Lately it has become fashionable among political pundits to declare that the US Presidential election has devolved into a negative slug fest in which both Obama and Romney are equally culpable, lying and distorting and refusing to accept fundamental realities. This is a sort of professional centrism–taking it as an article of faith that both sides are equally to blame. The trouble is that this centrism doesn’t reflect reality and consequently, in order to maintain it, these “centrists” have resorted accepting blatantly false claims from the American political right. Chief among these is the claim that “Medicare is going bust” and that Paul Ryan’s proposal to turn Medicare into a voucher system is some kind of bold, serious solution. Today I set out to examine and refute that claim.
Category: Economics
Concerning the nature of man and the economic system, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
Job Creators or Leisure Class?
A lot of people on the right have been exalting the virtues of “job creators”, agitating for policy changes like the lowering of taxes on the wealthy, the relaxing of regulations, and the augmentation of corporate subsidies so as to facilitate their special talents. Today I would like to juxtapose this view with that of Thorstein Veblen’s notion of the leisure class.
Republicans, The Germans, and Creditor Ethics
The republicans and the Germans have a lot in common right now. Ordinarily, comparing an American political party to the industrious Germans would be quite the positive thing, but right now the republicans and the Germans do not have industriousness in common–what they have in common is the hypocrisy of the creditor ethos.
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The Immense Obstinacy of Ed DeMarco
There’s an important fight going on in the Federal Housing Finance Agency that you may not have heard about. Actually, you might not even have heard of the FHFA. They’re the guys who oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the state-run mortgage buying businesses. Here’s the trouble–Fannie and Freddie possess a lot of mortgages for which the owners of these mortgages are “underwater”. Not that there’s been any flooding, of course.
Paul Ryan’s Magical Fantasy Budget
So Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his running mate in the US Presidential election. It is a very telling choice. As regular readers will know, Mitt Romney proposed a tax policy that was more or less mathematically impossible without inflicting severe tax penalties on the bottom 95% of tax payers. It just so happens that Paul Ryan is guilty of precisely the same magical thinking. Let’s explore.
Benjamin Studebaker 