutions; particularly in the red states they govern; as well tax cuts that have created massive budget deficits with little to show for it. These states have restricted many freedoms, such women’s right to make decisions about their own body, union organizing and minimizing health care benefits for their poorest citizens.

In fact, Republican administrations have attempted more than 30 times to repeal Obamacare, the only health care law that makes health insurance available to all Americans, regardless of preexisting conditions.

That is why “We need government to build the architecture of the American Dream, whether it be autonomous and public universities or functional public roads,” says Snyder.

Our government needs to do more to protect the constitution and our laws than we have done in the past, that Americans thought were not needed in less dangerous times.

We are at a turning point because such a ‘hands off’ attitude towards laws and regulations is allowing a Republican presidential candidate who said he admires Hitler’s generals, Vladimir Putin as a ‘genius’, and was labeled by former Chief of General Staff Mark Milley, “fascist to the core” to possibly become President again.

We need a government and laws representative of its citizens that is strong enough to make the American Dream available to all Americans for democracy to work. When it has been weakened by those wanting an autocracy over democracy, we have the partisan divide of today that is tearing Americans apart.

Concentrating all power in the hands of the few is the goal of authoritarian governments, and the purpose of weak democratic governments. It is what happened to the American economy over the past 40 years when it chose to ignore the guardrails that protected Americans.

We are at such a turning point today, says Dr. Snyder. “My kids have a chance. We all do. This world can be ever so much better.”

We can make the American Dream we believe in work for all, not the few.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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Bidenomics Is Working!

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Popular Economics Weekly

Financial FAQs

Brad Delong

Why are Republicans denigrating Biodenomics, the economic policies passed by a bipartisan congress since 2021 that is causing 3 percent GDP growth and 4.0 percent unemployment, with 8 million job vacancies looking for workers, and inflation back to COVID-19 pre-pandemic levels?

Republicans are playing politics in this election year, of course, but Senator McConnell has touted Biden for replacing major bridges in Kentucky with the Infrastructure Act.

In fact, the U.S. has far outdistanced other developed countries in recovering from the COVID-19. Why? Because President Biden has pulled off a great renaissance of public-private investments with said bipartisan congress, the largest investments in renewing the U.S. economy since Roosevelt pulled off the New Deal during the Great Depression..

Time Magazine described what it is meant to do: “Bidenomics argues that a large and thriving middle class is the primary cause of economic growth. “When the middle class does well, everybody does well,” the President has repeatedly explained. This is the core proposition of Bidenomics: that prosperity grows from the bottom up and the middle out.”

Vice President Harris has echoed that slogan in her campaign, because very few Americans seem to understand Bidenomics at all. A major reason is that four decades of its predecessor; Reaganomics, or Trickle-down economic policies; have badly damaged the middle class, followed by the double-whammy of COVID-19,

A Monmouth University Poll finds that just under half the public gives President Joe Biden credit for this upturn, for instance, but few say his policies are helping the middle class, especially compared to his predecessor.

“The president has been touting ‘Bidenomics,’ but the needle of public opinion has not really moved. Americans are just not giving him a lot of credit when it comes to the economy,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute.

The poll also finds that disapproval of Congress has hit a nominal record for the past decade.

Time Magazine cites a major reason for the pessimism in a new working paper by Carter C. Price and Kathryn Edwards of the RAND Corporation—the record inequality of the past four decades:

“…had the more equitable income distributions of the three decades following World War II (1945 through 1974) merely held steady, the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. “

The authors assert that since the 1970s, some $50 trillion in wealth has been transferred from workers to owners of capital with the massive deregulation of whole industries, including banking, the passing of anti-labor legislation that weakened union collective bargaining, and massive tax cuts for the wealthiest that practically halved the maximum income tax rate from 50 percent in 1980 to 28 percent today.

So, it is no wonder that workers in the Rust Belt Midwest want to return to the ‘good old days’ of post WWII, when income distribution was more equal (but with fewer Black and women’s rights)?

The problem is that has never been Republicans’ agenda, especially MAGA Republicans, still the party of the wealthy attempting to sell their credo that lower taxes and fewer government benefits will benefit all Americans.

Europeans love Bidenomics, however. “With a fast-growing economy, a strong labour market and falling inflation, the US has outpaced its counterparts in Europe and elsewhere, says a recent BBC article. That put the US at 2.5% over the course of the year, outpacing all other advanced economies and on track to do so again in 2024.”

What will it take for Americans to know and value what we have?

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

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