McClatchy News has the story Senate to take up student loans, resuming partisan debate.

Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin agrees with Baldwin that student debt is a big problem, but his view of the issue couldn’t be more different. While Baldwin says decreases in student aid and state education funding have exacerbated student debt, Johnson contends that government spending has fueled the problem by making it too easy for students to borrow money.

I just don’t understand why this Republican ploy works, the more untruthful and illogical the Republicans’ stance is, the more it seems to work for them.  Could it be the tremendous wealth behind their political campaigns and the fact that they just need to stop the government from doing anything to get what they want? Is this what makes them so powerful in this country?

In fact the support from government at all levels for higher education has been cut over the last 30 to 40 years, and the costs no longer paid for by government have been shifted onto the students.  The Republicans feign surprise at this logical reaction, and want to give us an even stronger dose of the poison that is killing us.

Perhaps the public is waking up to the fact that counter-intuitive explanations for what is happening to our country are not surprisingly correct.  They are just as wrong as their intuition says they are.

As the Wizard of Oz said, “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.  Republican wizardry is a better explanation for how to fix what ails you than all logic would have you believe?  You just have to have faith.  Maybe that is why the Republicans are in such favor with the religious right.  The more outrageous the claim, the stronger the faith is to hold onto it.

This article, Florida may have accidentally banned access to the Internet, comes from the Rachel Maddow show.

 The lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court on behalf of Incredible Investments, LLC, owned by Consuelo Zapata, alleges that the Legislature effectively applied the ban to all computers when it defined illegal slot machines as any “system or network of devices” that may be used in a game of chance. The state effectively made every smartphone and computer an illegal device, the plaintiff argues.

Just one more thing we northerners must be wary of when we vacation in Florida.  I am sure that none of my relatives who live in Florida would ever consider playing a game of chance on the computer.  However, that still may not absolve them of the crime.  The device is illegal if it “may be used in a game of chance”.  So even if you don’t actually use it in a game of chance, it is illegal.  Sort of like possessing marijuana even if you don’t smoke it?

CBS News has the story, U.S. health “mediocre” compared to other wealthy countries.

“The United States spends the most per capita on health care across all countries, lacks universal health coverage, and lags behind other high-income countries for life expectancy and many other health outcome measures,” wrote the authors of the new report, published June 10 in JAMA.

Don’t bother me with facts. We all know that the US has the best health care in the world. Karl Rove told me so. These people must all be using fuzzy math.

No socialized medicine could possibly beat the free market system we have. All the Republicans in Congress know that. Government simply does not work. Every time you give the Republicans a bit of power they easily demonstrate how government does not work. Even from a minority position, Republicans have a ready supply of monkey wrenches to throw into the gears of government. When will people ever learn?

Free market!!!! Free Market!!! FREE MARKET!!!

The Boston Globe has published the OpEd piece Unverified science: Studies that can’t be replicated create a problem with trust — and funds.  The fortuitous publication of this piece this morning gives me a place to comment with the letter to the editor that I composed in my mind last night while trying to go to sleep.

If the editors of The Boston Globe read this piece, they would immediately stop publishing the series “Uncommon Knowledge”.

I imagine the quandary of the people putting together such a column.  They must search for results that are unexpected, counter-intuitive, and surprising.  After an item meets these criteria, I wonder if anybody asks whether this is good science, repeatable, the conclusions fit the data, and are the most probable explanation of the data. In other words, could the experiment they describe possibly measure the effect they were trying to study?

I’d rather see a series with a headline that concentrated on items that were significant, backed by well run studies, with repeatable results that were an accurate measure of the effect being  studied.

The “Uncommon Knowledge” series cannot be a good way to support science which is one of the most important enterprises of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Atlantic has a very interesting if inappropriately titled article, Big Money vs. Bernanke: Who’s Right About the Economy? The value of the article is not in addressing who is right and who is wrong, which it does not address. The value is in the following explanation:

For a few months now, quite a few hedge fund managers have complained loudly about the Fed. Their protests reflect the difficulties of investing in manipulated markets which, at times, can be quite “irrational” – at least according to their analytical, historical and mental models. They hate interacting in markets where central banks act both as competitors (with better visibility and information) and referees (seemingly happy to change the rules at a whim).

So this is why the hedge funds reacted so strongly about Bernanke’s mild announcement that the Fed may gently moderate its current policies some time in the unforeseeable future.

I don’t think we want large hedge funds that are too large to fail to be playing games with markets that are supposed to be used as aids to the real economy. Perhaps the U.S. government needs to be in some international discussions on how to regulate the hedge funds just as it did recently with international treaties on banks.

I think it is commendable that the Fed can step in and slap these hedge funds around until they are so punch drunk that they cannot function.

PBS has the story and video Should We Fear “the End of Work”?

The best parts of this story (or perhaps unique parts) come when they ask the fundamental question of how the wealth will be distributed. The part that is not unique is that many of the people who specifically think they are addressing this part of the problem spout nostrums that have little to do with solving the problem.

