Steve's Politics Blog

I have posted the album about my Birdbath Heater project on my web site.

I have embedded the album here, but to see it outside of the blog, use the link above.

Naked Capitalism has the article Wolf Richter: New Census Data Shows Why the Job Market is Still “Terrible” (as Trump said).

So the number of jobs since 2010 has risen by 13.8 million – which the economists are endlessly touting, along with the even better sounding 14.8 million since 2011. But the population has increased by 16 million since 2010. Most of them are people of working age, jostling for position to grab one of these jobs that would put them on the nonfarm payrolls. And this is why the job market for many individuals is “terrible,” as Trump said.

Read this article to be armed with the numbers when any neo-liberal tries to tell you how many wonderful jobs have been created under President Obama. Many of us, especially Bernie Sanders supporters, have been saying this for over a year. The neo-liberals who thought they could win elections by pretending we were not experiencing what we could plainly see happening include Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Barrack Obama.

Since Elizabeth Warren is my Senator, I can make an effort to see that she has to pay a political price for endorsing Hillary Clinton when she could have and should have endorsed Bernie Sanders. It is the only way that these people will get the message. And if they still don’t get the message, at least we will have pushed them out of the way to where they can do no harm.

Elizabeth Warren sent me a solicitation to support the Economic Policy Institute.

Elizabeth Warren is a traitor to the cause of the 99%. She is just another politician who will say anything. I don’t think she believes a word she says given that she could endorse Hillary Clinton and pretend that Clinton was a champion for the 99%. She had a chance to endorse the true representative, Bernie Sanders, but she muffed it.

I have unsubscribed from the email list of the Economic Policy Institute.

Naked Capitalism has this very important article Chanos: Is a Big Change Underway in Global Capitalism?.

Events conspire to derail our perceptions of presidents. When we look at their platforms, we think we know where things are headed. But in modern times, the only two presidents that I can think of who really got their ideas and platforms enacted wholesale were FDR and Reagan. Everybody else has gotten compromised, or has had events overwhelm them.

This is an interview with a very perceptive investor and academic who seems uniquely able to look at reality without letting his biases interfere. He sees things quite differently (and more wisely) from most of today’s pundits.

What is particularly enlightening about this interview is both how much he knows and also how much he is aware of what he does not know.

One thing to learn here is to avoid getting all worked up about what you imagine Donald Trump will do because there is too much uncertainty about what he might do. We are just going to have to hang loose and wait for events to transpire before we will know what to do.

Naked Capitalism has the article Why Central Bank Models Failed and How to Repair Them.

Here is what Yves Smith, who posted the article, had to say to try to make the ensuing paper more understandable to a lay audience.

This is a layperson-friendly description of why the most widely used macroeconomic model, the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, is lousy. Most macroeconomists will acknowledge privately that these models are reliable only over a six month horizon, when they are used over much longer time frames. Note that while each central bank has it own version, they all have the same structure and underlying assumptions.

My experience with computer simulation of differential equations helped me understand some of the points of the article. Admittedly, my understanding is hardly complete, but each little piece I can add to my understanding eventually builds into a more complete picture. If you pick up anything out of this article, have faith that it adds to what you know.

Ribbonfarm has the article The Locust Economy.

The war between the 1% and 99% seems to play out with the 1% and the 90% collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle — the Jeffersonian middle class.

The article is rather long, but I found the writing entertaining enough to keep me interested. It is also very educational.

Ironically, my sharing this post with you is participating in the locust horde.

I don’t want to be a locust on the internet. I keep promoting the idea of how people can defend themselves from locusts like me, but they don’t seem to catch on. Perhaps one day they will wake up to how things have to change. See my previous post Monetizing Internet Content – A Working Example.

Thanks to João Geada for sharing this locust article on his Facebook page.

Investing.Com has the article Nearly 95% of all new jobs during Obama era were part-time, or contract.

The research by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that the proportion of workers throughout the U.S., during the Obama era, who were working in these kinds of temporary jobs, increased from 10.7% of the population to 15.8%.

