New Economic Perspectives has the article Mankiw Morality in a Mash Up with Mankiw Myths.

Bernie’s explanations of how the financial system is rigged, however, use conventional economics that people like me (one of his economic advisers) have long employed in our research.  I will show that Mankiw is actually spreading rather than refuting myths about the rigged system.  Mankiw’s own economic “principles” support Bernie’s explanation of why the financial system is rigged.

Read Bill Black’s eloquent take-down of anybody who pretends that there weren’t massive crimes committed during the build-up of the financial bubble and its inevitable bursting in 2008/2009.

Hillary Clinton’s challenge to Bernie Sanders to name one crime that was committed could have been answered by his handing her this article from one of his own economic advisers. I was surprised when Bernie Sanders came unarmed to that fight (debate). That mistake might cost Bernie the election.

In the article, Black mentions that not all CEO’s are incentivized to commit fraud, but he never explicitly states why.  The disincentive to commit fraud has always been the threat of being sent to prison for committing the fraud.  Now that President Obama and his Attorney Generals have buried the disincentive, what is left to stop this rampant crime on Wall Street?

New Economic Perspectives has the article Stop Calling Deals That Help CEOs Pillage with Impunity “Free Trade”.

These points explain why President Obama’s rhetoric about the deals – they mean that the U.S. rather than China makes the rules – is knowing propaganda on his part.  Whether U.S. CEOs or Chinese CEOs dictate the terms of the deal is irrelevant.  They all want to achieve and maintain the ability to rig the system with impunity.

People who aren’t reading these articles by William K. Black just don’t have any concept of how duplicitous President Obama is being when he pushes these “trade” deals.

Whenever my resolve weakens to refuse to vote for Hillary Clinton and her third Obama term Presidency, I take a good dose of Bill Black explanations.  That keeps me healthy for at least a few months.

RichardH sent me The New York Times article An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death.

“I think there’s no doubt that insulin is pro-cancer,” Watson says, with respect to the link between obesity, diabetes and cancer. “It’s as good a hypothesis as we have now.” Watson takes metformin for cancer prevention; among its many effects, metformin works to lower insulin levels. Not every cancer researcher, however, is convinced of the role of insulin and IGF-1 in cancer. Robert Weinberg, a researcher at M.I.T.’s Whitehead Institute who pioneered the discovery of cancer-causing genes in the ’80s, has remained somewhat cool to certain aspects of the cancer-metabolism revival. Weinberg says that there isn’t yet enough evidence to know whether the levels of insulin and IGF-1 present in obese people are sufficient to trigger the Warburg effect. “It’s a hypothesis,” Weinberg says. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong.”

I didn’t find a better excerpt to give you a feel for what is in the article, so to amplify on this one, one of the issues was sugar in the diet.

There is one caution that we need to all keep in mind.  It is an assumption that a chemical in your body that causes trouble comes from eating that chemical.  Therefore, not eating that chemical may not be a cure for what ails you.

The low fat diet is a case in point.  The fat in your arteries that causes Atherosclerosis does not come from eating fat in your diet.  It comes from the liver processing the carbs in your diet.  So cutting out fat in the diet and replacing that with carbs was exactly the wrong thing to do.

Just because an hypothesis is plausible, doesn’t mean that it is correct.  An hypothesis needs to be experimentally verified before you should bet your life on it.

CGMA Magazine has the article 6 ways to write an email message that works.

1. Limit whom you copy.
2. Be brief.
3. Be concise.
4. Think before you reply.
5. Make the subject line count.
6. Watch your tone.

You’ll have to read the article for the explanations.  I forgive the author for not realizing that brief and concise are synonyms.

The New York Times has the article Our Mismeasured Economy.

To develop a sustainable growth path, we should heed the business adage: You get what you measure. Fixing the measurement problems surrounding government activities is a good place to start.

This article does a wonderful job of identifying one of the reasons we have allowed ourselves to underestimate the value of what we get out of our investment in government services.  If we don’t measure the benefits, how can we possibly be doing a valid cost/benefit analysis?

I learned of this article on the Facebook page Government Is Good. What a name!  However, I think it is going to be a treasure trove of great links.

When I put my previous post Ideology of Money Scarcity on the the Sturbridge For Bernie Sanders Facebook page, I put some further explanation into an introduction.

One of the most important factors in my choice of which Presidential candidates to back is to see which candidates are more likely to free themselves from the false “Ideology of Money Scarcity”. Bernie Sanders is the only one that comes close.

