Economic Section containing current economic issues in the news….
I always put our selected song at the bottom of part 3, but today I also put the Kos articles towards the bottom, since parts 1 & 2 were already overloaded with article links. And as is always the case in part 3, we deal with current economic issues from recent newsfeed articles. We keep exploring the unmistakable concern of stagnant wages, along with disturbing trends of rising income inequality & deficits. I also recently heard we have half the number of business start-ups today as prior to the recession & in the prior century, which goes against the entrepreneurial spirit that once drove the American economy. The American Dream now hangs by a thread. This is going to take a lot more than a quick fix, we may need nothing short of a fundamental change in our free market capitalist system, where we find a way for the working class to rightly earn a higher percentage of our wealth creation & economic growth.
We get the kind of leadership we deserve based on who we elect into office. With each party moving more to the fringes & we’re voting in a lot more extremists, no wonder we get the kind of polarized government now in DC which is basically feckless in solving our problems. That’s why it’s so important voters be better informed with rational points of view, rather than deferring to radicalized narratives which are so prevalent today in both right & left-wing messaging sources. My messages in The Voracs call out the GOP in an attempt to drag them back closer to the pragmatic center where constructive things can get accomplished. Likewise, liberals need to be willing to negotiate back towards the middle where bipartisanship becomes real. In our current stalemate, we can’t get out of our own way let alone accomplish great things.
Because we are so bogged down in partisan gridlock, in some ways Trump could actually do plenty of good by shaking up the system. With serious domestic & foreign threats challenging our way of life, it’s not the right time for a caretaker president playing it safe. So I’ll admit Trump is very aggressive going against the establishment & really trying to tackle problems. It’d be great to break through the entrenched gridlock as long as any new legislation is logical enough to do more good than harm. But the prez may be way too reckless without a clue what he’s doing or understanding the ramifications of his actions. And I sense most of his advisers aren’t that qualified & also don’t know what they’re doing. Plus we’ve seen how Trump lashes out & makes decisions based on watching Fox, which there’s no doubt Hannity or Fox & Friends’ inane opinions are a rambling hodgepodge mess.
I try to avoid going Alex Jones-type conspiracy theory on you, but when I see Trump ruthlessly attack our democratic institutions like the DOJ, FBI, courts & media, while heaping gushing praise on some of the world’s strong-arm dictators, I’m going to go out on a limb. Seeing as how our prez appears to be an aspiring dictator himself & a Putin protege, with the way he always gave a pass to the Russian dictator’s murderous ways, I have a hunch about our American President that Trumpeters would consider nuts. Is it possible Trump’s request for giving drug dealers the death penalty, might it eventually pave the way for his political opponents & officials within the intelligence/security agencies who don’t pledge their full support to our fuhrer, that they might have something far more perilous to fear than just losing their jobs or pensions? Suppose the charges against those who refuse to be Trump sycophants go well beyond disloyalty or bias, since how hard could it be to pin a charge of drug pusher against these rebels not bowing at the alter of Trump? I know it’s a stretch & may sound crazy, but with all the dishonesty, mayhem, corruption & revengeful motives we’ve seen out of this White House, I wouldn’t put anything past this incompetent president. In trying to rein him in, we must be leery of the worst possible intent with anything he might do: donald-trump-death-
Reviewing particular links from the Related Articles below on current economic issues, as we’ve commented on often in the past, these excerpts from how-debt-could-blow-up-the-
Trump’s heady economic potion, however, is masking misguided policies that could leave those same businesses with a severe hangover from today’s celebration. The U.S. government’s huge and growing budget deficits have become gargantuan enough to threaten the great American growth machine. And Trump’s policies to date—a combination of deep tax cuts and sharp spending increases—are shortening the fuse on that fiscal time bomb, by dramatically widening the already unsustainable gap between revenues and outlays. On our current course, we’re headed for a morass of punitive taxes, puny growth, and stagnant incomes for workers—a future that’s the precise opposite of what Trump champions.
By 2028, America’s government debt burden could explode from this year’s $15.5 trillion to a staggering $33 trillion—more than 20% bigger than it would have been had Trump’s agenda not passed. At that point, interest payments would absorb more than $1 in $5 of federal revenue, crippling the government’s capacity to bolster the economy, and constraining the private sector too. Contrary to the claims of the President and his supporters, the U.S. can’t grow fast enough to shed this burden; indeed, Trump’s agenda on immigration and trade looks likely to stunt that growth. (More on that later.) “This is almost like climate change,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “It doesn’t do you in this year, or next year, but you’ll see the ill effects in a day of reckoning.” In the absence of decisive, quick action to tackle this slow-motion crisis, the best-case scenario for the next few years is that America becomes a much riskier place to do business. A high debt load will limit our flexibility to keep the economy on an even course. “Countries with high debt don’t respond aggressively to downturns,” says Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff. If the U.S. slips into recession, we’ll lack the option of lowering taxes or increasing spending on infrastructure, for example, as tools to revive growth.
