Republican Hypocrisy

The National Debt

Midweek Reading

State Sees Biggest Hike In New COVID-19 Hospital Admissions In 30 Days

Georgia Republicans cancel election for state Supreme Court, so governor can appoint a Republican

Too Big to Fail: The Entire Private Sector

Will Northwoods Vacations Spread COVID-19?

Covid-19 cases surge in some states as Americans celebrate Memorial Day weekend

The Strange Case of Ron Johnson

White House Press Secretary: Golf Is Not OK While U.S. Mourns (Trump Exempt)

Milwaukee County trending upward in counts of Covid-19 patients in hospitals, official says

Scott Walker has a plan to make everything worse

Investors Don’t Share Trump’s Scorn for Blue States

Labor: Human Activity That Provides The Goods Or Services In An Economy

"If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates Labor, he is a liar." ~ Abraham Lincoln

Yet, this seems to be exactly the message of Wall Street, conservatives and capital investment, in general.

According to investors, workers don't really deserve the fruit of their labor.

What's wrong with giving out pay raises? Plenty, according to some Wall Street analysts

“This is frustrating. Labor is being paid first … again. Shareholders get leftovers,” wrote Citi analyst Kevin Crissey in a note to clients. 

Jamie Baker of Morgan Stanley downgraded American shares to “neutral” from “overweight,” saying the pay decision “establishes a worrying precedent, in our view, both for American and the industry.”

John Cotton condensed the Wall Street view:

"There’s always this tension between what companies would want for the long term and what Wall Street wants for the short term," said John Cotton, professor of management and director of the Executive MBA Program in the College of Business Administration at Marquette University. "As far as Wall Street is concerned, if you could pay minimum wage to everybody on every job, that would be great because that would leave more money for stockholder. 

...

"Wall Street, they don’t care so much long term," Cotton said. "They would rather have the company buy back stock than, say, invest in making their business more effective over the long term, because that’s not going to pay off in the next 90 days. 

"It is short-sighted, but then Wall Street almost by definition is short-sighted," he added. "If you could do something to jack up your stock price 5%, the fact that it’s going to hurt your company over the next 10 years is irrelevant."

 American Airlines CEO defended worker raises:

"As a service organization, investments in our team are investments in our product," Parker said during a conference call with analysts. "We think it's precisely this kind of investment in our people that is going to make the difference in our service. And while this won't happen overnight, we also think it's the kind of investment that will continue to drive revenue (growth) for American. And as that happens, all of you will be the beneficiaries of those returns."

For Wall Street, raises should be reserved for the CEOs that decide to fire workers and/or suppress wages.

If we want to address the increasing income inequality in our society, we need to break from this capital-worship paradigm.

"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." ~ Abraham Lincoln

Conservatives' Government Dependency Fairy Tale

Acclaimed Mensa member and Wrangler jeans spokesperson, Sheriff David Clarke, following the calamity in Milwaukee, has fingered "progressive policies" as the cause of the protests.

The growth of the welfare state” encourages the destructive behavior seen on Saturday and Sunday nights...

“These progressive policies have hit the black community like a nuclear blast, and until we reverse this government dependency, that’s what creates all of this – and encourages it, by the way,” Clarke said.

Just like the good little conservative soldier he is, Clarke regurgitates right-wing tripe on cue.

In case you haven't heard, everything the Democrats, liberals, etc. have ever done is the cause of everything bad in the world. Nevermind reality or facts, everything the Democrats, liberals, etc. have ever done is the cause of everything bad in the world.

TANF Continues to Weaken as a Safety Net

In 2014, for every 100 families in poverty, only 23 received cash benefits from TANF. This is down from the 68 families for every 100 in poverty that received cash assistance when TANF was first enacted in 1996. This ratio, which we call the TANF-to-poverty ratio (TPR), has declined nearly every year since 1996 and reached its lowest point in 2014.

Improving the State of Our Welfare State

By the time Bill Clinton first ran for president, the concept of public assistance had diminished to such an extent that that he pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” He fulfilled this promise when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. With the stroke of a pen, the government’s largest direct cash assistance program for families with low or no income AFDC was replaced by the more restrictive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. What was called “welfare reform” at the time was in fact an attempt to lessen the financial commitments of the federal government. It also included several features advanced by conservatives, including time limits on assistance, connecting benefits to work effort, and a block grant structure that gave states greater discretion in how to distribute resources.