I would imagine that most voters haven’t got a clue as to how false the “Ideology of Money Scarcity” is for a country like the USA. Once Bernie becomes President he needs to figure out how to explain this to the voters.

FDR understood this quite well when he needed to get our industrial base back to full speed to fight WW II. We all know that he miraculously managed to get a hugely idle economy roaring at full speed, and without causing inflation. The populace was so distracted by the need to fight the war that they never thought to even ask how FDR managed to do it. We need such an effort now, hopefully without a war. Trying to do it without starting a war is what makes it more difficult for Bernie Sanders to pull it off than it was for FDR to pull it off.

I didn’t explain how FDR managed to perform his miracle of re-energizing the economy without causing inflation.  The reason why inflation would ordinarily be a huge problem during the preparation for the war, is that people were being well paid to produce the armaments for our war machine, but the product of their efforts was not something they could buy with the wages they were getting.  In fact there was very little energy going into producing the things that people making these kinds of wages would normally want to buy.

Of course we know there was rationing, but that was not the total solution.  What people do not realize is that the primary reason for the sale of war bonds was not to get the money to finance the war.  The money to finance the war came before the sale of the war bonds.

What the war bonds did was to temporarily take the earned money out of the hands of consumers so that they wouldn’t bid up the prices of everything they would want to buy.  In other words, the war bonds would only be redeemed after the war was over at a time when manufacturing could be returned to meeting the demands of the consumers.  At that time, the workers could get their hands back on the money they had earned during the war, the returning soldiers could find jobs to make the consumer products that would be demanded, and we could have a thriving, full-employment, low-inflation economy.  Rationing the rate of soldiers returning to the work force by giving them the benefits of the GI bill to go back to college was another way of keeping the economy in balance.

In the current era, we have need for major infrastructure rebuilding, we have idle resources, we have idle workers.  If the FED creates the money to put the idle resources and workers to work meeting the demand for infrastructure (think replacing the lead pipes that supply drinking water to many homes in America), we have a similar problem that faced FDR during the war.  The workers will be well paid to fix the infrastructure but the product of their efforts is not something the individual consumer can or would want to buy at retail.

How do we prevent that money from going into demand for products that are in short supply; that demand that would create inflation?  I think one obvious solution is that we mimic what we did in WWII. That would be to sell infrastructure bonds to the citizenry.  This would prevent people from spending all the new money they were earning to demand consumer products that we did not have the capacity to produce.  This would be a temporary deferral until such time as the demand for infrastructure diminished, and the productive capacity of the economy increased to be able to  satisfy the demand.

We have some fortuitous situations right now that seem to be problems, but are in fact opportunities.  With automation and outsourcing, we have more workers in the USA than we can put to work at a living wage (given the current income inequality).  So the inflationary pressure of the infrastructure projects would be less now than the pressure we had during the war.  Remember that during the war, we took millions of workers out of the economy, and sent them off to be soldiers, but we still paid them for their war efforts.

I think the only problem we would have is the holding onto the false ideology of money scarcity.  Without a war, there would not be enough distraction to keep people from asking how this is all going to work.  Therefore, I think there is more need to educate people on how this is all going to work before we can get people to vote for the politicians that can make it happen.  This will be Bernie Sander’ job as President.

If we need to have a higher level of education to compete in the world economy, it is not so our workers will be smarter than the competition.  Eventually, we hope for a civilization in which all workers will reach the appropriate level of education.  The need is to give people enough education so that they can understand how the new economy could work if they would only vote for the people who know how to make it work in the way I just described.

Will enough people understand enough of this right now to elect Bernie Sanders President to get the ball rolling in the right direction?  This is the task for Bernie Sanders to accomplish.  If he can’t do it, at least he has started people asking some of the right questions.  Perhaps it won’t take another 50 years for a politician with the right ideas to come along to finish the job Bernie couldn’t.

New Economic Perspectives has the article about J. D. Alt’s Over-Arching Perspective. In it, he talks about the “ideology of money scarcity.”

There you have it. The new piping exists on pallets in a myriad of plumbing supply yards across the nation, the backhoes are ready, the drivers and excavators and plumbers and pipe-fitters are plenty for the task, but the U.S. doesn’t have enough dollars to pay for the marshalling of these resources. So they sit idle while the lead continues to leach into our drinking water and our children’s mental development is threatened, to one degree or another, by the poison. In my book, The Millennials’ Money, I refer to this condition as the “ideology of money scarcity.” And it is certainly a mystery how and why―in the first modern age of pure sovereign fiat-money―this ideology stubbornly retains its dominance over our collective thinking.

