Senator Elizabeth Warren talks about her new bill to let people refinance their older students loans to today’s lower rates.

bankonstudentsbill.c­om?sen=warren

The Fed created trillions of dollars out of thin air to bail out the banks, and it did not cause inflation. The Fed could do the same thing for students, and there would be no need to find funding in the budget to make up for what the government will lose by lowering the student loan interest rate.

Elizabeth Warren apparently does not understand that there is no need to compensate for the money forgone by the government from the lower rates. Perhaps if enough people tell her this, she will stop looking for cuts in the budget or increased taxes to make up for something that does not need to be made up for.

And the funny thing about the Fed creating money out of thin air and its relation to inflation, the Fed would like to create a little more inflation in the economy than we have now. With all the bank bailouts and all the quantitative easing, they have been having a heck of a time creating the inflation that they are trying to create. In other words, they can’t even do it when they try.

You can watch the June 2, 2014 Sturbridge Town Meeting via video on demand provided by the town’s cable access channel.

If you could not attend the meeting, this will give you the chance to see what went on.

Thanks to Pete Connor and Jason Ansley for posting Talking Points Memo‘s article John Oliver: Net Neutrality Prevents ‘Cable Company F*ckery’ (VIDEO) on the Facebook pages.

Thanks to Samuel Max Hoffman for posting the Yahoo! article John Oliver Crashes FCC Comments System After Net Neutrality Segment on his Facebook page.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why Don’t the Unemployed Get Off Their Couches? After you read the answer to this question, you come to the following bottom line:

The striking trend lines of social and economic disparity that have developed over the last 50 years are clearly no accident; nor have disemboweled unions, a deindustrialized America, wages heading for the basement (with profits still on the rise), and the widest gap between rich and poor since the slavery era been the work of the invisible hand. It seems far more likely that a remarkably small but powerful crew wanted it that way, knowing that a nation of fast food workers isn’t heading for the barricades any time soon. Think of it all as a kind of “Game of Thrones” played out over many years. A super-wealthy few have succeeded in defeating all of their rivals — unions, regulators, the media, honest politicians, environmentalists — and now are free to do as they wish.

What most likely lies ahead is not a series of satisfying American-style solutions to the economic problems of the 99%, but a boiling frog’s journey into a form of twenty-first-century feudalism in which a wealthy and powerful few live well off the labors of a vast mass of the working poor. Once upon a time, the original 99% percent, the serfs, worked for whatever their feudal lords allowed them to have. Now, Walmart “associates” do the same. Then, a few artisans lived slightly better, an economic step or two up the feudal ladder. Now, a technocratic class of programmers, teachers, and engineers with shrinking possibilities for upward mobility function similarly amid the declining middle class. Absent a change in America beyond my ability to imagine, that’s likely to be my future — and yours.

One of the questions answered in the article is:

6) Shouldn’t we cut public assistance and force people into the job market?

Cutting public assistance may actually be a way to change the fact, mentioned above in the bottom line, that “a nation of fast food workers isn’t heading for the barricades any time soon.” Somewhere there must be a limit to what the bottom 99% will peacefully suffer.  The oligarchs of this country seem bound and determined to find out what that limit is.

The Daily Show has the video An Outbreak of Liberal Idiocy.

Samantha Bee discovers an epidemic of science denial coming not from conservative climate-change skeptics but from educated, upper-middle-class liberals.

Who knew that a former Playboy Bunny was a Liberal? That issue of Playboy is not what turned me from a Conservative into a Liberal.

All Jenny McCarthys aside, I must admit that Liberals are not immune to science denial.

Jacobin has the article Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows that not everything in mainstream economics is worthless. I am not sure the headline is the best representation of what is in the article.

Piketty suggests that the rise is a long-term structural trend – the outcome of decelerating population and productivity growth coupled with a profit rate (r) that stays steady. But what keeps r high? Piketty never explicitly says. This question is at the heart of the struggle over how to interpret his book.

Since I have not read the book yet, I have no idea if the reviewer is fairly representing what Piketty says.  However, I think the review is an excellent discussion of this multifaceted issue, no matter what Piketty might have said.

I learned about this review from a retweet by Murtaza Baxamusa of John Schmitt’s tweet.  There may be other links in the comments on the tweet that are worth following up.

Naked Capitalism has the article Is That a Good State/Local Economic Development Deal? A Checklist.

I’ll give you the checklist, but you’ll have to read the article to see what is said about the items.

1) Is this a new project, or is the subsidy simply being given to move an existing facility from one location to another?

2) Is this a retail project?

3) How many jobs will be created?

4) What are the pay and benefits for this job?

5) Does the project require the use of eminent domain?

6) Does the area that will host the project have objective evidence of economic deprivation, such as high unemployment or low per-capita income?

7) What is the track record of the company involved?

7a) Is the company’s identity hidden by a site location consultant?

8) What taxpayer protections are built in?

9) Would the investment go forward even without the subsidy?

10) Does the project connect to the public transportation grid?

11) What is the opportunity cost to government?

These are the kinds of issues I had in mind when I asked various gubernatorial candidates visiting Sturbridge whether or not they had a better plan to deal with companies wanting subsidies to come to Massachusetts.  I wanted to make sure that the candidate would not be a patsy, and give away too much without getting enough in return.

That goes for the local level as well as for us citizens. Don’t be a patsy when the poor rich companies come begging for help to fund their hugely profitable businesses.

