Cheap Sexism and Intellectual Dishonesty about Marriage

Posted on October 3, 2017 by | 4 comments

By William K. Black
October 2, 2017     Kansas City, MO

This is the second column in my series about win-win strategies to strengthen the family and countering the conservative culture warriors who use the family as a means to oppose win-win solutions that bring people together.  Mark Regnerus is one of the most notorious of these hard right culture warriors.  He is the disgraced pseudo-scholar who right-wing groups funded to try to gin up evidence that same sex marriage harmed children.  His efforts collapsed in an embarrassing spectacle that made clear that his dogmas rule his work.

Regnerus is back in the Wall Street Journal flogging his new book in an op ed entitled “Cheap Sex and the Decline of Marriage.”  He introduces his thesis with the claim that because unmarried heterosexual women are willing to have sex, tens of millions of men are no longer willing to marry.  If unmarried heterosexual women wish to improve their chances of getting married, they need to be virgins – and convince their sisters to remain virgins until marriage (at an average age of around 28 for college-educated women).

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The Poorest Tax Payers to Pay the Most Under Trump Plan

Posted on October 2, 2017 by | 6 comments

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and says that both Republicans and Democrats are financially illiterate when they speak about the deficit, and Trump’s economic experts are ‘completely disconnected from the real world.’ You can view here with a transcript.

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The Job Guarantee Should Unite Anyone Interested in Strengthening Families

Posted on October 2, 2017 by | 4 comments

By William K. Black
Kansas City, MO     September 25, 2017

The University of Missouri – Kansas City recently hosted the first conference on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and a closely associated idea, a federally-backed job guarantee for everyone willing and able to work.  On September 25, 2017, the New York Times published an article exemplifying one of the applications of the job guarantee that would provide a win-win that should unite anyone interested in strengthening the family.  The title is “How Did Marriage Become a Mark of Privilege?”  Claire Cain Miller authored the column, and her key takeaway are in these two passages.

Fewer Americans are marrying over all, and whether they do so is more tied to socioeconomic status than ever before. In recent years, marriage has sharply declined among people without college degrees, while staying steady among college graduates with higher incomes.

Americans across the income spectrum still highly value marriage, sociologists have found. But while it used to be a marker of adulthood, now it is something more wait to do until the other pieces of adulthood are in place — especially financial stability. For people with less education and lower earnings, that might never happen.

These facts establish an obvious policy that could unite the public.  The combination of MMT full employment policies and the job guarantee is the best way to strengthen family financial stability.  The United States, which has a sovereign currency, can do that.  The European Union nations that lack a sovereign currency will frequently be unable to do so.  Jobs, not simply income, are essential to many humans’ happiness and sense of self-worth.  Unemployed American men, for example, do less housework than do employed American men.  Businesses are deeply reluctant to hire the unemployed, particularly if they have been unemployed for any significant time.  The cliché of males responding to unemployment through depression has considerable truth.

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Hy Minsky, Low Finance: Modern Money, Civil Rights, and Consumer Debt

Posted on September 29, 2017 by | 2 comments

By Raúl Carrillo

I delivered the remarks published below at the First International Conference on MMT on September 22nd, 2017. The panel, entitled “Modern Money, Courts, and Civil Rights — Against Legal Predation”, explored the interplay between the cycle of crisis, austerity, and privatization, and the concomitant loss of rights for the public. I was joined by two esteemed law professors: Angela P. Harris, formerly of UC Davis School of Law, and Martha McCluskey, of the University at Buffalo School of Law. The panel was moderated by Danny Sufranski, MMN Harvard Chapter President.

These remarks were delivered solely in my capacity as a director of the Modern Money Network and do not reflect the views of any past or present employers.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Raúl Carrillo and I’m a director of the Modern Money Network (MMN), a student-driven interdisciplinary organization promoting public understanding of money, law, finance, and the economy (obviously embracing MMT as a foundation). By day, I’m an attorney specifically focused on consumer financial protection or as one notorious predator, Capital One, would say, “What’s in your wallet?” Perhaps a better way to put it, is that, in the Minskian sense, I help people manage their “survival constraints.”

