IdeasConnect

Make Children Top Priority in Budget Battles

"As Congress struggles over deficit reduction and the budget, we must ensure that the needs of children will not be sacrificed to protect the richest and most powerful citizens and corporations. Contact your members of Congress and tell them to protect children’s safety nets and to invest in their health, education and well being.

Include a personal story or one relevant to your congressional district or state to give your message more of an impact:"

https://secure.childrensdefense.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=411

"As you and your colleagues debate ways to reduce the national debt, I urge you to consider children first and make them your top priority in your budget decisions."

Progressive Unchained Meritocratic Capitalism

Context: Is Meritocracy Good? by James Kwak on The Baseline Scenario

 

Agree to the extent that merit has some of the same element of lottery (talent part of it) as does family background. However, one part of merit is also the work one put in to build on one’s God endowed talent. agree that mere Education (especially when even that Education is unaffordably expensive for many) does not create a normative case for higher earning by itself, unless you can demonstrate it’s utility in an untinkered, un authority-manipulated marketplace:

http://www.nolanchart.com/article6125_RiskSterilization_of_PinStriped_Market_Careers__Its_Consequences.html

Yet It is a societal mistake to scuttle merit and emphasize behavioral suaveness and political navigation through the entrenched power structures - as has occurred under the Corporato Topdown socialism in the last few decades, with its accent on doing well via "Corporate Ettiquetes", "Managing to survive 'Superiors'", while the Government shares the responsibility for Corporate Toplines and Bottomlines. Any ' lottery' - other than straight merit wrt the exact work one does on paper - gives sub optimal results for society. Having a system in which those in power take in new people and promote them as they 'assess' best within the organization 'system' eventually rots, because it does not receive the best from meritorious people - as the mediocres are forever more open to sucking/managing their way up than are meritorious people. Worse, if the latter actually get pushed into the illegal-immoral pathways to get their merit their due, the society is even worser off. So, a system of (individual merit . Progressive taxation) is perhaps the best. With it’s progressive tax haul, the Gov provides for equality for opportunity, not outcomes, and not suppression or "management" of merit and it's achievement- for oneself and for making society better off.

Ohm

Are Republicans Overplaying Their Hand?

Are Republicans Overplaying Their Hand?

2010 was essentially a mandate against inverted socialism - against Executive bailouts and welfare, of the very """leaders""" that failed the World. Only the Tea Party reflected that outrage with sincerity, so it emerged with the most impressive election gains. However, TP seems to have taken a wild notion that it were their extreme and core positions on zero tax and zero deficit and no_social_safety_net_Bottom-or-Top that were ratified by the electorate. So it is pushing the parts that actually have little traction generally -- that's why its rallies now get mere 300 people out of which 100+ are contributed by the media! However, neither mainstream Conservatives nor Liberals have really taken on reverse Socialism, there isn't even a sincere sounding outrage against GE's effectively NEGATIVE taxation from any political block...so 2010 mandate actually stands lost. Nobody's gained from it for 2012 (bcos everyone has ignored it), while the ~ centre types voters that joined the Tea Party for 2010 are now so-to-speak the losers.

Corporate Skew

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/03/are-ceos-overpaid.html#tpe-action-resize-392

the problem with a self-mandated (as opposed to electorally (re)mandated one like most modern Govs) system [and I see widely held public listed companies as practically self-mandated since I do not believe there is any real thing called Shareholder Democracy in actual operation] is that its feudalism has little scope of correcting, it just gets worse. We get left with little choice but to accept the payouts to the Executive and the facilitator layers, disproprtionate to their value add (another problem is how to even quantify that value add). So a practical view needs to be taken, some legal thumb rules to be imposed (agreed that its easier said than effectively achieved). The thing is, the Wall Street run system has given Capital Appreciation as a substitute for dividends for shareholders, but the salary curve skewing within the Org, beyond a point, helps! kill aggregate demand in the economy, and unless you can legally contain the skew OR have a reckless credit bubble to counter it, the economy, and number of people able to particpate, shrinks.

The "Shareholder Democracy in Public Companies" Fairy Tale!

Felix Salmon: “At risk, then, is the shareholder democracy that America forged, slowly, over the past 50 years. Civilians, rather than plutocrats, controlled corporate America, and that relationship improved standards of living and usually kept the worst of corporate abuses in check…..”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/opinion/14Salmon.html)

Wha..at! In public listed corps, when was the last time shareholders that actually supervised the running of the business, eh!? THAT only happens in closely held companies…exactly the ones whose increase in numbers Salmon’s lamenting! In public listed companies, all stock'holders' are mere pocker players, with their bets, for the most part, outsourced to mutual fund managers at that. "Shareholder Demo" ' s just a nice sounding term. Salmoan's whole piece is heterogenous mumbo jumbo aimed at...dunno what.

Gov policy (of decreasing returns from fixed return instruments) has been squarely to “credit” for the returns people got from the stockmarket casino, NOT the delusionary “shareholder democracy” (whaz-zat!?)

http://economiccircuit.blogspot.com/2011/02/intelligent-design-is-intelligent.html

"If it is reasonable to sAy that one deserves whatever one has stolen, then it is reasonable to say that the banksters deserve their money"!

tiny.cc/cprhn

Isn't this Worse Model than Communism?

“(Cisco) The giant networking company warned that sales will miss forecasts because of a dramatic drop in orders from austerity crazed European governments and U.S. states forced to balance revenue starved budgets. Simply put, when governments order technology products they are creating private sector jobs.”

http://www.escapethenewgreatdepression.com/2010/11/11/early-evidence-public-austerity-killing-private-sector-jobs/

In Communism, Govt creates and maintains all types of jobs, and gets to decide how much each job it sustains will pay. In the above paradigm, Govt maintains jobs in "private" organizations with no control over what it's Executives award themselves. Surely this is nonsense - worse than Communism.

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Financial Sector Opulance on Public Policy

“Over the past 30 years, the economics profession – in economics departments, and in business, public policy, and law schools – has become so compromised by conflicts of interest that it now functions almost as a support group for financial services and other industries whose profits depend heavily on government policy.”

www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2010.10.24/1192.html

http://tiny.cc/MarketCareers

Where the REAL Deficit Lies..

"the idea that the deficit is the nation's biggest long-term problem, and that we owe it to our grandchildren to fix the problem now....is false.

The real threat to our economy and to our grandchildren is our decaying infrastructure; an environmentally and technologically unsustainable dependence on wasteful energy consumption and a growing population without access to adequate education or health care.

The budget deficit is a symptom - not the cause - of an **out-of-balance economy** increasingly based on speculation and profiteering instead of production of useful goods and services. Instead of a deficit commission, we need a commission for an industrial policy for America's physical and social infrastructure."

http://peoplesworld.org/the-deficit-trap/

Circular Hoodwink!

From, "Wall Street's Global Race to the Bottom"

http://robertreich.org/post/1245725732

"Their main argument is if regulations are too tight, the big banks will be less competitive internationally. Translated: They’ll move more of their business to London and Frankfurt, where regulations will be looser.

Meanwhile, Wall Street is warning Europeans that if their financial regulations are too tight, the big banks will move more of their business to the US, where regulations will be looser.

Two weeks ago, after the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (a global financial regulatory oversight body) came up with a new set of rules to toughen bank capital and liquidity requirements, European officials threatened to get even tougher. They approved a new system of European regulatory bodies with added powers to ban certain financial products or activities in times of market stress."