I was afraid that Warren and Piketty would miss the point that taxes are not needed to fund federal government spending.  My fear was realized when Elizabeth Warren talked about her bill to ease student loans by allowing the borrowers to refinance their government student loans at the lower interest rates that new government student loans are charging.

She pointed out that even on a small segment of the population’s loans the government was getting $60billion dollars a year in interest payments on those loans.  She then said that the money that would be forgone by lowering the interest would have to be made up in some other part of the  budget. She recommended raising revenue by closing loopholes  for the rich and powerful as a way to make up for the loss in revenue on the student loans.

Whether you believe in Modern Monetary Theory’s explanation of why raising taxes is not needed to fund new spending, the fact remains that the Fed created trillions of dollars out of thin air to bail out the banks.  Why can’t the Fed do the same thing to bail out the students, graduates, and their parents and grandparents who signed up to back these loans?  The total student loan debt at the moment is only $1.2trillion.

When I talked about the money created to bail out the banks, I said trillions.  That was not a typo.  I did not mean billions.  Same goes for the total student debt.

If the Fed can do it for the banks without causing any inflation, doesn’t that sound to you like proof that the Fed could do it for students?

Closing the tax loopholes for the very wealthy is a laudable and necessary thing to do for the health of our society, but it is not needed as a way to fund student bailouts.

While watching a news story last night, the question came up, “How come all news stories about restraining orders are about ones that are violated?  Does that prove that restraining orders are useless?”

Besides the obvious answer that it’s not news if the restraining order is obeyed and no one is bothered again, I decided to find out if the effectiveness of restraining orders has been studied.

In a quick Google search, I found a large number of hits.  Here are two.

Do Domestic Violence Restraining Orders Ever Really Work?

But just how effective are restraining orders in these highly-emotional, always-volatile situations, where a piece of official-looking paper is supposed to serve as a figurative bulletproof shield?  Studies on the efficacy of TROs vary widely, with one suggesting they are effective in keeping victims safe about 85 percent of the time, while another report suggests a less optimistic 15 percent success rate. So let us split the difference and say that restraining orders work about half the time and the other half, they don’t. Why or why not?

This is an article by someone involved in the field.  There article has a lot of speculation on why the outcomes are the way they are.

I also found Practical Implications of Current Domestic Violence Research: For Law Enforcement, Prosecutors and Judges.

Chapter 7. Judicial Responses
Section 11 — Do protective orders work?

The research has not been able to answer this question definitively, mainly because it is not ethically permissible to randomly grant or deny protective orders to compare results. Furthermore, these orders may “work” at different levels.
.
.
.
Implications for Judges

Victims should be encouraged to take out protective orders and retain them but should also be advised that the orders do not deter all abusers and may be more effective when accompanied by criminal prosecution of the abuser. (Research basis: Numerous studies indicating consistent victim satisfaction with orders, complemented by studies that have consistently found that orders do not appear to significantly increase the risk of reabuse and may deter some abusers.)

This one is just one section of one chapter.  There is a lot more to be learned about the subject from this source.

The upshot is that the topic is the subject of much research.  Laws are not passed completely blindly with no tracking of the results of the law.

Here is the email that I received from MoveOn.org about participating in the conversation.

——– Original Message ——–

Subject:	TONIGHT: Watch Elizabeth Warren & Thomas Piketty talk inequality in America
Date:	Mon, 02 Jun 2014 06:07:38 -0700
From:	Ilya Sheyman, MoveOn.org Political Action <moveon-help@list.moveon.org>

Dear Steven,

Thanks for RSVP’ing for tonight’s one-of-a-kind online conversation between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Professor Thomas Piketty, author of the #1 New York Times bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Here’s everything you’ll need to watch and participate in tonight’s conversation:

What: Senator Elizabeth Warren and economist Thomas Piketty in conversation

When: TONIGHT, Monday, June 2, at 8:30 p.m. ET (7:30 CT/6:30 MT/5:30 PT)

How to join: A few minutes before 8:30 p.m. ET, visit this webpage to get ready for the broadcast to begin:

http://pol.moveon.org/warrenpiketty/watch.html?id=96589-7776955-w11pe3x&t=1



If you’re on Twitter, you can tweet using the hashtag #WarrenPiketty to join the conversation online.

More than 10,000 people have already signed up to participate in tonight’s debut broadcast moderated by The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim and featuring questions from MoveOn members. Can you help spread the word even further by inviting your friends and family to join the conversation?

Click here to invite your friends on Facebook.

Click here to invite your friends on Twitter.

Or forward this email to your friends and family.

Senator Warren and Professor Piketty are two of the leading voices on economic inequality. The more people who join this conversation, the better equipped we’ll be to fight for an economy that works for everyone, not just the 1%.

See you online tonight!

Thanks for all you do.

–Ilya, Justin, Maria, Manny, and the rest of the team

P.S. In the online broadcast, you’ll see Sen. Warren and Prof. Piketty respond to questions submitted by MoveOn members—like this question from Diane W. of Gulfport, FL: “How will the costs of climate change interplay with economic inequality?” They answered a question from Lars F. of Marietta, GA about what it would take for the 1% to pay their fair share of taxes, and from Robert B. of Portland, OR about alleviating the burden of student debt. Tune in tonight at 8:30 p.m. ET to watch the whole conversation: http://pol.moveon.org/warrenpiketty/watch.html?id=96589-7776955-w11pe3x&t=4

Want to support our work? We’re entirely funded by our 8 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

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PAID FOR BY MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, http://pol.moveon.org/. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate’s committee.