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Jared Bernstein Shows the Costs of Not Understanding Sovereign Currencies

Posted on September 27, 2017 by | 18 comments

William K. Black
September 26, 2017      Kansas City, MO

UMKC has just hosted a well-attended conference on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and job guarantee (JG) programs in which the federal government would provide the funds for employer of last resort programs.  In conjunction, MMT and JG allow full employment to become the norm.  MMT is based on reality, it explains how the monetary system in a nation with a sovereign currency actually functions.  Most monetary theory taught in conventional economic classes is a fiction arising from carryovers from the era of the gold standard in which nations lacked a sovereign currency.

Jared Bernstein has just published an op ed in the New York Times entitled “Do Republicans Really Care About the Deficit.”  Republican elites, of course, have not really cared about federal budget deficits for decades.  That is a good thing that Democrats should embrace in a bipartisan spirit.  Bernstein, of course, is correct that the Republicans are hypocrites about federal budget deficits, pretending to care about them when the Democrats hold power and displaying their lack of any real care when Republicans hold power and the context is tax cuts for the wealthy.

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Italy’s Great Experiment

Posted on September 27, 2017 by | 11 comments

By J.D. ALT

Italy is experimenting with giving tax-cuts to its citizens in exchange for public services―such as pulling weeds and cutting grass. Wow. What an amazing idea! The government issues a tax credit, and uses it to pay a citizen in exchange for the citizen’s services to the government. The government could even make this arrangement more formal by printing the tax credits on pieces of paper called “LIRIES” (or something like that) and paying for the weed-whacking services with this “cash.” That way the citizen who’s earned the “LIRIES” has the option of using them as payment to another citizen (who’d also like a tax-cut) for, say, a bag of potatoes. So, the first citizen pulls some weeds, gets paid in “cash” and then uses the “cash” to buy her dinner. If you thought about it, you could possibly run an entire economy in this fashion. The only thing you’d have to worry about, of course, is that the government might run out of the tax-credits it needs to pay the citizens to do the work! If that happened, where could the government possibly get more tax-credits? Could it collect tax-credits as “taxes”? Could it borrow them from all the street-sweepers and weed-whackers who’ve earned them? (In which case it would have to pay “tax-credit interest”―which just seems to exacerbate the problem!)  Hmmm. I’m going to have to think about that one. But in the meantime, doesn’t this mean that any Eurozone country has the option to stay IN the Eurozone while at the same time operating its own local economy using its own local “sovereign” currency?

 

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Massachusetts First to Sue Equifax Over Massive Hack

Posted on September 24, 2017 by | 2 comments

NEP’s Bill Black was on The Real News Network and discussing that several government agencies and at least 34 state attorneys general have opened investigations into the Equifax data-breach scandal–which is ‘the gift that keeps on giving.’ You can view with transcript here.

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Equifax Data Breach is a 10 out of 10 Scandal

Posted on September 12, 2017 by | 1 comment

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and discussing the hacking of consumer credit reporting giant Equifax, and the company’s ‘cynical’ handling of it, is a far-reaching disaster that borders on criminal. You can view here with a transcript.

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Low Rate of Unionization in US Consequence of Deregulation

Posted on September 12, 2017 by | Comments Off on Low Rate of Unionization in US Consequence of Deregulation

NEP’s Bill Black appears on The Real News Network and points out that former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers’ recent plea for greater unionization contradicts his actions as a member of the Clinton and Obama administrations, when he promoted financial deregulation, increasing the power of capital. You can view with transcript here.

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Trump Proves Again that it is Impossible to Compete with Unintentional Self-Parody

Posted on September 12, 2017 by | 1 comment

By William K. Black
September 5, 2017      Kansas City, MO

In my immediately prior article I discussed how Politico fell for Third Way’s dishonest discussion of how Democrats should brand themselves as the party committed to jobs.  I explained that progressive Democrats were the party of good jobs in part because they opposed fraudulent for-profit schools while President Trump, the Republicans, and the New Democrats were anti-jobs because they supported the rip offs.  Trump, having run a for-profit “university” so fraudulent that.it was not even a real university, is the most glaring patron of these frauds.

Trump appointed Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education because she is a fierce enemy of public education and loves the for-profit frauds.  Recently, however, DeVos has taken a step so brazen that it adds proof to our family saying that it is impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody.  DeVos chose a prior executive of DeVry, a for-profit school sanctioned for its recurrent frauds, to head the Education Department’s “enforcement” unit responsible for disciplining fraudulent for-profit schools.  In any normal administration, this would be a scandal leading to investigations and resignations in disgrace.  Under Trump, the latest DeVos scandal is already a forgotten footnote in an administration in which absurdity and sleaze are constant companions.

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