The End of Welfare as We Know It

More than 13 million people received cash assistance from the government in 1995, before the law was passed. Today, just 3 million do.

If nothing else, these policies were an effective way to reduce the number of people on welfare rolls. People on the left and right agree that they helped change a program that was in need of reform. But there were real human costs too: Those who didn’t find jobs, who weren’t working, who lived in states trying to reduce their cash-assistance programs, were left to struggle on their own...

Today, in large part because of welfare reform, the safety net—the set of government efforts to come to the aid of the country’s citizens when they are down on their luck, much of which has existed since the Great Depression—is thin and getting thinner. And this thinning goes beyond welfare, which gives needy families cash support: On April 1, between 500,000 and one million childless adults will lose access to food stamps (officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP). This is the belated consequence of a rule that was part of Clinton’s welfare reform, which stipulated that childless adults can only receive three months of food stamps if they aren’t employed at least 20 hours a week or in a training program. For years states received waivers for the rule, but in many states, governors have chosen not to ask for extensions for this year.

How the rise of America’s massive military welfare state led to the decline of the civilian welfare state

Over the past four decades in the United States, as the country has slashed its welfare state and employers gutted traditional job benefits, growing numbers of people, especially from the working class, grasped for a new safety net – the military. Everyone recognizes that the US armed forces have become a global colossus. But few know that, along with bases and bombs, the US military constructed its own massive welfare state. In the waning decades of the 20th century, with US prosperity in decline, more than 10 million active‑duty personnel and their tens of millions of family members turned to the military for economic and social security.

Reality appears to be almost the exact opposite of what Clarke claims. It has been, in fact, the decline of the welfare state and the lack of investment in the poorest persons and neighborhoods that has caused the current situation.

Too much money for stadiums and the well-connected, not enough investment in the needy and underprivileged.

In can also be argued that our recently militarized police state has diverted dollars from more appropriate investments in the communities that need it most. We keep increasing our police force in communities nationwide, claiming a need for law and order. But, what if, rather than employing a force to "keep order," we were, instead, investing in community institutions and assets, schools, real estate renovations, public spaces and jobs for these economically blighted neighborhoods? Rather than employing a force to lock down a neighborhood, why not try a New Deal-like infrastructure investment and jobs program targeted at these distressed areas?

Update:

Another aspect of this issue in which Republicans, Conservative, Right-Wingers, etc. are hypocritical and wearing blinders - where are the their complaints about corporate welfare? We have millionaires and billionaires with their hands out asking for public dollars for stadiums, business parks, factories and on and on. These are The Haves asking for more...and getting it. Talk about a culture of dependency.

Wisconsin's Corporate Welfare
Corporate Welfare
Where Are The Conservative Calls For Accountability For Corporate Welfare Recipients?

Another Wisconsin Corporate Welfare Failure

Wasteful Corporate Welfare

More On Scott Walker's Stadium Corporate Welfare

Stock Markets Rise, But Half Of Americans Don’t Benefit

Stock Markets Rise, but Half of Americans Don’t Benefit

Performance Among Asset Classes

h/t Barry Ritholtz

The Top 1% VS. The Average American

1% Vs. Average American

Infrastructure Readings

American Infrastructure
America's Infrastructure Engineering Dilema
A Plan To Save U.S. Infrastructure
Demand For Infrastructure At All-Time High
Falling Apart & Falling Behind
Infrastructure Report Card
The Race To Rebuild America's Infrastructure
Renovating American Infrastructure
10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now
This Is Why Your Flight Is Delayed
U.S Infrastructure Woes: A Roadblock To Growth
U.S. Port Infrastructure Ranked 22nd In The World
Wisconsin Infrastructure Report Card

Casino Capitalism

Scott Walker's budget solution for Wisconsin is to gamble more public dollars at the Wall Street casino.

"Walker said he wants legislators to create a $100 million "fund of funds," an investment vehicle in which a manager hired by the state would put taxpayers' money into a variety of existing venture capital funds."


I like the caveat of the plan whereby investments must be in Wisconsin. But, wouldn't it be quicker, and more efficient, to just directly distribute these funds to targeted Wisconsin companies? Why pay Wall Street fees and commissions? Why hire a manager to do part of the job we elected our legislators to do?

