Monthly Archives: August 2019

By J.D. ALT

Mitch McConnell is desperate to find investment funds and businesses that will create jobs for his Kentucky constituents. America, it seems, is mostly incapable of being a source for either. Such is the diminishment of our impoverished private enterprise system that only foreign companies seem interested in bringing U.S. dollars to America to build the factories that will employ us.

America, for example, has not built an aluminum rolling mill in over forty years. It must be easier (read “more profitable”) just to import the stuff. If you want to create jobs, though, in exchange for votes from your constituents, “profitability” takes on new dimensions. And while those additional dimensions don’t seem to appeal much to American enterprise, for some inexplicable reason they are appealing to foreign “investors”—especially ones from Russia. Russia, it seems, has discovered a new form of American “politico-capitalism.”

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By J.D. ALT

Since the Democrat’s presidential debates, the attacks on progressive candidates for their “unrealistic” proposals to address the biggest challenges we face as a collective society have intensified dramatically. The primary criticism is the enormous price-tag associated with each of the big-ticket issues they propose to undertake: universal healthcare, mitigating climate-change, eliminating college debt, free pre-school daycare, re-envisioning and rebuilding America’s infrastructure, a job guarantee and a universal basic income for every citizen. The attacks come from both conservative Republicans and centrist Democrats, each of whom are avowed believers in fiscal “responsibility” and balanced federal budgets.

Unfortunately, while there is growing sympathy with the progressive goals themselves, the advocates of those goals still don’t have a convincing explanation or formula for how the federal government will pay for it all. The best they can come up with is that we’ll increase taxes on the super-wealthy and the big corporations—or that it’s simply unacceptable, conceptually, that the world’s richest democracy cannot manage to achieve these goals for a healthy society. So long as these are the progressive narratives—even if they manage to win the upcoming elections—the goals will never be achieved. To create genuine, wide-spread support for undertaking the big-ticket issues we face, it will be necessary to explain to America how its monetary system actually works.

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