Found here. My comments in bold.
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Plowing through this superficial idiocy required a gargantuan effort. The author casually makes banal assertions as if they're self-evident truths, and constructs a straw man of epic proportions.
I can assure you that every one of the author's solutions will require more government.
Please excuse my sarcasm as you read.
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Guaranteed jobs, universal basic incomes, public finance and more
It's a new year, but one thing hasn't changed: The economy still blows. (You mean none of the government's huge spending initiatives helped? None of the financial safeguards imposed via regulation and legislation prevented this? I wonder why?)
Five years after Wall Street crashed, (Wall Street didn't crash, the system crashed. Government oversight crashed. Leftist initiatives crashed. And the average person paid the price, since none of the perpetrators were held to account. Thanks, Obama.)
America's banker-gamblers have only gotten richer, while huge swaths of the country are still drowning in personal debt, tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed – and the new jobs being created are largely low-wage, sub-contracted, part-time grunt work. (What happened to all the "shovel ready" jobs? Rebuilding the infrastructure with the stimulus? Why didn't thinks improve under Obama?)
Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. (Hmmm. He thinks capitalism is at fault. Clueless.)
But that egalitarian impulse isn't often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. (In a self-congratulatory mode, the author thinks that what he will propose is uniquely "concrete.")
Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.
1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody
Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government (Yes, the government.)
to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector. There are millions of people who want to work, and there's tons of work that needs doing – it's a no-brainer. (What about those who don't want to work? And what about those who have little or no skill, or a poor work ethic, or are disabled or elderly or under age? And what about those who are mentally deficient?
I am almost sure the author hasn't thought these things through.
But beyond that, jobs exist because there is work to be done. The worker offers his labor, and the employer offers his cash. If the labor isn't valuable, the cash offer is low. If the labor isn't needed, there is no cash offered at all.
But the author has no use for this equation, because he wants government to create jobs out of thin air.)
And this idea isn't as radical as it might sound: It's similar to what the federal Works Progress Administration made possible during Roosevelt's New Deal, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. vocally supported a public-sector job guarantee in the 1960s. (That is, the author is not offering anything innovative or new at all, he's advocating for something implemented 80 years ago and still operates in large form to this day. He conveniently omits the fact that the Great Depression lasted years longer than it should of partly because of those programs. And he wants more!)
A job guarantee that paid a living wage (Now he takes the value of the work off the table. No matter how unskilled, incapable, or unmotivated, everyone would get at least a living wage, no matter how bad a worker they are.)
would anchor prices, (Anchor them higher.)
drive up conditions for workers at megacorporations like Walmart and McDonald's, (Waaait. Wasn't the author just talking about something like a federal employment plan ala FDR? But now he's talking about megacorporations?)
and target employment for the poor and long-term unemployed – people to whom conventional stimulus money rarely trickles all the way down. (That is, target those who are least employable.)
The program would automatically expand during private-sector downturns and contract during private-sector upswings, (No, it will never contract. Government programs never contract.
But more to the point, if the idea is so good, why would the author think it might contract?)
balancing out the business cycle and sending people from job to job, rather than job to unemployment, when times got tough. (He's says these things so flippantly, as if there's some sort of easy-peasey mechanism that would accomplish this process. However, such a mechanism, even if it were possible to create, would uproot families, devastate businesses, and destroy rural communities.
"When times got tough" is a red flag. Times never get tough in a socialist utopia. Doesn't the author know this? Isn't he supposed to be offering "concrete" solutions? Yet he admits that times might get tough. How is this possible?)
Some economists have proposed running a job guarantee through the non-profit sector, which would make it even easier to suit the job to the worker. Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions. Sounds nice, doesn't it? (Yeah, and there will be pink unicorns and cotton candy and everybody will be nice to each other in this sweet utopia. Not.)
2. Social Security for All
But let's think even bigger. (He uses the word "think".)
Because as much as unemployment blows, so do jobs. What if people didn't have to work to survive? Enter the jaw-droppingly simple idea of a universal basic income, in which the government would just add a sum sufficient for subsistence to everyone's bank account every month. A proposal along these lines has been gaining traction in Switzerland, and it's starting to get a lot of attention here, too. (I sit at my keyboard speechless. **Pauses to recover equilibrium** "...the government would just add a sum..." That's it. That's all it takes. So easy, it is. Just give people money. If you can fog a mirror, you get a check. You can sit all day in your underwear on a beanbag chair eating Cheetos and playing video games. "I deserve my money because I'm a valuable human being," you shout at your TV screen.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the bowels of a government building, a printing press is spewing out checks written on an account with no money in it. Since there is no longer an incentive to work, there are no longer workers, and therefore no longer businesses. And thus, there is no more tax revenue that would have funded those checks.