You can say this about the whole economy at this time that all the resources to do something are awaiting being put to use except for the money to do it.  J. D. Alt lays out this specific important example that is in the news.

Later on in the article he has some interesting conjectures about why we might have these so-called Neanderthal ideas, and suggests that there might be a scientific test that can be applied to see which Presidential candidates have more of this tendency and which ones may have less.

Based on listening to what the candidates have to say, it seems to me that there is only one candidate who might be able to free  himself from the remaining Neanderthal that we all have to some degree or another.  Of course, that is Bernie Sanders.  One of the reasons I am such a strong backer of Bernie Sanders is that I feel he can be made to understand the silliness of the “ideology of money scarcity”.  He can then explain it to the voters who are still holding onto this ideology that the oligarchs have been drumming into our heads for 65 years.

Newsweek has the article Donald Trump’s Possible Running Mates: The Odds. Thanks to Michael K. for sending this to me.

Ted Cruz’s campaign is donezo. Now, barring some unforeseeable cataclysm, like maybe a micrometeorite smacking him directly in the forehead, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. Thus begins the scramble for the veep nod.

Michael wasn’t sure whether this was a serious article or not, and neither am I.  However, this gives me an opportunity to mention another interesting idea that I heard today.

I had a conversation with someone, Fritz, who gave me an idea I hadn’t considered. He doesn’t like Hillary and he would not vote for Trump, but he would consider a Clinton/Sanders ticket.  I don’t know if either Clinton or Sanders would consider such a ticket.  I don’t know if I would consider such a ticket.  I hadn’t thought about what the voters might consider, though.

Don’t miss the point about what Fritz said. It has is nothing to do with whether or not it is a stretch to consider that it might happen.

The point of it is to put your Democratic strategist hat on and consider it from the point of view of people like Fritz. Now wonder how many people would vote for that ticket who
would not vote for it if Bernie wasn’t the VP on the ticket. Now see if you, as a strategist, would think of whether it would be worth it to make this ticket come to pass.

The New York Times Magazine has the article What Happened to Worcester?  This is a very interesting story woven around the history of one family in Worcester to demonstrate the social and economic history of this country. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article that exemplify the range that this story covers.

But long gone are the days when Worcester’s plants offered a decent job to just about anybody willing to put in a hard day’s work. New employees looking to join the middle class must have not just a high-school diploma but an associate degree, if not a bachelor’s degree.

For all its decline in the second half of the 20th century, Worcester did enjoy one bit of good fortune: In the 1960s, the University of Massachusetts placed its medical school in the city. The school, which continued to grow, brought several generations’ worth of high-paying medical jobs and a fair number of lower-paying support positions. Similarly, Worcester’s position close to the center of New England has been good for the transportation business. Many of my relatives who stayed in town have worked either in the medical center as nurses or in the transportation field as truck drivers, dispatchers, rail-yard inspectors. These are solid, stable jobs, but they don’t enable the kind of jump-up in socioeconomic status that my family experienced many decades ago.

Now that we live much closer to Worcester than we’d ever had before and I’ve established some ties with people there, I can appreciate this story more.

New Economic Perspectives has the article False Choice or Real Possibilities.  The article gives the historical record that leads up to the ultimate question.

Given the overall results of the U.S. experience with dramatic, targeted efforts of sovereign spending in World War II, given the proof that the federal government and central bank have the means to effectively manage and maintain the value of the U.S. currency in spite of massive expenditures of government fiat money, given the fact we know, from experience, all this can be done without “nationalizing” the economy—and that, in fact, the doing of it, if properly managed, will produce an unprecedented expansion of private innovation, investment, business creation, and employment opportunities for American citizens—given that we historically know all of this, why should we not feel comfortable to undertake, once again, substantial sovereign spending programs to achieve critical collective objectives? And if, indeed, we should do that, why don’t we?

There is only one candidate now running for President who has the breadth of vision to imagine asking this question.  He has hired the right economic advisers to give him the logical answer.  Are we all smart enough to vote for that candidate, or are we willing to live with the false choices the other candidates all present?

Who knows when a candidate will come around again to offer us the choice that Bernie Sanders is offering?  It may occur in my lifetime, or it may not.  Part of my success in life is not so much that I was just lucky.  At least part of it was that when opportunity came knocking, I was in a position to open that door to the call.  Is our country ready to open the door to a better future?