Some people are spreading the lie that Bernie Sanders has not been able to get any legislation passed. To be charitable, maybe they just assume that because he does not belong to either party in Congress that he must be ineffective. It would be good to look at his legislative record before spouting things that are not true.
The image of the first page of his record shows that there are 6,199 items in the list
New Economic Perspectives is running a series of tutorials on Money and Banking by Eric Tymoigne. This is important information especially for any one who thinks a politician (I mean you Ron and Rand Paul) knows anything about the subject.
Money and Banking – Part 1 – balance-sheet mechanics
January 9, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 2 – Central bank balance sheet and immediate implications.
January 16, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 3– Monetary Base and the Balance Sheet of the FED.
January 24, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 4 – What does the Fed do in terms of monetary policy and why?
January 30, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 5 – FAQs about monetary policy and central banking
February 7, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 6 – Treasury and Central Bank Interactions
February 14, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 7 – Leverage
March 6, 2016
Money and Banking – Part 8 – The Private Banking Business
March 12, 2016
The Week has the article The politics of the deficit are utterly backward.
So after that first round of stimulus, the deficit was very large due to all the borrowing. However, its inadequacy was also obvious, as unemployment plateaued at nearly 10 percent — then stayed there for an entire year. During and immediately after the crisis, the centrist establishment was too shocked to respond, but they eventually regrouped and began demanding immediate cuts to balance the budget — effectively aligning themselves with resurgent conservatives, who as usual demanded all social insurance programs be torched.
I’d like to introduce a new concept that is particularly apt for the current situation. An early sentence in the article is the jumping off point for my idea.
A recession means the economy is suffering a shortage of aggregate demand.
It’s not the deficit, but the aggregate demand that is the key. There is a way to boost demand without increasing the deficit. This becomes particularly obvious when one notices the reaction to the FED’s attempt to stimulate.
Like the Great Depression, fiscal stimulus was particularly important during the Great Recession, because by late 2008, the Fed had cut interest rates all the way to zero — pushing its economic accelerator all the way to the floor — and it didn’t halt or even much slow down the recession.
Like a car spinning its wheels while stuck in the snow, pushing on the accelerator just does not help. It needs to get some traction.
The money the FED was pouring into the economy was just going into the hands of the wealthy to speculate in the stock market or to buy US Treasury notes and bonds because there was no place else that made any sense to invest the money. Had the government taxed back all the money that was going nowhere in the hands of the wealthy, and used it to hire people to do work, the recession could have been ended much more quickly with a much smaller deficit.
In fact, even now, the overhang of all that liquidity that the FED pumped into the economy could eventually come back to haunt us should the economy ever really recover. The only way to prevent hyper-inflation might be to drastically raise taxes to suck that money back out of the economy. The proper actions now could be moderate compared to what will be needed if we wait until the emergency becomes obvious.
Robert Reich’s session on Facebook has the worst investment advice I may have ever heard.
Here is a guy I generally admire, but don’t take your investing advice from him.
He starts with a chart that shows you why investing in the stock market has been a bad idea over the last 20 years.
What a pile of hogwash. Few people are unlucky enough, if they have any brains, to invest only at the peaks. I thought he was an economist that knew economics. Or is investing not part of what an economist knows anything about? Maybe John Maynard Keynes was an exceptional economist.
Does Reich know about dollar cost averaging, even if he doesn’t know about Keynes/Graham/Buffet investing? If I had listened to Reich’s kind of advice over the last 20 years, I would be a lot poorer than I am now, and I mean a lot.
Of course, if I had bought only at the valleys and sold at the peaks, I would have been a lot richer, but nobody knows how to do that.
If you fall for what Reich is selling in this video, then maybe he is right, you shouldn’t be investing in the stock market.
First let me give you the ad.
Hillary Clinton decries this as a negative ad. Her name never comes up in the ad. So what does Hillary think is negative?
Is she saying the following excerpt refers to her?
There are two democratic visions for regulating Wall Street. One says it’s okay to take millions from big banks and then tell them what to do.
Wouldn’t she have to be telling us that she is the one taking millions from big banks to claim this ad is about her? Is that the message she wants to give us? Is this campaign starting to drive her around the bend?
Next is an excerpt from the expert’s letter.
In our view, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ plan for comprehensive financial reform is critical for avoiding another “too-big-to-fail” financial crisis. The Senator is correct that the biggest banks must be broken up and that a new 21st Century Glass-Steagall Act, separating investment from commercial banking, must be enacted.