I don’t know if this article is reporting accurately. The study to which they refer is described in a paper The Rise and Nature of Alternative Work Arrangements in the United States, 1995-2015. This paper, published in March 2016 is only 35 pages or so, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet. If it says what this article claims it says, then this explains why so many prople are not so thrilled with Obama’s economic “recovery”.

Naked Capitalism has the very interesting article, The Global War on Cash – Lessons from History.

If payments systems users were that eager to adopt non-physical cash, they would have done so by now. Attempts to provide alternatives date back 25 years or more. Yet physical notes and coins remain in circulation and are the only legal tender in most jurisdictions.

Physical cash’s variable unit costs are progressive — the less wealth you have, the less of the systemic costs is passed onto you as a currency user. Stored-value card systems impose a cost on users and that cost is regressive — the less wealth you have, the higher the unit cost becomes.

Smartphone, “app” and NFC/virtualisation based systems impose an even bigger cost on users due to the high up-front purchase price of a smartphone. Even in cultures which have exhibited a fondness for novelty, technological advances and gadgetry like Japan, a payment system based on smartphones, apps and NFC technology have not proved to be transformative to the payments systems in that country.

I have led a nearly cashless life for many years. I have always realized that this works well for me because I am a free rider in the system. I always pay my credit card bills in full and on time, so I get a free loan from the credit card company for the time between when I make a purchase and when I have to pay the bill. I get the credit card for free. The people who carry credit card balances and pay high interest rates to the credit card companies are the ones paying for all the free stuff I get. This works so well for me, that I have never given much thought to the reality that this Naked Capitalism article discusses. As long as it still works for me, I am going to continue to take the free ride. However, what has never occurred to me before is that when the free ride is over, the old system may no longer exist for me to return to.

Naked Capitalism has the very important article too subtly titled A Strategic Thought posted on December 21, 2016 by J.D. Alt

Even though the fiscal-austerity position was a political ploy, it is still very much stuck in the thinking and rhetoric of the House and Senate Republicans. If the progressives come out first, and early―before Trump has an opportunity to reframe their allegiance―the Tea-Party politicians, who built their reputations by refusing to increase the federal debt ceiling, will have no choice but to, once again, loudly denounce and denigrate the spending proposals. If that happens, it will be much more difficult for Trump to initiate the secret weapon of every authoritarian populist government around the world: giving direct cash payments, stipends, and rebates to the unemployed and under-employed voters―transforming them into vehemently loyal supporters. (This is precisely what is happening today in Poland.)

This post was preceded by a video posted on New Economic Perspectives and titled Bill Clinton’s Surplus: Not Something to Celebrate.

If people could only learn this principle of economics, we could have an historic opportunity to prevent the Trump presidency from becoming a prelude to a turn toward a disaster that happened in Germany when Adolf Hitler rose to power.

It is enough that we failed to take advantage of a possible historic opportunity when people like Elizabeth Warren failed to endorse Bernie Sanders early enough to change the course of the recent election. So here is a proposal to still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Unfortunately, I am fairly confident that our country will miss this opportunity, too.

YouTube has The Young Turks video Trump Didn’t Win The Election… Hillary Lost It.

The populist wave is here. Democrats can either ride it to victory or be crushed by it. Cenk Uygur, host of The Young Turks, breaks it down.

Cenk Uygur quotes some statistics that show what I have suspected. There was no ground swell of voters for Trump. There were a whole bunch of voters who were so disgusted with both candidates that they did not vote. More of the possible Democratic voters did not vote than possible Republican voters. Plus 17% of the Trump voters thought he was not qualified, but they were so disgusted with Hillary as an option that they voted for Trump anyway.

These are facts that the Hillary supporters still refuse to believe. They are still trying to blame every other thing in sight. It’s not the elephant in the room they are ignoring. It is the big honking mirror that they refuse to look into.

The worst part of it is that some of these Hillary supporters want her to run again in 2020.