Friday, November 1, 2019

What We Can Do

From Ken's Class

  •  A class member asked me last week “If you’re gone one week, can you find the films online to catch-up?” Yes, in most cases, see below.
  • Week #1 “Inequality for All” w/ Robert Reich > 
Netflix > https://www.netflix.com/title/70267834 Subscription 

  • Week #2 “American Winter > 
iTunes > https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/american-winter/id943268941 Rent HD $4.99 Buy HD $10.99

  • Week #3 “A Place at the Table” >
Google Play > https://play.google.com/store/movies/details?id=Stx5PGsFj20 Rent HD $3.99 Buy $9.99

  • Week #4 “Heist: Who Sole the American Dream?” > 
Distrify > http://www.heist-themovie.com/ Buy HD from $3.99

Ø  Week #5 “Citizen U.S.A.”



Ø  Week #6 Angela Glover Blackwell on the American Dream April 13, 2012 (45:26)http://billmoyers.com/segment/angela-glover-blackwell-on-the-american-dream/

Ø  Week #7 “The House I Live In” >
+ Amazon https://www.amazon.com/House-I-Live-FilmBuff/dp/B00B19HFMK Rent HD $3.99, Buy HD $9.99

Ø  Week #8 “Money-Driven Medicine” > http://newsreel.org/video/MONEY-DRIVEN-MEDICINE
 Capitalism as the problem.

  • Five myths about capitalism - Maybe greed isn’t so good.

Myth No. 1 - Greed,  natural human instinct, makes markets work.

Myth No. 2 – Corporations must be run to maximize value for shareholders.

Myth No. 3 – Workers’ pay is an objective measure of economic contribution.

Myth No. 4 – Equality of opportunity is all people need to climb the economic ladder.

Myth No. 5 – Making the economy fairer will make it smaller and less prosperous.

By Steven Pearlstein - Steven Pearlstein, a Washington Post economics columnist and the Robinson professor of public affairs at George Mason University, is the author of “Can American Capitalism Survive?” September 28, 2018 

SOLUTIONS for Wall Street and Capitalism Abuses:

  • What Should Be Done? Charles Ferguson - author of the Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century
Bring the financial sector under control:
  • Reform, and tightly regulate, compensation structures at the individual, corporate, and industry levels.
  • Break up the largest banks.
  • Greatly strengthen the power and political independence of regulation and white-collar criminal law enforcement.
  • Tax financial transactions.
  • Tax financial sector income fairly.
  • Close loopholes for activities such as “innovations” designed for tax avoidance or for betting against one’s own securities.
Natural result of proper re-regulation of the financial sector:
  • Reduce its size, concentration & political power.
Many benefits:
  • Increasing the supply of talented people for more productive activities.
  • Reducing the pressures for political corruption.

Control the impact of money on politics:
  • Lobbying and political contributions should be heavily taxed .
  • Government and regulator salaries should be raised sharply, in return for strict prohibitions on revolving-door behavior.
  • Some form of public campaign financing for political campaigns should be mandatory.

Reform the tax system:
  • Both the individual and corporate, so as to raise revenues, increase fairness, and mitigate against the forms of hereditary and financial oligarchies.
  • Extremely high estate taxes are one important element of this, as is the fair taxation of very high financial sector incomes.

Greatly strengthen antitrust policy and the regulation of corporate governance
  • Antitrust policy and analysis have fallen victim to corruption in two ways:
  1. The corruption of U.S. government policy through campaign finance, lobbying, and revolving-door hiring.
  2. The corruption of the economics discipline that supplies the economic analysis, and the personnel, behind antitrust decisions.
Ø  In the areas of industrial organization, regulation, corporate governance, and antitrust theory, the economics discipline doesn’t just need reform; it needs a five-organ transplant and a yearlong stay at a reeducation camp.
  • More generally, America needs to figure out how to keep large, mature industries from going the way of General Motors, U.S. Steel, AT&T, Microsoft, or for that matter Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, either by deep reforms in corporate governance, by breaking up large and stagnant companies, or by creating other mechanisms for new entry in mature industries.