The author is maleducated.)
We live in the age of 3D printers and self-replicating robots. Actual human workers are increasingly surplus to requirement – that's one major reason why we have such a big unemployment problem. (Luddite fallacy.)
A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating." (Yes of course. The simple fact that the author typed it on his word processor means it could happen.)
Put another way: A universal basic income, combined with a job guarantee and other social programs, could make participation in the labor force truly voluntary, thereby enabling people to get a life. (The author gets to decide what constitutes a life.)
3. Take Back The Land
Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don't really do anything to earn their money. (No, except to work hard to put together enough cash to risk buying a property, and then hope they can find a tenant that won't destroy the place.)
They just claim ownership of buildings (No claim involved here. they do own it.)
and charge people who actually work for a living (Now the author gets to decide what constitutes work.)
the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve. (Unsupported assertions.)
In a few years, my landlord will probably sell my building to another landlord and make off with the appreciated value of the land s/he also claims to own (No claim involved here. they do own it.)
– which won't even get taxed, as long as s/he ploughs it right back into more real estate. (ON what basis it should be taxed is never explained.)
Think about how stupid that is. The value of the land has nothing to do with my idle, remote landlord; it reflects the nearby parks and subways and shops, which I have access to thanks to the community and the public. (A true city boy. He has no idea about land or values or what makes things valuable. He thinks that value is because of society, when value is based on utility.)
So why don't the community and the public derive the value and put it toward uses that benefit everyone? Because capitalism, is why. (No, because it doesn't belong to the community.)
The most mainstream way of flipping the script is a simple land-value tax. (Oh, like a property tax? Wow, no one has ever thought of that before!)
By targeting wealthy real estate owners and their free rides, we ("We?" Who is "we?" It can only be government.)
can fight inequality and poverty directly, make disastrous asset price bubbles impossible and curb Wall Street's hideous bloat. (All these are products of prior government intervention. Of course, more of the same has got to work this time.)
There are cooler ideas out there, too: Municipalities themselves can be big-time landowners, and groups can even create large-scale community land trusts so that the land is held in common. In any case, we have to stop letting rich people pretend they privately own what nature provided everyone. (Unsupported assertion. And notice that only the wealthy appear to own things.)
4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody
Hoarders blow. Take, for instance, the infamous one percent, whose ownership of the capital stock of this country leads to such horrific inequality. (Notice the lack of thinking skills. People owning more stuff than others leads to... inequality. This is a tautology.)
"Capital stock" refers to two things here: the buildings and equipment that workers use to produce goods and services, and the stocks and bonds that represent ownership over the former. The top 10 percent's ownership of the means of production is represented by the fact that they control 80 percent of all financial assets.
This detachment means that there's a way easier way to collectivize wealth ownership than having to stage uprisings that seize the actual airplanes and warehouses and whatnot: (That is, rather than the typical socialist bloody revolution at the cost of millions of lives, the author has a brilliant solution...)
Just buy up their stocks and bonds. When the government does that, it's called a sovereign wealth fund. Think of it like a big investment fund that buys up assets from the private sector and pays dividends to all permanent U.S. residents in the form of a universal basic income. Alaska actually already has a fund like this in place. If it's good enough for Levi Johnston, (Bristol Palin's ex.)
it's good enough for you. (So the government is going to take money from you to buy from you what you own so that everyone can own it, and the money paid for your property is valueless because everyone owns everything. Makes perfect sense...)
5. A Public Bank in Every State
You know what else really blows? Wall Street. The whole point of a finance sector is supposed to be collecting the surplus that the whole economy has worked to produce, and channeling that surplus wealth toward its most socially valuable uses. (Really? That's the purpose of Wall Street? On what planet?)
It is difficult to overstate how completely awful our finance sector has been at accomplishing that basic goal. (I can guarantee you that Wall Street doesn't have that goal. Its goal is to make money.)
Let's try to change that by allowing state governments into the banking game.
There is only one state that currently has a public option for banking: North Dakota. When North Dakotans pay state taxes, the money gets deposited in the state's bank, which in turn offers cheap loans to farmers, students and businesses. The Bank of North Dakota doesn't make seedy, destined-to-default loans, slice them up inscrutably and sell them on a secondary market. It doesn't play around with incomprehensible derivatives and allow its executives to extract billions of dollars. It just makes loans and works with debtors to pay them off. (How unfair that people should have to pay back these loans, especially since the loan money was used to purchase "capital stock" which should be owned by everybody.)
If that idea – or any of the others described in this piece – sounds good to you, there's a bitter political struggle to be waged. Let's get to work. (Count me out.)
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