The right is already tossing around Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio as potential US presidential candidates in 2016. Are they presidential material? Each has shown up recently in the news and offered us some insight into that very question. Today I would like to further examine the remarks of both Jindal and Rubio, the former on the fiscal cliff, the latter on young earth creationism.
Tag: Debt
Fiscal Cliff Ignorance
I’m back in the United States for a month, so it’s only fitting to write an American piece. There’s a statistic out there that should put fear into the hearts of those of us who practise, either professionally or as a hobby, the art of statecraft. The implications of this statistic are vast for the health of the American economy and the American democracy.
It’s a Trap!
In the rush to come up with a plan of spending cuts and tax hikes, both democrats and republicans have missed the essential detail that makes our current economic circumstances different from any we have previously experienced since World War II–it’s a trap. A liquidity trap, that is, and it’s going to make any spending cuts and tax hikes the US government enacts mean serious pain for millions of people.
Misconceptions: “America is Like Greece”
The other day I found myself in conversation with one of my fellow students about whether or not the British government had too large of budget cuts too soon in the economic recovery. I argued that it was fairly self-evident that it had done so, considering the superior economic performance of most nations that had refrained from issuing cuts or embarked on a policy of stimulus. The response he gave me was an interesting one–he argued that the advantages being enjoyed by the stimulus countries were short term, and advised me to look at France, a country that had refrained from austerity and has recently had its credit rating reduced by Moody’s, is seeing stagnant growth rates, and has a host of other problems. I responded that Eurozone countries were in a different kind of economic crisis from countries like Britain and America, and that different rules applied–this was met with scepticism, as if I were trying to weasel my way out of the point. So today I would like to make the broad argument that the economic problems being experienced in non-Euro countries like America, Britain, Japan, and Canada are of a fundamentally different nature from the kind being experienced in France, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. So different, in fact, that comparing the former to the latter is intellectually useless.
Universal Basic Income: Free Money
Today I had a lecture that introduced an interesting idea, one I think worth sharing and discussing–universal basic income (hereafter referred to as UBI). UBI is a radical alternative to the present welfare system existent in most western countries. In most societies, welfare is conditional on a demonstration of effort to gain employment–it has a work requirement. UBI proposes that the work requirement be scrapped and that welfare be provided to all citizens irrespective of need so that everyone has a sufficient standard of living such that employment becomes a life choice rather than a life requirement.
Benjamin Studebaker 