Category Archives: Economics

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 18, 2019: 

Stephanie Kelton, professor of public policy and economics at Stony Brook University, served as an advisor to Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. She gave similar advice to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as she was preparing to be sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives: You can have it all!

Writing in the Huffington Post last November, Kelton said:

We have the outline of a plan. We need a mass mobilization of people and resources, something not unlike the U.S. involvement in World War II or the Apollo moon missions — but even bigger. We must transform our energy system, transportation, housing, agriculture and more.

 

What we don’t (yet) have is the final, vital ingredient — a critical mass of politicians prepared to unleash the enormous power of the public purse to save the planet.

To Kelton’s way of thinking, the only thing standing in the way of spending billions the government doesn’t have to solve problems many think don’t exist, is to change just how we think about the federal budget: “To save the planet and fix historical inequities … we must change the way we approach the federal budget. We must give up our obsession with trying to ‘pay for’ everything with new revenue or spending cuts.”

It starts with discarding that old canard about how inflation

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, February 5, 2019: 

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo blamed his state’s revenue shortfall of $2.8 billion on Donald Trump during a press conference on Monday, stating,

There is no doubt that the budget we put forward [$175 billion for fiscal year 2019-20] is not supported by the revenues. It’s as serious as a heart attack….

 

SALT [which capped deductions for state income and local property taxes for the wealthy in Trump’s tax reform act] was an economic civil war. It literally restructured the economy to help red [Republican] states at the cost of blue [Democrat] states.

 

That’s exactly what it did. It was a diabolical, political maneuver.

Cuomo could have accepted the blame for the state’s ongoing exodus (out-migration) of wealthy individuals by pinning the blame where it belonged: on his state’s increasingly unfavorable environment for them thanks to its high taxes. Instead, he said he did the right thing by extending the temporary “millionaires’ tax” levied following the financial crisis a decade ago, and signing into law a bill raising sales tax rates to 8.82 percent.

In other words,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, January 21, 2019:  

The judge sorting out the Puerto Rican bankruptcy got it right. Said Judge Laura Taylor Swain (appointed to the position by Chief Justice John Roberts back in 2017): “There is no decision that can perfectly reconcile all concerns.”

That’s an understatement. The primary revenue source to pay interest on Puerto Rico’s $74 billion in debt is the island’s sales tax. There are barely three million citizens living on the island, and almost 85 percent of them live in poverty. So the sales tax revenue stream comes primarily from tourists [Correction: most of the sales tax – 11.5 percent! – is borne by the locals]. It turns out that that revenue stream has been overcommitted, some of it illegally, in order to support the government’s profligate spending.

All Swain has to do is

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, January 21, 2019:

Bond investors trusting big dog Wall Street bankers like Goldman Sachs are about to learn (or relearn) at least two very important lessons: 1) don’t trust them; and 2) don’t assume the U.S. government will bail you out if things go south.

Like they are in Puerto Rico.

The island’s debt crisis dates back to 1973 when