Naked Capitalism has the article The Global Corporate Saving Glut with commentary on and a link to another published article.

On the one hand, the VoxEU article does a fine job of assembling long-term data on a global basis. It demonstrates that the corporate savings glut is long standing and that is has been accompanied by a decline in personal savings.

However, it fails to depict what an unnatural state of affairs this is. The corporate sector as a whole in non-recessionary times ought to be net spending, as in borrowing and investing in growth.

You have to ask a deeper question. Why is it that the “natural” state for the corporate sector “as a whole in non-recessionary times ought to be net spending”?

It all comes down to my maxim “What part of no freakin’ customers do you not understand?”

If the efficiencies of automation, cost savings of outsourcing jobs, and unfair tilting of the market toward corporate interests decimate the buying power of your customers, what is there left to invest in?

Corporations aren’t investing in satisfying the needs of an increasing customer base exactly because their prior actions have shrunk the customer base below the break even point of the capacity they already have.

Wouldn’t it be rather insane to invest in more production capacity when you already have too much, and are shutting down some of what you already have?

I just can’t understand why economists are searching to find more trees while they are standing in the middle of a forest. The obvious answers are lying all around them and have been since the 1930s. Why can’t they see them?

We need to remember the short, eloquent explanation of why we have a government.

Whenever a member of Congress or a President proposes a law to enact, check it against this brief explanation of why we have a union for a country.

I think that just asking if it “promotes the general welfare” is the strongest filter their can be. For instance, do tax cuts for billionaires promote the general welfare?

The Alternet has an interview Exclusive Interview: Seymour Hersh Dishes on Saudi Oil Money Bribes and the Killing of Osama Bin Laden.

A wide-ranging interview tied to his new book, “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.”

At the end of the interview there is a discussion about our doing the destruction of the SYrian Government’s arsenal of sarin weapons under the agreement reached between Syria, Russia, and the USA.

Guess what else we know from the forensic analysis we have (we had all the missiles in their arsenal). Nothing in their arsenal had anything close to what was on the ground in Ghouta. A lot of people I know, nobody’s going to go on the record, but the people I know said we couldn’t make a connection, there was no connection between what was given to us by Bashar and what was used in Ghouta. That to me is interesting. That doesn’t prove anything, but it opens up a door to further investigation and further questioning.

Strategic Culture has the article Seymour Hersh Says Hillary Approved Sending Libya’s Sarin to Syrian Rebels. This is a compilation of some old articles and some new ones. I’ll excerpt the first paragraph whose links I checked that refer to the previous sarin gas incident.

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles.

I am going to post as a sepaarate post the artcle linked to in this later excerpt.

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books («Whose Sarin?» and «The Red Line and the Rat Line») has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles.

As I went back to the Strategic Culture article, I realized that I had been sidetracked in reading the Alternet article. There may even be worse stuff later on in the article. I am going to post the Alternet article, and then go back to look at the rest of the Strategic Culture article.

There is so much more in the original article and the links that I just don’t have the time to track it all down. I’ll have to pass the relay baton to someone else.

Here is the section of Bernie Sanders’ response at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on March 31, 2017.

We can also make some important improvements in the affordable care act, for example there are parts of this country where there is maybe one insurance company. I think we should have a public option in 50 states in this country.

I think this is where Bernie Sanders negated every good thing he said before. If only he had not said this, I would have gone away remembering why I was such a fervent supporter of Bernie Sanders.

If there is a problem with the private insurance company options on the ACA state marketplaces, and we add a public option, then there will be an almost inevitable adverse selection process. What the private insurance companies always want to do is to insure the people who are least likely to need the insurance, and therefore be the most profitable customers. They will do everything they can to discourage the sick and expensive customers, and give them up to the Public option. The ACA has limited the private insurance companies’ abilities to do this, but you can bet they will find a way. So the costs for medical care for those on the Public Option will necessarily be higher than the ones in the private insurance companies. The politicians who want to cut many people out of the health care system will use these statistics to deceptively convince people that publicly funded health care is inherently more costly than private insurance.

If these politicians manage to convince voters with these deceptive number, they will convince voters to vote against Medicare-for-all, thinking it will be more expensive. However, Medicare insurance premiums will be mandatory for all, and there will be no adverse selection problem with Medicare.

Why should Democrats fight for an interim program that is almost certain to sink their vision for the ultimate program? This is why I specifically went to this event with my placard.

April 2, 2017 – 11:00 PM

Maybe there is a way to put in a public option that will be inoculated from the Republicans claim that it is more expensive than private insurance.This needs a lot of discussion, because I am not sure it will work, but it is an idea.

Explicitly say that the public option is intended to siphon off the high risk people from the private insurance market. This will allow the private market to sell their insurance cheaper. Surely the private insurance companies would be glad to not have to insure the most expensive clients. Also, since private insurance has much higher overhead expenses than the public insurance option, these high risk patients will be treated at less expense to the health care system than if they were insured privately. Every time the Republicans would claim that the costs per capita for the public option were higher (if they were) than the private insurance, we could say, “Yes, we know. That was the intention to take the higher cost patients out of the private market. You want to put the expensive patients that the private market does not want back into the private market?”

Perhaps the private insurance companies will bribe encourage the Republicans not to torpedo the public option.

I have posted this article to the Health Over Profit for Everyone – HOPE Facebook page to see what they think of the idea. They were the ones to raise the issue of the deleterious effects of adverse selection on a public option.

