John Case has sent you a link to a blog:
Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: Fwd: Friday interviews confirmed for 8:00 and 8:30 am
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2017/01/fwd-friday-interviews-confirmed-for-800.html
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Friday, January 13, 2017
Thursday, January 12, 2017
Our Resistance
Our Fight to Save Obamacare
I just read an article by Nobel Laureate and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman about the GOP being willing to repeal .Obamacare without a replacement.
Because now 30 million Americans receive get their health insurance from elements of Obamacare and because both coverage of adult children and no pre- existing conditions are so popular, the fascists have backed themselves into a hot , messy corner.
Obamacare is very controversial--Except for its Elements.
The fascists' opposition to Obamacare created the internal necessity to destroy it--despite it's Very Popular Elements.
Because so much of the coverage of Obamacare comes through. Medicaid, the destruction of Obamacare is an Attack on Medicare.
Congressional Democrats must fight the fascists by focussing on the popular elements of the policy.
The intended destruction of Obamacare is An Attack on Medicaid.
Sent from my iPhone
I just read an article by Nobel Laureate and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman about the GOP being willing to repeal .Obamacare without a replacement.
Because now 30 million Americans receive get their health insurance from elements of Obamacare and because both coverage of adult children and no pre- existing conditions are so popular, the fascists have backed themselves into a hot , messy corner.
Obamacare is very controversial--Except for its Elements.
The fascists' opposition to Obamacare created the internal necessity to destroy it--despite it's Very Popular Elements.
Because so much of the coverage of Obamacare comes through. Medicaid, the destruction of Obamacare is an Attack on Medicare.
Congressional Democrats must fight the fascists by focussing on the popular elements of the policy.
The intended destruction of Obamacare is An Attack on Medicaid.
Sent from my iPhone
Re: [socialist-econ] There Will Be No Obamacare Replacement [feedly]
The fascists created their own Monster. They campaigned on Obamacare is a disaster and created the need amongst their base to destroy it--even tho very large elements of their base desperately need Obamacare.
Sent from my iPhone
--....really, Prof Krugman, only Comey and Putin?There Will Be No Obamacare Replacement
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/01/there-will-be-no-obamacare-replacement.htmlPaul Krugman:
There Will Be No Obamacare Replacement: You may be surprised at the evident panic now seizing Republicans, who finally — thanks to James Comey and Vladimir Putin — are in a position to do what they always wanted, and kill Obamacare. How can it be that they're not ready with a replacement plan?That is, you may be surprised if you spent the entire Obama era paying no attention to the substantive policy issues — which is a pretty good description of the Republicans, now that you think about it.From the beginning, those of us who did think it through realized that anything like universal coverage could only be achieved in one of two ways: single payer, which was not going to be politically possible, or a three-legged stool of regulation, mandates, and subsidies. Here's how I put it exactly 7 years ago...It's actually amazing how thoroughly the right turned a blind eye to this logic, and some — maybe even a majority — are still in denial. But this is as ironclad a policy argument as I've ever seen; and it means that you can't tamper with the basic structure without throwing tens of millions of people out of coverage. You can't even scale back the spending very much — Obamacare is somewhat underfunded as is.Will they decide to go ahead anyway, and risk opening the eyes of working-class voters to the way they've been scammed? I have no idea. But if Republicans do end up paying a big political price for their willful policy ignorance, it couldn't happen to more deserving people.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
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Rodrik: Trump’s Defective Industrial Policy
Trump's Defective Industrial Policy
CAMBRIDGE – US President-elect Donald Trump has yet to take office, but his brand of flawed industrial policy has been on full display since his surprise win in November.
Within weeks of the election, Trump had already claimed a victory. Through a mix of inducements and intimidation, he prevailed on the heating and cooling firm Carrier to keep some of its operations in Indiana, "saving" around 1,000 American jobs. Touring the Carrier plant subsequently, he warned other US firms that he would impose stiff tariffs on them if they moved plants overseas and shipped products back home.
His Twitter account has produced a stream of commentary in the same vein. He has taken credit for Ford's decision keep a Lincoln plant in Kentucky, rather than move it to Mexico. He has threatened General Motors with import tariffs if it continues to import Chevrolet Cruzes from Mexico instead of making them in the United States.
Trump has also hounded defense contractors for cost overruns, berating the aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin on separate occasions for producing planes that are too expensive.
