Problems with Capitalism are detailed below & can’t be fixed on its own…And certainly the obvious problems with capitalism won’t be fixed unless we start working on it, coming up with bold new ideas. Trump voters thought their man would bring those ideas to DC. I too love the idea of a renegade president coming to DC to clean things up & shake up the system! This current deep state, elite establishment, crony capitalist system has an entrenched bureaucracy that mainly benefits politicians & special interests over the American people! But any new leader needs to know enough to solve problems, not make them worse. Aside from starry-eyed Trumpeters, nobody bargained for Trump. I constantly warned about this clueless raging egomaniac during the 2016 campaign, but he’s turned out far worse than I even imagined.
A crony capitalist structure is basically the big business class working in cahoots with the political class at the exclusion of everyone else. That is at the heart of our problems with capitalism, with the middle class & workers having taken the brunt of this, losing ground for decades. And it’s not looking to get any better on its own, as smarter heads need to prevail in engineering better jobs for the future, so we can create a more productive workforce who can get paid accordingly. But for now, something is broken as expressed in this full article posted from problem-with-work-ai-robots-automation-oren-cass:
For the last several years, some of the world’s leading thinkers have fretted over robots and artificial intelligence, with one particular worry — whether jobs across the U.S. and the rest of the advanced economies are going to be wiped out.
The big picture: As of now, no one truly knows what will happen, but everyone agrees on one point — that something is substantially broken when it comes to work. Most Americans have not received a real wage increase in decades, one-third of working-age people are not part of the labor force at all, and the education system seems divorced from the future economy.
So fraught has the subject become that radical solutions are now getting mainstream attention.
What’s happening: President Trump won the 2016 election in large part by repositioning the Republican Party as the defender of rank-and-file workers in down-on-its-luck communities in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump had captured the zeitgeist that almost no one else could see.
But the evidence for a building problem was hiding in plain sight in the form of blighted cities, communities and states. The problem of future work had been outlined, too: In 2013, two young researchers at the Oxford University published a thundering study forecasting that 47% of future U.S. jobs could be automated in the coming decades. More recently, studies by McKinsey have said that a massive reskilling of workers can avoid that outcome. But other studies said that, while that may be right, there is no solution on the horizon for flat wages.
Now Oren Cass, Mitt Romney’s former domestic policy adviser and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that the problem is so profound that it will only be solved by essentially throwing out the long-standing economic policies of both parties.
His new book, “The Once and Future Worker,” rejects the usual explanations — that the problem is robots and automation. Rather, he says, public policy has pushed many workers away from physical labor, to which most are suited, and meanwhile taken whacks at the industrial economy, including extraction industries, that might employ these workers.
Cass told me that the entire economic system should be reordered away from a worship of greater GDP and toward wage growth, higher participation of workers in the labor force and a higher savings rate. The focus of policy should not be on supporting college for everyone, but on skills education. “What we want for society is more than just a larger economic pie,” he says.
Evidence that the system has failed, he argues, is that, although GDP has tripled since 1975 and spending on lower-income families has quadrupled, poverty has risen and wages have been flat.
As a remedy, Cass, like Trump, takes a gigantic step away from decades of orthodoxy, urging an abandonment of both Great Society anti-poverty programs and supply-side tax cuts, arguing that both have resulted in the swath of Americans left behind.
Public policy ought to attend primarily not to the health of companies nor the support of poor people, but specifically to workers — building a system in which people of all abilities can obtain a productive job. He calls this “productive pluralism.”
The bottom line: The problems and the solutions that Cass proposes are neither Republican nor Democratic. The strength of the book is in striking a much-needed challenge to business as usual. But Cass is conspicuously attempting to give an intellectual foundation to Trump’s off-the-cuff policymaking and to influence White House policy and 2020 candidates. In that sense, his book is a political screed. But he is asking the right questions and proposing what is probably needed — an upside-down change to economic policy.
The Problems with Capitalism discussed here
Insider Inc. CEO makes a presentation how to fix capitalism in this next link. It’s all about the pay issue so America can get away from the current setup of being a nation of overlords and serfs: henry-blodget-better-capitalism-raising-wages-ignition. As I’ve often commented, we either fix capitalism for the working class or we’ll soon fall into a form of socialism. Here’s some disturbing excerpts from capitalism-is-working-as-designed claiming capitalism is now working just as it was designed, which isn’t good:
David Leonhardt of TheNew York Times has made a shocking discovery: Capitalism isn’t delivering the goods for the working class! By Jove! Thus he concludes that capitalism “isn’t working.” He argues this is due to business leaders becoming selfish and forgetting their social responsibility. And to be fair, it’s nice to see liberal business journalists writing frankly about the profound economic dysfunction that has gripped the United States for decades. But capitalism as such is working as designed.
