The web site Economic Principals: A WEEKLY COLUMN ABOUT ECONOMICS AND POLITICS,
FORMERLY OF THE BOSTON GLOBE, INDEPENDENT SINCE 2002 has the July 12, 2015 article The Rivals: Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman … by David Warsh.

It is a fascinating tail about these two famous economists. I am not quite sure if I can call the following excerpt as conclusive, but it does give lots of credit to the ideas of Paul Samuelson, whom I favor, as opposed to the ideas of Milton Friedman whom I despise.

From a distance of thirty years, Robert Lucas, who had been a young econometrician at the time and who would later win a Nobel Prize, looked back at what had been the conventional wisdom then:

For the applied economist, the confident and apparently successful application of Keynesian principles to economic policy which occurred to the United States in the 1960s was an event of incomparable significance and satisfaction. These principles led to a set of simple quantitative relationships between fiscal policy and economic activity generally, the basic logic of which could be (and was) explained to the general public and which could be applied to yield improvements in economic performance benefiting everyone. It seemed an economics as free of ideological difficulties as say, applied chemistry or physics, promising a straightforward expansion of economic possibilities. One might argue as to how this windfall should be distributed, but it seemed a simple lapse of logic to oppose the windfall itself. Understandably and correctly, non-economists met this promise with skepticism at first; the smoothly growing prosperity of the Kennedy-Johnson years did much to diminish these doubts.

Nothing like a good dose of confirmation bias to help you decide what to believe. Of course I have my own explanation of how Lyndon Johnson and his conduct of the Viet Nam War ruined it all.

Politico has the article Elections security: Federal help or power grab?

The federal government wants to help states keep hackers from manipulating the November election, amid growing fears that the U.S. political system is vulnerable.

This article and the national discussion so badly misses the whole point about election security. It is not the possible tampering by Russia that we should fear, It is the actual tampering by the oligarchs and their hired politicians that we should fear. There is a simple solution that I have proposed that would solve the problem without very much federal government intervention, except to enact some minimal anti-tampering requirements for the software/hardware that will pass muster for an election to be safe.

See my previous post Standardize Electronic Voting Technology. Notice the federal agency that I think is best to take on this issue.

Salon has the article and video WATCH: Jill Stein comes on Salon Talks: “Stand up and fight for the greater good”

In one of Salon’s most popular Facebook Live interviews to date, Stein urged millennials to take a stand

Another great interview. It dispels even more of the myths that the corporate media is trying to create against Jill Stein. If you watch enough of these, you will finally start to get the truth about Jill Stein.

I think she still missed an opportunity to answer the great unanswered question. How will her program create jobs that the Obama administration failed to create? Obama subsidized companies to increase what they supplied to an economy that was not buying all that companies were already able to produce. What Jill Stein will do is to have government do the buying of product, so that the companies will need to increase the supply. The greatest incentive a company can receive to produce more goods and hire more workers is to create customers for their products. People with no money cannot be customers. The government that creates money can be as big a customer as it needs to be.

This trailer does not end on a Bernie Sanders ad. Keep watching.

People of all political stripes know the difference between wasting, spending, and investing. People who plan for the future invest.