Trump's policy style represents a sharp break from that of his predecessors. It is highly personalized and temperamental. It relies on threats and bullying. It is prone to boasting, exaggeration, and lies about actual successes. It is a type of public spectacle, staged on Twitter. And it is deeply corrosive of democratic norms.
Economists tend to advocate an arm's-length relationship between government and business. Public officials are supposed to insulate themselves from private firms, lest they be corrupted and engage in favoritism. This is a prized principle in the US – but one that is more often breached than observed. An obvious example is the undeniable influence over US government policy exercised by finance moguls during the last three decades.
Yet close business-government interactions also lie behind many of America's successes. The history of US economic development is one of pragmatic partnerships and collaboration between the public and private sector, rather than arm's-length relationships and rigid rules. As historically minded economists and policy analysts such as Michael Lind, Stephen Cohen, and Brad DeLong have reminded us, the US is heir to a Hamiltonian tradition in which the federal government provides the investment, infrastructure, finance, and other support that private enterprise needs.
US technological innovation owes as much to specific government programs, such as loan assistance or government purchases as it does to American entrepreneurs' and inventors' ingenuity. As Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner notes, some of the most dynamic technology companies in the US, including Apple and Intel, received financial support from the government before going public. The electric carmaker Tesla was a beneficiary of the same public loan guarantee program as Solyndra, the solar cell company that went bust in 2011 in a spectacular public collapse.
As the Solyndra example illustrates, many public initiatives fail. But the ultimate test is whether the social return on the portfolio as a whole is positive, taking successes together with the flops. Such broad evaluations tend to be rare. But one analysis found that US programs to boost energy efficiency had produced positive net benefits. Interestingly, the bulk of the benefits were attributable to three relatively modest projects.
Sociologists Fred Block and Matthew Keller have provided perhaps the best analysis of the US "developmental state" – a reality that they say the reigning market-fundamentalist ideology has obscured. Block and Keller describe how a "decentralized network of publicly funded laboratories" and an "alphabet soup" of financing initiatives, such as the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, work with private firms and help them commercialize their products. They and their colleagues have documented the extensive role of both federal and state governments in supporting the collaborative networks on which innovation rests – whether in biotech, green technologies, or nanotech.
Such industrial policies, based on close collaboration and coordination between the public and private sectors, have of course been the hallmark of East Asian economic policymaking. It is difficult to imagine China's transformation into a manufacturing powerhouse – and the attendant success of its export-oriented model – without the Chinese government's helping and guiding hand. It is ironic that the same people who extol Chinese gains from globalization are often alarmed that a US administration may copy the Chinese approach and explicitly endorse industrial policies.
Unlike China, of course, the US purports to be a democracy. And industrial policy in a democracy requires transparency, accountability, and institutionalization. The relationship between the government and private firms has to be calibrated carefully. Government agencies need to be close enough to private enterprises to elicit the requisite information about the technological and market realities on the ground. For example, what are the fundamental reasons for the loss of manufacturing jobs in, say, automobile production, and how can the government help, if at all? But they cannot get so close to private firms that they end up in companies' pocket, or, at the other extreme, simply order them around.
And that is where industrial policy à la Trump fails to pass the test. On one hand, his appointments to key economic positions indicate he has little intention of severing government ties to Wall Street and big finance. On the other hand, his policymaking-by-tweet suggests he doesn't have much interest in building the institutionalized dialogue, with all the required safeguards, that sound industrial policy requires.
This means that we can expect the Trump administration's industrial policy to vacillate between cronyism and bullying. That may benefit some; but it will do little good for the overwhelming majority of American workers or the economy as a whole.
John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
Harpers Ferry, WV
The Winners and Losers Radio Show
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The Earnings Gap between Black and White Men [feedly]
The Earnings Gap between Black and White Men
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/01/the-earnings-gap-between-black-and-white-men.html
-- via my feedly newsfeed
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/01/the-earnings-gap-between-black-and-white-men.html
John Laidler at the NBER Digest:
The Earnings Gap between Black and White Men: Since the end of slavery a century and a half ago, differences between the earnings of black and white Americans have been a reality of the U.S. labor market. Among working men, this gap narrowed sharply between 1940 and 1970 and has remained largely stable ever since. In Divergent Paths: Structural Change, Economic Rank, and the Evolution of Black-White Earnings Differences, 1940-2014, (NBER Working Paper No. 22797), Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles point out that focusing only on those who are employed fails to account for the growing numbers of men who are not working for a number of reasons. This group includes those who are unemployed, disabled, or no longer searching for work, as well as the rising number of individuals who are incarcerated.
