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?

What’s wrong with this video that I received in the following email?

Subject:	FW: Who has the real worldview?
Date:	Mon, 2 May 2016 00:52:40 -0400
From:
To:

Subject:Who has the real worldview?

This is the Israel that many the fanatic Muslims want to destroy.

Watch this 3 1/2 minute video and I promise you’ll be glad you did. Then send it as far and wide as you can. Help spread the story of who Israel is. Remember when Hurricane Sandy hit NY? Israel was the only country to send aid!

https://player.vimeo.com/video/154464174

My response to this email was the following:

How many good deeds does it take to make up for taking people’s homes, cutting off their water, strangling their economy, and applying massive group punishment for any resistance? I was raised to abhor the group punishment meted out by the Germans in WWII against the people in the occupied countries because of the acts of their resistance fighters.

Do all the US’s good deeds make up for the coups we have fomented? Does it make up for the genocide we committed against the native Americans at the birth of our country and on-going? Does it make up for the Iraqis and Libyans and Syrians that have been killed because we wanted to spread democracy in the middle east?

On the other hand, do you have good feelings for all the humanitarian aid that Cuba has given out around the world?

Do you have any capability to see things as your adversaries might see them, and stop to think that maybe you can’t make up for acts of inhumanity by a few acts of humanity?

How many murderers get off because they can point to all the billions of people that they did not murder? In the eyes of our laws one act of murder wipes out all the good acts you have done.

/Steve

YouTube has the TYT – Florida Open Debate.

The first ever bi-partisan Open Debate for U.S. Senate in Florida between Alan Grayson and Rep. David Jolly.

This is another way to hold a debate. This is not a Presidential debate, but it could be a model for one. I am not sure what I think about it. What do you think?

The fact that Alan Grayson is running for the Senate in the Democratic primary and David Jolly is running for the Senate in the Republican primary adds an unusual twist to the debate that is more than just a format change. They aren’t actually challengers of each other in the next contest facing either one of them. They will only be direct opponents if they both win their primaries against other people who are not in the debate.

Naked Capitalism has the article A Simple “Trade” Solution to Boost Workers Across the Planet.

But the reason Third World workers get such a large share of jobs is because their wages are low. Third World countries export so much of what they produce because their workers cannot afford to buy these goods themselves. Handicapping them will only drive their wages lower, making them even more attractive to foreign corporations.

Is which group of workers to hurt, the only choice? Is there no trade policy that can help all workers at the same time? There is.

Remember that this is just one part of the solution. Don’t get hung up on thinking this is THE silver bullet that will fix everything instantly. However, when you hear representatives of the oligarchs tell you that we must protect “our” “intellectual property” from the foreigners learn to cringe at what they are trying to foist upon us.

There are a raft of ideas on how to rethink trade agreements so that they are good for everybody, not just the wealthy and the multi-national corporations.  Free trade done right is a good thing for all of us.  The ideas in this article are just examples of some of the things that could be done.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Obama’s Great Lie: What’s Good for Wall Street Felons is Good for America.

 A president who has a good case to make on the merits of his economic policies can make that case to the public with all the advantages of his office.  Obama would have gained immense “political capital” if he had led a vigorous claim to hold the Wall Street frauds personally accountable for their crimes and he would have discredited the source of much of his future opposition.  A president who allows elite CEOs to grow wealthy through fraud and even wealthier through a public bailout will – and should – squander his political capital.

Obama admitted to Sorkin, that he chose the strategy of allying himself with Wall Street and disparaging its critics.

There is no nice way to put this, Obama is either a con artist or a fool.  If he found the country had been taken in and put into dire straights by the felons on Wall Street, what kind of answer did he expect when he went to those crooks and asked them how to fix the mess they had made.  You don’t go to the con artists to ask them what to do when you discover they are con artists who have treated you very badly.

In Hillary Clinton’s case, she is the con artist, so there is no wonder she likes the “solution” that Obama chose.  This country just cannot afford to put another Obama type into office as President.  I am surprised that when Clinton touts her economic plan over Bernie Sanders’ plan that he  doesn’t point out to us all that her economic advisers are all crooks themselves.  What kind of advice do we expect the crooks to give us?

The New York Times has the story What’s in a Name Change? Politics, Some at George Mason University Fear.

Those foundations have given more than $50 million over the past decade, most of it funneled to pet initiatives affiliated with the university, like the Mercatus Center, an economic think tank that churns out libertarian policy research, and the Institute for Humane Studies, which promotes libertarian philosophy. Mr. Koch sits on the boards of both.
.
.
.
The Charles Koch Foundation usually insists on some say in how its money is used, going as far as asking for the right to have a committee it appointed sign off on hires to a new economics program it funded in 2011 at Florida State University.

This is what I fear is going on at The David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. When MIT announced this project, my alma mater and I parted company.  I no longer give any money to MIT, which <sarcasm>I am sure they sorely miss</sarcasm>.  I didn’t dare go to my 50th reunion for fear that the speakers extolling the contribution for David Koch might make me sick to my stomach.