An important design feature of classical capitalism is that it only distributes income to workers and owners of capital. It displaced feudalism by driving the peasants off the land, which previously (for all its other gruesome characteristics) served as a sort of safety net by allowing for some subsistence agriculture. If one couldn’t work and had no wealth, one starved — which is why early capitalism was widely and correctly seen as a brutal, inhumane system. An important empirical characteristic of classical capitalism is that it automatically creates extreme inequality. This happened in Britain and the United States during the Industrial Revolution up through the Gilded Age, and as Thomas Piketty writes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it took the Great Depression and two shattering world wars to cut down inequality, through confiscatory war taxation and outright destruction of wealth. It’s possible to fight capitalist inequality, but only by moving away from that pure state of capitalism.
But starting in the 1980s, as the Soviet Union visibly stagnated and collapsed, and the conservative backlash to the New Deal gathered strength, classic capitalism was back in vogue. All those anti-capitalist structures were dismantled piece by piece: Unions were killed, regulations dismantled, taxes lowered, and welfare slashed. The result was a nearly point-for-point retread of the 1920s: skyrocketing inequality, a devastating global financial crisis, and lingering economic dysfunction. It may be possible to re-regulate capitalism and make it less dysfunctional. But at least for now, capitalism is working as designed — and that’s the problem.
Let’s Find the Determination to Fundamentally Craft Something Better!
If we have these many problems with capitalism in a (reportedly) strong economy, what happens with all those millions of struggling workers when the economy goes south? A good review of our current hot & cold economy is presented here in this entire article pulled from americas-economy-is-both-booming–and-fading:
“First of all, the economy itself is really strong,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC on Tuesday, citing such factors as low unemployment and high consumer confidence. “It’s the press that seems more obsessed with what may lie in the future.” Policymakers should share that obsession, though, because America is at once booming and fading. Last week, for example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that U.S. life expectancy declined for a third straight year in 2017 — a calamity last observed in the 1910s amid a global flu pandemic and World War I. Gross domestic product is surging and now stands nearly 20 percent above its pre-recession level, yet the Economic Innovation Group’s Distressed Communities Index reports that the most prosperous 20 percent of U.S. Zip codes account for the entire net increase in employment over that period. Across the remaining 80 percent of the United States, fewer jobs exist now than in 2007. In a world that revolves around sound bites, headlines and tweets, the art of holding two ideas in one’s head has lost its appeal. But that is what understanding this moment in the United States requires. The economy is booming, as most every metric will attest. But it is doing so in cyclical terms, in an upswing following a deep recession. The economy’s long-term trajectory, at least for less-educated Americans, remains downward. We have yet to grapple with the problems that have degraded the U.S. labor market for decades, so we have no right to expect improving results.
The easiest way to appreciate the predicament is by comparing boom to boom. Obviously, things look much better than in 2010. But how do they compare with 2007, at the peak of the last business cycle, or with peaks in 2000 or 1989? Not well. The unemployment rate is low, but millions more men are no longer even looking for work. The 19 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 not working full-time in 2018 is much higher than the 16.6 percent in 2007, which was higher than the 14.4 percent in 2000, which was higher than the 13.6 percent in 1989. Even more striking, that 19 percent figure is worse than the highest levels reached during recessions before the Great Recession. By the pre-2007 standard, today’s labor market would be the worst recession year on record. A similar picture emerges for wage growth, where even promising data looks weak by the standard of prior booms. One way to understand the American experience is as bumps on a downward slope. Picture a child sledding down a hill studded with jumps. As the sled descends, it launches upward off each ramp and the child shrieks with joy, but the sled lands each time a little lower down. Eventually, despite soaring repeatedly, it ends up at the bottom of the hill. Each boom has the unfortunate political effect of relieving the pressure to address longer-term challenges. Who wants to talk about deep labor-market problems or policy failures with the unemployment rate below 4 percent? But that was the sentiment in 2007, and in 2000 — points well uphill from today. While deficit-financed tax cuts may have succeeded in amplifying the current boom, their effect is, at best, to create more space for genuine solutions. They cannot themselves be the solution, and the bill will come due.
Another recession will hit, as the latest stock-market fluctuations remind, and after that another boom. The fortunes of the next generation do not turn on that. They turn on whether we change the conditions in society that hold across booms and busts and that determine how the labor market behaves. We will have to revitalize the industrial economy to create better job opportunities, especially for the majority of Americans who still do not obtain even a community college degree, and build pathways in the education system to help such workers gain a foothold in the labor force. We will need a system of organized labor appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century and a safety net that subsidizes work rather than discouraging it. Trade and immigration policies will have to seek balance — in the flows of both people and products into and out of our markets. The Republican agenda of more and bigger tax cuts will do none of that. The emerging Democratic proposals for more and bigger programs of redistribution won’t, either. Only if we make work, and rising productivity for everyday workers, the priority will the recessions begin to feel a little less deep and the peaks begin to reach higher.