You can use the following link to read the letter that the experts wrote.
Ever since Hillary made the claim that her proposal was better, I have been waiting for exactly this rebuttal from Bernie. I have been posting on my blog this explanation of why his plan is far superior to the Clinton plan. In the debate, he could have asked her if the experts who told her that her plan was better were the same ones that were such a disaster in her husband’s and in the Obama administrations.
YouTube has this great video Clinton to Obama: ‘Shame on you’ which I have renamed with the title of this post, 2008 Hillary Clinton Attacks 2016 Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton attacks Hillary Clinton for using shameful tactics against Bernie Sanders. Maybe she just doesn’t remember what she thought of this the last time she ran for President. Or maybe she does remember, and figures if it worked for Obama, it might work for her. Don’t you just love the sincerity and high moral standards? How are her fans going to make excuses for this?
For additional perspective, you might want to read the article Hillary Clinton’s dirty attack on Bernie Sanders.
Whatever weakness she mischaracterizes in Bernie’s plan can be traced back to the plans she and her husband have supported for years. Is this what stands for principles in Hillary’s book?
This should just about finish off Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party.
The Washington Post has the article The transcript of President Obama’s final State of the Union: What he said, and what it meant. The “what it meant” part is in the yellow high-lighted words which are links to their interpretation of background material.
I link to the article, not so much for their interpretation so much as a source for the original words for me to interpret. I probably want to pick apart more of the speech, but the following is a good place to start me off right away.
Food Stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial crisis; recklessness on Wall Street did.
A large part of the State of the Union Address was great. This is one of the statements that stood out from what was not so great. For many of the problems that the President addressed, there was no agency in how he spoke of them. People feel insecure, wages aren’t high enough, there is instability in the world, the economic system is rigged because they just happened with no agent responsible for causing the problem? In this one sentence he finally made mention of the fact that there are people who cause some of these problems.
Obama was eloquent on many of the things we have to do to solve our problems, but occasionally he would slip in a good word about some of his policies that are responsible for our problems. The Trans Pacific Partnership that he touted is the antithesis of what he claimed it was. Trade policies like the TPP are exactly the kind of tools that the rich use to rig the system in their favor. I refuse to believe that he doesn’t know this. So his touting of this pact is one of the things that ruined the speech for me.
In my 71 years I have grown to know some of the times when I am being lied to. I don’t like it no matter who is doing it.
You would expect an attack on Bernie’s plan from a Presidential candidate who represented the oligarchs and the 0.1% of people who are the wealthiest in this country. Well, here is the proof of what you would be getting if you voted for the attacker. Not only have I received the following email from the Sanders campaign, but I have also seen the news headlines about the attack. Even the Clinton’s daughter has been enlisted in making this false attack. Motherjones has the article Chelsea Clinton Accuses Sanders of Trying to “Dismantle Obamacare”.
You shouldn’t need any further proof that Hillary Clinton wants to be president no matter what it costs our country for her to rise to power. If she would stoop so low as to try to set back universal healthcare for a generation just so she could defeat Bernie Sanders, then what else is she capable of?
YouTube has a video Health Care: Sanders vs Paul. I don’t want to bias you in any way, but I must say that I have always considered Ron and Rand Paul to be complete fools. I think I have finally found the evidence to prove it to even the most biased person.
Rand Paul’s argument is so fallacious, I don’t know how anybody could fall for it. Health care as a right does not mean you have a right to demand that a specific doctor should provide you with health care. It means that the health care system should find access to health care for you no matter what your financial means are. Paul even agrees that the system does do that to a large extent without enslaving doctors. Medicare for all would be Bernie Sanders’ better way of providing the health care you have a right to.
If Rand Paul applied his logic to diagnosing your illnesses where he cannot even figure out what one thing does and does not imply about another thing he would be a very poor doctor.
I see that Rand Paul does not only use faulty logic about fractional reserve banking. Here he applies it to health care, too. What else is he using faulty logic for?
Alternet has the article Dabs, the Latest Pot Trend Police and Media Are Needlessly Freaking Out About:
A potent form of marijuana has arrived on the East Coast, and some media outlets seem to have gotten a contact high.
I post this only as an educational service. Not being interested in marijuana except as a political issue, I knew nothing about this.
It is generally vaped, rather than smoked.
I have seen the term “vape” in print, but I didn’t know what it meant. From reading this article, I am guessing that this is something that will be turned into a media storm. This is probably one more thing that we should guard against being sent into an unnecessary tizzy by news people who pretend to know less about this than we do.