Educating every one to a very high level, does not automatically solve the problem. One person mentions that there are now half a million people writing apps for smart phones. This is supposed to be an example of the new jobs that will keep people employed. Yet, even this job can be automated. There will still be more people in the world than we need to create all the apps that everyone will want. We still need to figure out how people are going to be able to buy all the wonders that technology can produce.

There is a little more meat in the written article than there is in the video. Perhaps the following is the best we can expect at this stage of exploring the issue.

By now, if you’re feeling like the views expressed are all over the map, bewilderingly so, and wondering “okay, now what?,” I’m with you. The challenge for the American economy in the 21st century — how to compete successfully in an ever aggressive global economy and yet ensure that a wide swath of Americans benefit from that success — is dauntingly complex. We’re only just starting to grapple with what’s coming and what’s needed.

If there was a conclusion, it centered on the responsibility of leadership in society and its institutions — in not surrendering to a paralyzing sense of inevitability about the march of technology and the jobs it is trampling in the process. From his seat on Wall Street, Steven Berkenfeld targeted the business community:

“There is a real need for corporate leadership, and there is a need for accountability. When companies engage in productivity layoffs with record profitability, unprecedented levels of cash and all-time-high stock prices, no one in the media says, ‘Isn’t this terrible?’ No political leader speaks up to protest. We don’t hear anything from the labor unions. The companies are applauded for it because they’re cutting costs and improving profitability, and that’s supposedly what a company exists for. But it’s not that simple. They do have other responsibilities.”

Let me finish with Thomas Kochan’s plea for a renewed sense of national activism to forcefully change the course of an economy that just doesn’t seem to be working for the benefit of the vast majority of Americans. In Kochan’s words, it just doesn’t have to be this way:

“In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.

“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.

“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.

“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.

“If we don’t start to take the leadership,” Kochan concluded, “it isn’t going to come from anywhere else.”

The other change from the past that we need to account for is the declining dominance of the United States in the world economy. When the United States dominated and India and China were tiny economic powers, it was easier to solve problems on only a national level. Now with corporations able to move across international borders if they do not like the policies of a particular country, increasingly the solutions must be international.

You may not like the idea of international government, but the global economy is not asking whether or not you like it. It is just something we will have to deal with whether we like it or not. We cannot stop the trend.

Moneynews.com has the article Billionaires Dumping Stocks, Economist Knows Why.

I’ll pick out a few quotes so that you get the idea of what this story is about.

So why are these billionaires dumping their shares of U.S. companies?

It’s very likely that these professional investors are aware of specific research that points toward a massive market correction, as much as 90%.

One such person publishing this research is Robert Wiedemer, an esteemed economist and author of the New York Times best-selling book Aftershock.

So how do your know this article is a come-on?  This article is full of teasers for Wiedener, but the one thing that is totally absent from the article is any hint of where these billionaires are putting the money they reaped from dumping their shares.

Of course the following quotes are probably even more damning to the credibility of the article.

Wiedemer’s video interview also contains a comprehensive blueprint for economic survival that’s really commanding global attention.

Now viewed over 40 million times, it was initially screened for a relatively small, private audience. But the overwhelming amount of feedback from viewers who felt the interview should be widely publicized came with consequences, as various online networks repeatedly shut it down and affiliates refused to house the content.

Quick, get in on the secret that only 40,000,000 people know.  This secret has a conspiracy that is trying to suppress it.  Act on this secret news while you can still be the 40,000,001 person who gets in on the ground floor of this secret.

This information is commanding global attention that only you can be privy too.  Sounds like the maxim attributed to Yogi Berra about a restaurant in New York, “Nobody goes there anymore because it is too crowded.”  This information can’t be getting global attention and still be much of a secret.

What is this world coming to? I don’t think I ever had to do this on my job.

The web site mentioned in the video is fixmyjob.com

You spend a big part of your life at work.

Don’t you deserve a fair treatment and the chance to work up to your full potential?

Here is the TED talk that introduces what this is all about.

Rootstrikers is the organization being set up by Lawrence Lessig.

The Los Angeles Times has the article Federal Reserve adopts tougher rules on bank reserves.

The Federal Reserve adopted tougher requirements for bank balance sheets, sending a message to the financial industry that it will cost much more to remain an institution that’s considered too big to fail.

The rules, approved Tuesday as part of an international agreement designed to prevent another financial crisis, make it more expensive to be a very big bank while going easier than originally proposed on small and medium-size institutions.

It is worth noting that this comes from an international agreement, so the banks in one country won’t have the excuse that they cannot compete in the international market if they are subject to new restrictions.

The second thing to note is that though this agreement must have been in the works for some time,  no mention of such an effort hit the press that I commonly follow.  This lack of widespread notice gives demagogues the opportunity to try to win elections by claiming the government isn’t doing anything to solve the problem.  For instance, Gabriel Gomez was going to go to Washington in part to fix the problems of banks that are too big to fail.  Maybe he was such a good politician after all, that he didn’t even have to win the election to get the problem solved.