Jobs Report & Tax Bill
The jobs report continues to see the ongoing challenge of lackluster wage growth & stuck-in-the-mud participation rates: us-created-155000-jobs-in-november-vs-198000-expected & also november-jobs-report-wages-unemployment. That tax bill passed a year ago continues to be proven a dud, as corporations & the wealthy pocketed the money that did not trickle down to workers. But if Trump wanted ballooning deficits from those tax cuts, he certainly got that. More on that subject are reported in these excerpts that are the opening to since-pushing-corporate-tax-cuts-to-boost-jobs-half-of-the-rate-coalition-has-laid-off-employees:
In the lead-up to the enactment of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, Donald Trump’s massive tax cut that mostly benefited rich people and big corporations, a coalition of powerful business interests formed with one major priority in mind: slashing the corporate tax rate. The Reforming America’s Taxes Equitably (RATE) Coalition comprised dozens of companies and trade groups that all insisted lowering corporate taxes would mean more jobs. A ThinkProgress review found that about half of RATE Coalition’s members have made layoffs since the law’s enactment. In other words, not only did the expensive tax cut not bring more jobs, it couldn’t even forestall significant job losses.
The Fiscal Policies of a Drunken Sailor…
are also the policies of a reckless jackass. This is Trump’s economy, defined by higher debt, volatility & uncertainty: were-now-seeing-trump-economy. He could care less about passing this massive debt onto future presidents. But all Americans are going to pay for this, especially our children & grandchildren. We should never/ever be anywhere near $1 trillion deficits unless we’re battling our way out of recession. Plus if we’re headed for an economic slowdown & possibly recession as experts forecast, this budgetary malfeasance leaves us with very little leverage in our fiscal toolbox to battle back: trump-2020-election-economy-recession-trade-war.
When will his Trumpeter loyalists finally realize the prez they voted in has no clue? This is a president who only cares about himself, not the country, as seen from this opening to trump-on-coming-debt-crisis-i-wont-be-here-when-it-blows-up, where the prez admits he doesn’t mind running up yuge deficits:
Since the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump’s aides and advisers have tried to convince him of the importance of tackling the national debt. Sources close to the president say he has repeatedly shrugged it off, implying that he doesn’t have to worry about the money owed to America’s creditors—currently about $21 trillion—because he won’t be around to shoulder the blame when it becomes even more untenable. The friction came to a head in early 2017 when senior officials offered Trump charts and graphics laying out the numbers and showing a “hockey stick” spike in the national debt in the not-too-distant future.
In response, Trump noted that the data suggested the debt would reach a critical mass only after his possible second term in office. “Yeah, but I won’t be here,” the president bluntly said, according to a source who was in the room when Trump made this comment during discussions on the debt. The episode illustrates the extent of the president’s ambivalence toward tackling an issue that has previously animated the Republican Party from the days of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of Barack Obama. But for those who have worked with Trump, it was par for the course. Several people close to the president, both within and outside his administration, confirmed that the national debt has never bothered him in a truly meaningful way, despite his public lip service. “I never once heard him talk about the debt,” one former senior White House official attested.
Repatriated $’s?
The president’s bold promises always sound good when he says them, but they rarely come true. More hyped-up assertions from Trump about his tax bill that never materialized are here, as he originally claimed trillions of repatriated dollars would pour back into America, seen in the opening to trump-tax-promise-of-trillions-back-to-u-s-fails-to-materialize:
The amount of offshore cash U.S. corporations have returned home so far this year is just a fraction of what President Donald Trump had promised. A Morgan Stanley report released Thursday estimates companies brought back from $50 billion to $100 billion in the third quarter — which would bring the total repatriated back to the U.S. to as little as $514 billion, based on previously released figures for the first and second quarters from the Commerce Department. The tax overhaul signed into law by Trump in December gave companies incentives to bring money back to the U.S. by offering a one-time low tax on repatriated profits.
Trade, Tariffs & China Talks
I don’t bash everything Trump does. I’ve been saying for a long time we need a level playing field in our trade with China, including preventing the theft of our intellectual property. We can only hope the Trump tariffs & strong posturing that’s causing pain, uncertainty & rattling markets now, would in 2019 lead to equitable trade deals benefiting us for the long run. So while I empathize with what the prez is trying to do, we can rightly be concerned if he is using the right approach: us-china-trade-war-record-trade-deficit-trump. These articles speak to the current uncertainty, seen in tariff-man-us-trade-deficit-reaches-record-high-55-billion-in-october & also us-china-trade-war-huawei-cfo-arrest-sabrina-wanzhou-trump-tariffs.