In the next link americas-debt-crisis-is-
Thanks to the recent budget-busting tax cuts and spending deal, the national debt is skyrocketing and on an unsustainable course. And where there is debt, there are interest payments on that debt. In fact, interest is by far the fastest growing part of the budget. In our latest nonpartisan analysis, we found that interest payments will quadruple, topping $1 trillion per year in as little as a decade. That’s more than we will spend each year on the military or Medicaid, and as a share of the economy, it is the highest in history. As the country spends more and more to service our debt, it leaves less room to spend on everything else, from defense to education to infrastructure to new tax cuts.
Over the next decade, we’ll spend around $7 trillion — $55,000 per household — just servicing our debt. That’s hardly the best use of our scarce tax revenue. Unfortunately, we can’t just cut these interest payments; they represent commitments to our creditors. But a thoughtful plan to slow the growth of our rising debt can help keep interest rates down and prevent interest payments from eating up our entire budget. Sadly, policymakers have spent the past year doing exactly the opposite. Between massive new tax cuts and massive spending hikes, Congress has added over $2 trillion to projected debt. We’re addicted to debt!
And on that subject of entitlements bankrupting our country, this next excerpt comes from america-is-getting-older-when-
The Census Bureau’s latest report on the state of the U.S. population reminds us of this in dramatic fashion. “The year 2030 marks a demographic turning point for the United States,” the report notes. “Beginning that year, all baby boomers will be older than 65.” That is, 21 percent of the entire population will be on Medicare, Social Security or, in most cases, both. Just five years thereafter, in 2035, the number of 65-and-overs will surpass the number of Americans under 18 for the first time in the nation’s history. In short, the dependency ratio — the percentage of non-working members of society who depend on the working members — is rapidly growing and will exceed 70 percent from 2030 on. Unlike in the last period in which the ratio was that high, 1960 to 1980, however, the majority of dependents will be elderly adults, not children. The Census Bureau doesn’t say so, but we couldn’t help noticing that the onset of these all-but-inevitable developments coincides with two other events that the Social Security and Medicare trustees recently forecast: the exhaustion of the Medicare trust fund in 2029 and the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund in 2034.
In this next excerpt from voters-may-be-wising-up, there are hopeful signs maybe voters are starting to wise up. The best way to change the GOP is to reject their agenda at the ballot box, forcing the party to change their recently acquired extremist ways:
There’s no mystery about the Republican agenda. For at least the past 40 years, the G.O.P.’s central policy goal has been upward redistribution of income: lower taxes for the wealthy, big cuts in programs that help the poor and the middle class. We’ve seen that agenda at work in the policies of every Republican president from Reagan to Trump, every budget proposal from party stars like Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House. This policy agenda is, however, deeply unpopular. Only small minorities of voters favor tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations; even smaller minorities favor cuts in major social programs. So how does the G.O.P. stay politically competitive? The answer is that the party has mastered the tactics of bait and switch: pretending to stand for one thing, then doing something quite different in office. But if special elections in the Trump era are any indication, voters are wising up. And under any plausible allocation of the spending cuts needed to offset lost revenue, the tax cuts will leave most Americans worse off (while, of course, benefiting the top 1 percent). The thing is, voters seem to have realized this. Republican groups pretty much stopped running ads about the tax cuts weeks before the election, apparently concluding that they weren’t gaining much traction. And election night polling suggests that health care — specifically, opposition to G.O.P. efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act — was a key issue in PA-18.
From are-wages-disconnected-
That’s actually a plausible hypothesis, but my difficulties with this ended up leading me in an entirely different direction: Is wage growth simply not linked very tightly to the labor market anymore? We see anecdotal evidence of this frequently in news stories that feature CEOs moaning about how hard it is to attract qualified workers—but not raising wages to attract the workers they need. For one reason or another, perhaps companies these days simply don’t react to labor shortages by raising wages.
Here’s a paragraph coming from america-ceo-worker-pay-gap-
Up until this year, comparisons of CEO and worker pay have had to rely on the average take-homes of US workers overall – not the pay of workers at individual corporations. Those generalized figures helped us track the soaring trajectory of executive compensation at big US corporations, from 30 times average worker pay in the 1960s to over 300 times more recently.
This next perspective comes from democrats-cant-expand-
According to recent Pew survey data, about 62 percent of Americans think our economic system unfairly favors the rich and powerful, with the sentiment strongest among millennials, who have grown up in the wreckage of the Great Recession. Fully 82 percent of Americans, likewise, think inequality is either a very or moderately big problem — and again, millennials are the most likely to identify it as a very big problem. As Yale historian Samuel Moyn recently observed, even the robust tradition of human rights is less effective and less imaginative due to the corrosive impact of inequality. If Democrats want to formulate a bold, enduring political vision that will speak to the future that Americans want for themselves, they need to accept that opportunity is a result and companion of equality, not a separate choice altogether.
Inside the remaining links are a variety of topics on our current economic issues. It includes healthcare, drugs, immigration, Puerto Rico, infrastructure, trade & the big mistake of bringing in Kudlow (& TV commentators in general to take high White House positions). The bottom articles generally explore can we ever put aside our differences in joining together for the common good, actually focused on fixing the many current economic issues?
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