Among working men, "the median earnings gap between blacks and white fell by almost 60 percent from 1940 to 1980 (with large decreases in the 1940s and 1960s) but has been essentially flat ever since, remaining in the 35-40 percent range in every sample from 1980-2014," the researchers report. But when they consider the entire population of men, they find that the earnings gap has actually widened substantially in recent decades. In 2010, the gap in the population as a whole was comparable to that in 1950.
Their analysis, which focuses on the black-white earnings differences among prime-aged men from 1940 through the Great Recession, "points to the incredible lack of progress and, in many cases, regress in closing the gaps in labor market outcomes for black and white men."
The findings are most striking among median- and low-income blacks, whose position relative to median-income whites changed little in the seven-decade study period. In 1940, the earnings of a median-income black earner fell at the 24th percentile of the earnings distribution for whites. At the time of the Great Recession, the comparable black earners' earnings fall at the 27th percentile of the earnings distribution for whites—only a slight improvement in rank over the entire 75-year study period.
In contrast, a black earner at the 90th percentile of the distribution for African Americans saw progress relative to the earnings of whites. In 1940, the earnings of the 90th percentile black were comparable to those of the median white, but by the late 2000s, this earnings level had risen to the 75th percentile in the white earnings distribution.
The racial earnings gap around the median narrowed from 1940-70, due largely to broad economic forces which reduced the income disparities among all workers. But since then, the relative gains made by low-skilled blacks through improved education have been countered by the growing overall connection between education and economic rank, the researchers find. "Racial convergence in educational attainment would have led to strong positional gains for black men at the median and below, except that these men faced strong structural headwinds from the simultaneously rising returns to education, both in terms of wages and in the probability of employment," the researchers find.
By contrast, high-skilled black men have moved closer to their white counterparts in income, which the researchers suggest has been due to more-equal access to quality higher education and high-skilled occupations.
"While the entire economy has experienced a marked increase in earnings inequality, this increase has been even more dramatic for black men," the researchers find, "with those at the top continuing to make clear gains within the earnings distribution, and those at the bottom being especially harmed by the era of mass incarceration and the failing job market for men with low skills." The impact of rising incarceration is particularly striking: The incarceration rate tripled for black men between 1980 and 2010, from 2.6 percent to 8.3 percent of the population. The rate quintupled for white men, but remained much lower, at 1.5 percent of the population.
The researchers conclude that education "has played a subtle but extremely important role in the evolution of the racial earnings gap," both fueling and stalling progress.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
There Will Be No Obamacare Replacement [feedly]
....really, Prof Krugman, only Comey and Putin?
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/01/there-will-be-no-obamacare-replacement.html
Paul Krugman:
There Will Be No Obamacare Replacement: You may be surprised at the evident panic now seizing Republicans, who finally — thanks to James Comey and Vladimir Putin — are in a position to do what they always wanted, and kill Obamacare. How can it be that they're not ready with a replacement plan?
That is, you may be surprised if you spent the entire Obama era paying no attention to the substantive policy issues — which is a pretty good description of the Republicans, now that you think about it.
From the beginning, those of us who did think it through realized that anything like universal coverage could only be achieved in one of two ways: single payer, which was not going to be politically possible, or a three-legged stool of regulation, mandates, and subsidies. Here's how I put it exactly 7 years ago...
It's actually amazing how thoroughly the right turned a blind eye to this logic, and some — maybe even a majority — are still in denial. But this is as ironclad a policy argument as I've ever seen; and it means that you can't tamper with the basic structure without throwing tens of millions of people out of coverage. You can't even scale back the spending very much — Obamacare is somewhat underfunded as is.
Will they decide to go ahead anyway, and risk opening the eyes of working-class voters to the way they've been scammed? I have no idea. But if Republicans do end up paying a big political price for their willful policy ignorance, it couldn't happen to more deserving people.
-- via my feedly newsfeed
Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio:How to get a raise, on Labor Beat Radio
John Case has sent you a link to a blog:
Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: How to get a raise, on Labor Beat Radio
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2017/01/how-to-get-raise-on-labor-beat-radio.html
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Blog: Eastern Panhandle Independent Community (EPIC) Radio
Post: How to get a raise, on Labor Beat Radio
Link: http://www.enlightenradio.org/2017/01/how-to-get-raise-on-labor-beat-radio.html
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