The Economic Benefits of Fairness to Wage Earners

 ChumForThought, Political Commentary, Politics, USA 2012 Elections  No Responses »
Jan 312012
 

I read the article in “The Daily Beast” – The Path to Victory in November for Barack Obama and the Democrats by Michael Tomasky. One of the comments pointed out that President Obama doesn’t get credit for all the changes that he has made to support America’s recovery and that he doesn’t spend enough time explaining the economic benefits of focusing on fairness to the wage-earners, just the social benefits. Here was my response:

“Yeah, I thought the connection was more intuitively obvious. Perhaps the dots need to be explicitly connected.

When businesses or investors get more money, they tend to take it out of circulation; they save it (Apple is now sitting on about $100 Billion) or buy things like bonds, mutual funds, or other companies. When businesses or private equity firms buy a business, they often take it apart, sell some pieces, and lay off employees as they squeeze operations for fast profit. 

When private citizens get more money, they tend to spend it on products and services. This money continues to circulate multiple times as the people they give it to also spend it on products and services. Eventually, companies and/or taxes reduce the circulation. When the government gets more money it also tends to spend it on products and services. There is no truth to "trickle-down economics;" there is only "bubble-up investments." However, if you let private citizens and progressive governments spend, you stimulate the virtuous cycle of a recirculating self-reinforcing economy.

There is an exception in the case of some conservative governments. Although a war can stimulate the economy through increased manufacturing and payrolls (as in WWII), It can also damage the economy if its costs are funded by printing money (as in Bush’s Iraq/Afghanistan). Plus, at the end of such a war investment, there is no significant tangible domestic benefit such as improved infrastructure.

Thus, President Obama is right to shift the emphasis from the last 30 years’ trend that favors robbing from the wage-earners (who make money by working) and favors making it easier for businesses, banks, and investors to make money from moving money. He is right to shift the emphasis from hoarding the fruits of American’s labors to planting, growing, nurturing, and replanting what we earn in ways that help more people to work and more people to earn more.”

MoveOn.org Encourages Progressives to Run for Office

 Political Commentary, USA 2012 Elections  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 

Dear _____,

If you were mayor of _____, what would be the first thing you’d do? Make sure city employees don’t lose their pensions? Support green business startups? Or maybe fight back against cuts to crucial local services?

This isn’t just a hypothetical scenario—it’s exactly what more than 4,000 MoveOn members just like you have been thinking about since taking the first step to run for elective office. And they’re not just running for mayor. They’re exploring running for offices including school board, town council, and state legislature in cities and towns across the country.

If you’ve ever thought, "I’ve got some ideas for doing things differently in _____," or seen a local politician and thought, "If that were me, things would be different," then it’s time to join thousands of other progressives across the country and run for office.

And if you decide to run, you won’t be alone. You’ll be part of a nationwide progressive strategy to take back local offices in 2012 and beyond. To help give you the resources you need to run a competitive campaign, we’ve partnered with the New Organizing Institute to provide you with online training and strategic advice. Trust me—running for office is easier than you think. So what do you say?

Yes, I’d consider running for office. (<– click here)

Back in 2010, tea party candidates, backed by national tea party groups, were elected to hundreds of local offices. That’s exactly what we’re going to do in 2012—but with a wave of candidates who will stand up for the 99% in communities across the country. 

If you decide to run, you’ll gain access to the New Organizing Institute’s great online training programs. And to help progressive candidates in 2012, they’ve created a comprehensive set of candidate guides. Here are some examples of what you’ll have access to:

  • Expert online courses on how to run your own campaign and how to get started
  • Help finding the elected position that’s right for you 
  • An online community so that you can ask questions and share advice with other progressive candidates around the nation
  • A database of time-tested strategic campaign tips, and more

So if you’ve ever wanted to change things in Iowa, or imagined yourself running for office in _____, now’s the time.

Republicans Have Become “Insurgent Outliers”

 Political Commentary, USA 2012 Elections  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 

Clippings from Newyorker.com, The Political Scene, The Obama Memos, by Ryan Lizz, January 30, 2012

Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write, “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kJZqylwT 

In “The Audacity of Hope,” Obama wrote longingly about American politics in the mid-twentieth century, when both parties had liberal and conservative wings that allowed centrist coalitions to form. Today, almost all liberals are Democrats and almost all conservatives are Republicans. In Washington, the center has virtually vanished. According to the political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have devised a widely used system to measure the ideology of members of Congress, when Obama took office there was no ideological overlap between the two parties. In the House, the most conservative Democrat, Bobby Bright, of Alabama, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Joseph Cao, of Louisiana. The same was true in the Senate, where the most conservative Democrat, Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, was farther to the left than the most liberal Republican, Olympia Snowe, of Maine. According to Poole and Rosenthal’s data, both the House and the Senate are more polarized today than at any time since the eighteen-nineties.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kJk0nlgZ 

Polarization also has affected the two parties differently. The Republican Party has drifted much farther to the right than the Democratic Party has drifted to the left. Jacob Hacker, a professor at Yale, whose 2006 book, “Off Center,” documented this trend, told me, citing Poole and Rosenthal’s data on congressional voting records, that, since 1975, “Senate Republicans moved roughly twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats moved to the left” and “House Republicans moved roughly six times as far to the right as House Democrats moved to the left.” In other words, the story of the past few decades is asymmetric polarization.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kJkPmwOF

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