Improve educational opportunity and quality is fundamental.
  • A country cannot compete economically, elect wise leaders, or call itself a fair society if it has a 25 percent school drop rate, or if only the wealthy can attend good schools. Here, there is a fairness issue that not even a bank CEO can openly deny. If there is one thing that nearly everyone can agree on, it is that all children deserve a fair chance. If a child is born in a poor area, or to drug-addicted parents, it isn’t the baby’s fault. And yet the way we handle school funding, child nutrition, foster care, and child poverty remain shameful, especially in the U.S., and if anything, threaten to become more so. Beyond this, a well-educated population yields a far happier, more prosperous society. As it stands, we are wasting a startlingly high fraction of our people, in ways that are painful and very expensive.

Create a truly universally accessible, high-speed broadband Internet infrastructure, both wireline and wireless.
  • Broadband deployment should be viewed in much the same terms that a government deploys a national road system. If anything, broadband deployment is more important than transport, as a way to decrease foreign strategy dependence, insure security, and reduce global warning.

  • Week #9 Capitalism & Wall Street MS Power Point presentation slides: Please see the attached slides from Week #4.


Tuesday, October 29, 2019

The Debt and Economists

Debt, Doomsayers and Double Standards
Selective deficit hysteria has done immense damage.
By Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as an Op-Ed columnist. He is distinguished professor in the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D. program and distinguished scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York. In addition, he is professor emeritus of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.  More


Monday, October 28, 2019

Economist - Medicare for All will save us each money



Make No Mistake: Medicare for All Would Cut Taxes for Most Americans



Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
October 25, 2019
The Guardian


Not only would universal healthcare reduce taxes for most people, it would also lead to the biggest take-home pay raise in a generation for most workers



Supporters of Medicare for All are Right, Yana Paskova/Reuters


The debate about healthcare has been at the center of the Democratic primaries, yet it is hard to make sense of the conversation. For some, public universal health insurance – such as Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill – would involve massive tax increases for the middle class. For others, it’s the opposite: Medicare for All would cut costs for most Americans. Who is right?

The starting point of any intelligent conversation about health in America must be that it’s a cost for all of us – and a massive one. The United States spends close to 20% of its national income on health. Elderly Americans and low-income families are covered by public insurance programs (Medicare and Medicaid, respectively), funded by tax dollars (payroll taxes and general government revenue). The rest of the population must obtain coverage by a private company, which they typically get via their employers. Insurance, in that case, is funded by non-tax payments: health insurance premiums.

Although they are not officially called taxes, insurance premiums paid by employers are just like taxes – but taxes paid to private insurers instead of paid to the government. Like payroll taxes, they reduce your wage. Like taxes, they are mandatory, or quasi-mandatory. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, it has become compulsory to be insured, and employers with more than 50 full-time workers are required to enroll their workers in a health insurance plan.

A frequent objection to calling health insurance premiums a tax is that people have some choice. Can’t the poor, the argument goes, enroll in cheap health plans? If you start calling health insurance premiums a tax, then shouldn’t we also call spending on food and clothes a tax?

This argument, however, is wrong, because cheap healthcare does not exist. There are cheap meals, there are cheap clothes, but there is no cheap way to treat your heart attack, to cure your cancer, or to give birth. Cheap health insurance means no healthcare when you need it. All wealthy nations, even those that try hard to control costs, spend 10% of their national income on health – the equivalent of $7,500 a year per adult in the United States. The view that healthcare services are like haircuts or restaurant meals – services for which there is a product tailored to any budget – is a myth. Healthcare is like education: everybody needs it, regardless of their budget, but it’s expensive. That’s why all advanced economies, except the United States, fund it through taxation.

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Tax Our Way Back to Justice

How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice
It is absurd that the working class is now paying higher tax rates than the richest people in America.
By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman
The authors are economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
·       Oct. 11, 2019

Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Public Option for Health Care ?

The ‘Public Option’ on Health Care Is a Poison Pill
Some Democratic candidates are pushing it as a free-choice version of Medicare for All. That’s good rhetoric but bad policy.

https://www.thenation.com/article/insurance-health-care-medicare/