Defeat Trumpism
But for the most part, pragmatic conservatism needs to return & Trumpian policies should be repudiated. If this rift in the party can ever be mended, it will likely come about only after Trump exits office, as hinted at in this last paragraph from former-rnc-chair-difference-between-republicanism-and-conservatism-in-age-of:
Many traditional conservatives have left the Republican Party entirely since the rise of Trump in the 2016 presidential contest, and others have declared themselves opposed to the president at every turn. Many Republicans, however, praise Trump for his “America first” policies and for what they describe as needed changes happening in Washington, D.C.
Worse than a Real Job
Many workers are turning to the gig economy to make ends meet, but the pay is generally a bigger ripoff than a regular job: is-the-gig-economy-what-it-has-been-cracked-up-to-be. Even with so many positive metrics on the economy, the Fed chair admits it’s an uneven economy inside is-the-gig-economy-what-it-has-been-cracked-up-to-be. Just more signs we have problems with capitalism, with workers continuing to be exploited by wealthy corporate interests.
Millennials trying to Stay Afloat
Young people have played by the rules & worked hard for their college education, but many are finding the American Dream out of their grasp: stop-blaming-millennials-killing-economy. They can hardly get started on their lives, with crippling student debts stopping them from moving out on their own, getting married & starting a family, as explained in excerpts from yes-student-loans-really-are-making-millennials-go-broke:
Ten years after America’s largest financial institutions upended the economic livelihood of millions of millennials entering the job market, a new report from the Federal Reserve confirms what we already knew: millennials are broke. Post-recession, the banks regained their footing, the housing market stabilized and company earnings rose. But while big industries were thrown a lifeline, a whole generation — the largest workforce in U.S. history — faced escalating college tuition costs with few streams of money. Now, 44 million Americans are shouldering $1.5 trillion in outstanding student loans, with young people under the age of 35 holding almost half of that debt. The Federal Reserve’s report is one more piece of evidence that proves that student debt is stripping value out of our financial lives in tangible ways. Earlier this year, through an analysis that looked at the percentage of people’s paychecks that goes towards repaying student debt, we learned that millennials as a whole, and particularly millennials of color, have the largest portion of their paychecks being siphoned away to pay down student loan debt.
Millennials are the most educated cohort in American history, but an uneven economic recovery that forced many of us to take on large sums of student debt, along with an unregulated student loan industry, created a troubling economic situation where millennials like Daniela are earning wages that are lower than what people her age earned in 1984. This occurred despite the fact that our generation is twice as likely to have college degrees, and work in an economy that is 70 percent more productive. Coupled with rising health care, childcare, and housings costs, the economic priority for young people like Daniela is to achieve and maintain financial stability instead of getting ahead. Student debt is keeping young people from buying homes, saving for retirement, and fully participating in the economy. Our generation deserves solutions. We are not killing chain restaurants, nor are we choosing avocado toast over homeownership, we’re simply living and working in an economy with lower earnings, exorbitant tuition costs, and outrageous levels of student debt.
Do as I say, not as I do
The prez wants the wall built & shatter the dreams of dreamers, while he’s also attacking our immigration & asylum laws. But he makes exceptions for his own personal business interests: trump-golf-club-undocumented-workers & also trump-national-golf-club-hired-undocumented-workers-lawyer-says. Heck, he may have even married one.
Dangers Lurking within the Party I always Supported
We’re on vampire watch: trump-is-a-political-vampire. Yes, the GOP has become a dangerous party now in a dangerous place. I’m fully onboard with this Never Trump sentiment, seen inside never-trump-conservative-calls-gop-existential-threat-to-us. This has gone way beyond party or ideology. It’s now about a major political party that has become so thoroughly corrupted, it’s a direct threat to American democracy!
Bush 41 had His Friends Sing at His Services
Our selected songs you may have heard this week, either at his funeral service in DC or in Texas. They’re beautiful/powerful songs in honor of our 41st President, made even more emotional since these were personal friends of the President. The first link takes us to the song by a famous Christian singer, the next one sung by a famous opera singer, with the last one a famous country quartet. The Lord offers the promise, hope & faith that death is not the end of the journey:
And friends are friends forever
If the Lord’s the Lord of them
And a friend will not say never
‘Cause the welcome will not end
Though it’s hard to let you go
In the Father’s hands we know
That a lifetime’s not too long
To live as friends
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