I think that Bernie Sanders made a similar remark in all three venues in Massachusetts on March 31, 2017. Here is the one from the address at the Edward Kennedy Institute.

Let’s not forget it was a Democratic President, not a Republican, who deregulated Wall Street and initiated the beginning of disastrous trade policies.

He never mentioned the name of that Democratic President in any of the three venues. Even after he was introduced by Elizabeth Warren who called Bernie Sanders a “great friend” Remember that Elizabeth Warren was the great friend who wouldn’t endorse Bernie Sanders when she had a chance to change the whole tenor of the primary elections. Instead, Elizabeth Warren eventually came out to endorse Hillary Clinton. In many events during the general election, Elizabeth Warren introduced Hillary Clinton by telling us how Hillary was going to be the major fighter for the middle-class. Apparently, neither Elizabeth Warren nor Bernie Sanders can remember the name of the Democratic President who did those things that have sunk the Democratic Party over the last 8 years.

Bill Moyers web site has this interview broken up into two pieces. The first is Ian Haney López on the Dog Whistle Politics of Race (Part One).

Haney López is an expert in how racism has evolved in America since the civil rights era. Over the past 50 years, politicians have mastered the use of dog whistles – code words that turn Americans against each other while turning the country over to plutocrats. This political tactic, says Haney López, is “the dark magic” by which middle-class voters have been seduced to vote against their own economic interests.

“It comes out of a desire to win votes. And in that sense… It’s racism as a strategy. It’s cold, it’s calculating, it’s considered,” Haney López tells Bill, “it’s the decision to achieve one’s own ends, here winning votes, by stirring racial animosity.”

The second part is The Dog Whistle Politics of Race, Part II.

Politicians manipulate deep prejudice to rouse hostility against minorities and the government, according to Haney López, and summon support for policies that make economic inequality even worse. And it’s not just Republicans and the tea party who have used this “strategic racism” to win votes, but Democrats as well.

The point of this presentation is not to demonize the people who are the targets of these strategies. The point is to demonize the people who use the strategies to get people to vote for things they don’t realize they are voting for.

Bill Moyers web site has the article How Bill Clinton’s Welfare “Reform” Created a System Rife With Racial Biases. Here is an excerpt to give you an idea of what is in the written part of the article.

Holland: According to your study, just five years after the passage of the Welfare Reform Act, 63 percent of families in the least stringent programs were white and 11 percent were black, and in the most restrictive programs — that is, the ones with the toughest penalties and the most stringent requirements for eligibility – 63 percent were black and just 29 percent were white.

Soss: Yes, and the stringency of the rules matter tremendously for outcomes. The tougher the rules — and the more frequently people are punished for breaking them — the worse the outcomes are for people after they finish the program.

In fact, in the toughest programs, people actually end up in worse shape after they get through them than they were before they got the benefits to begin with. And remember, they were in such a bad situation that they had to turn to a welfare program that’s been so stigmatized that pretty much everyone wants to avoid it.

We also found that people who go through the toughest programs learn lessons about government that lead them to retreat from participating in politics. They become less likely to make their voices heard, and less likely to participate in elections and community organizations.

In a subsequent post, Ian Haney López on the Dog Whistle Politics of Race, I will talk about the video that is embedded in the article.

I read two fascinating articles on the Strong Towns web site. The first article was The Real Reason Your City Has No Money.

Through a combination of federal incentives, state programs and private capital, cities were able to rapidly grow by expanding horizontally. This provided the local government with the immediate revenues that come from new growth — permit fees, utility fees, property tax increases, sales tax — and, in exchange, the city takes on the long term responsibility of servicing and maintaining all the new infrastructure. The money comes in handy in the present while the future obligation is, well….a long time in the future.

The second and follow-up article was Poor Neighborhoods Make the Best Investments.

What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is — TODAY — bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that’s assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.

This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.

Yes, this was all very surprising and revealing. The explanation is plausible. I’ll have to read more to see if plausible in this case is also actual. However, I bet that most people were as ignorant of this as I was. Do you think 45 knows this?

The Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance has the working paper International Tax Competition and Coordination.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey of the theory of international tax competition. Starting with the standard framework, it visits the non-cooperative equilibrium of tax competition, analyses aspects of partial and regional coordination, repeated interaction, stock-flow-effects, agglomeration effects and time consistency issues in dynamic models. We discuss profit shifting in the Keen-Kanbur model an d then survey frameworks to analyze countries’ bidding for firms, tax rate differentiat ion and preferential tax regimes, the role of information exchange and recent work on tax havens. The paper also discusses approaches that replace the benevolent government assumption b y selfish (Leviathan) governments or by political processes that determine countries’ decis ions on their tax policy in an international context.

I have just started to read this paper. What got me interested was the knowledge of one of the truths mentioned near the beginning of the paper.

It is over the last two decades or so, however, that increased economic integration has made international considerations a central component of tax policy making around the world. Like it or not, national tax policy makers are involved in a game with one another. This class of games is what is meant here by “international tax competition,” and it is the aim of this chapter to take stock of what is known of this game, the outcomes it may lead to, and the ways in which it might be beneficially reshaped.

If you are not a policy wonk, you are probably unaware of this issue, let alone how important it is to how we are governed and taxed. I suspect George W. Bush was told how important this is so that he would pull us out of coordination talks as soon as he came into office. Coordination would have ended the games companies play.