The Boston Globe has the story G-20 backs plan to curb tax avoidance by large corporations.

The world’s richest economies for the first time endorsed a blueprint Friday to curb widely used tax avoidance strategies that allow some multinational corporations to pay only a pittance in income taxes.

I have been realizing for quite some time that the solution to the race to the bottom of international companies meeting their tax obligations must come at an international level.  No single country, even one with the large economy of the United States, can solve this problem.  We might have come to this solution many years ago had not George Bush put a stop to the efforts by our country to work with other countries to solve these problems.  What a difference a President makes.

If you cannot get to The Boston Globe article through their pay wall, there is a hint to what is in this article on The Boston Globe free site, in the article G20 finance ministers aim for more growth.

Stashing profits offshore may soon get tougher for companies, thanks to an ambitious plan released Friday by the finance chiefs of leading world economies aimed at forcing multinationals to pay more taxes.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics has this short piece on their web site, There Is No Liquidity Trap: Understanding 21st Century Monetary Policy.

As long as there exist assets whose price would be pushed up (and rate of return pushed down) by extra demand, monetary policy remains effective and there is no liquidity trap. Fiscal policy may be a useful alternative or complement to monetary policy in certain circumstances, but it is not a necessary alternative even when the short-term risk-free interest rate is zero.
.
.
.
There is no reason to doubt that central bank purchases of equity or real estate could significantly influence the prices of those assets.

I was thinking of all the arguments against these ideas, and wondering if I needed to broaden my thinking to accept what this author, Joseph E. Gagnon, was saying.  Then I started to think beyond the examples of equity and real estate.  The Fed could buy roads and bridges.  At this point I realized why monetary policy could do all the things that we think only fiscal policy can do.  You just change your definition of monetary policy to include all the things in fiscal policy, and then everything becomes possible.

The official explanation of the Peterson Institute says:

The Peterson Institute for International Economics is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution devoted to the study of international economic policy.

While The Peterson Institute does employ some very respectable economists, I am always a little suspicious of the Institute because of some of the strongly held, and wacky, economic ideas held by the founder and money bags behind the institute, Pete Peterson.

It might be very interesting and worthwhile to follow up the links to citations in the article.

Here is another one for my fellow Elizabeth Warren fans.  Politico has the article Elizabeth Warren, hard-liner.

Earlier this week at the White House, President Barack Obama tried to use his powers of persuasion on Elizabeth Warren, privately urging the consumer watchdog-turned-Massachusetts senator to back the student loan deal he was reaching with Senate leaders.

It didn’t work.

On Thursday, she went to the Senate floor to attack the plan, saying it would hurt students and benefit big banks. “I think this whole system stinks. We should not go along with any plan that continues to produce profits for the government. It is wrong,” Warren said.

Warren’s stance accomplished two things.  The compromise bill got passed so that an immediate problem was ameliorated.  She moved the center of debate farther left.  The failings of the bill that got passed can be fixed after the debate moves to where it ought to be.

I particularly liked one comment that I saw in response to the article.

After living in a house with a bunch of smoker, or a bunch of dogs, or in the case of the US house and senate, no one ever flushing the toilet, it is refreshing to hear someone walk in to the place and say this place stinks.

It’s about time.

Yesterday I posted The Real News article Study Links High Stakes Testing to Higher Incarceration Rates. I wondered who in their right mind could spend money to make matters worse?

Today, The Real News Network featured this answer from Jimmy Kimmel, How Does Congress Work? – “You’re Screwed”

So now you know, in case you were in any doubt.

The Real News Network has the interview about the Study Links High Stakes Testing to Higher Incarceration Rates.

One of the interviewees stated that

We can’t have cruelty as part of education policy.

Why not, I ask? My friends that have stayed in the business world longer than I have confirm that cruelty is part of industrial policy of major corporations. Why not teach the kids what they are going to face when they go to work?

For those of you who are inclined to believe what I said above, I state most emphatically that I am being sarcastic.

The Real News Network article Sen. Warren Drops A History Lesson On CNBC And It’s GLORIOUS led me to this video from CNBC.

You could say that Elizabeth Warren answers some of the criticism in my previous post Elizabeth Warren’s Long Game Against Wall Street.

Of the four speeches to the convention by gubernatorial candidates, the one by Don Berwick was the most crowd rousing one.

The other speeches were also good content-wise. Dan Wolf gave a more crowd rousing speech at his breakfast the morning of the convention than he gave to the full convention.

In my opinion, just about all the candidates have a tremendous potential for being a good governor. So the balance will probably shift as the campaign progresses. In other words, I am not locked on to any particular candidate, so far. I could support any one of them that gets the nomination. So far Don Berwick and Dan Wolf lead in my personal estimation.

USA Today has the article Senate appears to have avoided ‘nuclear’ option.

“I feel fairly confident,” [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said on the floor Tuesday morning, crediting the efforts of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to reach a deal to approve pending nominations to the National Labor Review Board and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Here is a fluff video, but read the article to get the details.

Finally, putting the obvious pressure on the Republicans made them see the light. The Republicans used this tactic against the Democrats in the past, and it worked. Why has it taken 6 years for Harry Reid to finally figure this out?

If the Republicans renege as they frequently do, the real nuclear option is still available.

Reader Supported News has the article Elizabeth Warren’s Long Game Against Wall Street. After rejecting a couple of theories on why Elizabeth Warren is sponsoring banking legislation that has no chance of passing and wouldn’t solve the problem anyway, the author posits a third theory.

It’s the long-game theory.

This theory says that Senator Warren isn’t trying to change individual laws, so much as move the entire political discussion of the financial sector to a different rhetorical arena and force other legislators to join her there. In this theory, Warren’s anti-bank bills and activism aren’t meant mainly for her constituents in Massachusetts, for the Internet audience, or even for Wall Street. They’re directed to her fellow legislators. And their message is simple: On issues involving Wall Street, the center isn’t where you think it is.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and it puts her activities in more perspective for me.  This is essentially the path that I wished Obama had started from the day he got into office.  Instead of negotiating with himself before even talking to the opposition, he needed to put out positions that would have shifted the debate. He needed to do that in a few areas at the least, if not in every case.

Perhaps we needed the debate shifting strategy 50 years ago when the Republicans started their long campaign to shift the debate.  If we don’t start now, then whenever we do start the effort we will only be that much more time behind schedule.

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.