Investment Versus Debt

$4.8 trillion of this (if we include the total $1 trillion, pre-Reagan, debt as the Democrats' debt), for argument's sake,  can be considered the Democrats.

That leaves $9.2 trillion the responsibility of the Republicans.

Over sixty-five percent of our debt is the responsibility of the tax-cut, deregulation, government-stinks, unions-are-thugs cabal.

We have one party - the Democrats - investing in the country, thereby incurring debt:

• the infrastructure: roads, bridges, trains, wind turbines, broadband
• the people: earned income tax credits, retraining incentives, unemployment insurance, Medicare, public works, green jobs

And, another party - the Republicans - digging in their heels on deregulation, public sector ineptitude, corporate tax cuts, and privatization; the policies explaining the majority of their debt-incurrence.

At least with the Democrats' policies we have something to show for what we've spent; an actual investment.

With the Republicans, all we seem to get is more debt and a continually-morphing economic platform impervious to empirical evidence and increasingly self-assured, even in the face of apparent failure.

Uncertainty?

Jared Bernstein (with the help of Lawrence Mishel) dispels the right-wing talking-point of "uncertainty":

"Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, has an extremely useful piece up collecting all the reasons -- with evidence -- why the conservatives' "uncertainty" talking point is shovel-ready nonsense.

First, "uncertainty" in this context refers to the Republicans argument that it's government and central bank actions -- taxes, regulation, fiscal/monetary policy, health care/financial regulation reforms -- that are holding back the economy, not any of that ill-begotten Keynesian stuff, like lack of customers, orders, investors.

So how might you test for something like that?

Well, what about actual investment?

Investment in the current recovery has increased more than in it had at the same time period in the prior two recoveries and roughly the same as it did during the 1980s recovery [see figure]. In other words, this recovery is far more investment-led than the recovery under the pro-deregulation George W. Bush administration.

Private sector jobs, you ask?

...private sector job growth in this recovery looks much like job growth in recent recoveries, suggesting that businesses are not reacting to a new threat of potential regulations and taxes (the difference with this recovery is actually the loss of public sector jobs.

And then, of course, there's what the business folks, as opposed to their DC reps, actually say about what's bugging them:

...the regular National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) surveys of small businesses found that the most common answer to the question, "what is the single most important problem your business faces?" was "poor sales." And while a number of businesses also cited regulation, the numbers were not substantially higher than under Presidents George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan and were lower than under Presidents Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush.

None of this is to say "uncertainty" is not a problem. But while conservative politicians are busy jamming their perennial tax cut/deregulate agenda into the current context, the thing that businesses are truly uncertain about is when they're going to start seeing some customers again."

Weekend Reading

10 Questions For The GOP

A Fight We Must Win

Dissecting the Stock Market's P/E

Is Mitt Romney A Job Creator? Or A Job Destroyer?

Public Pension Problem Shrinking

Social Security Trust Fund FAQs

States Can Save Money By Ending Ineffective Development Programs

Value of the Dollar: Five Factors For Investors

What Really Matters For Growth (It's Not Tax Rates)

What Your Taxes Do (And Don't) Buy For You

Idiot's Guide To Governing

The Scott Walker 'death to collective bargaining' bill is supposedly about cost savings.

But...

Bill targeting unions may cost state $46 million in Federal funds.

It seems, more accurately, everything the Walker administration has done so far has cost additional jobs and/or investment. And, every new proposal or plan they develop has implications for hurting Wisconsin more.

The Persistent Deception

Recently the Journal Sentinel mused on Growing A Region. It contained typical platitudes recognizable to any even cursory Journal reader. Entrepreneurs are the answer, regional collaboration is good, and (as always when private entities have their hand out) government should provide the start-up funds for these inevitable private gains.

First, if the market and the private sector are so omnipotent, why does the government have to continually give subsidies, provide research, create special taxing districts and tax credits, among numerous other hand-outs and giveaways, for the private sector to function and locate opportunities?

There is not an industry or sector of the economy where the government isn't crucial. We - the government - have provided a majority of the R&D, seed money, tax breaks, and general initiative for major advancements in medicine, aviation, electronics, manufacturing, mining, utilities, energy, food and on and on.

If we didn't have or drastically downsized government, as many right-wing parrots cackle, the economy would collapse. A majority of the initial investments, the infrastructure, the risky 'getting off the ground' period of many initiatives would never happen.

But, let me get this straight, government is bad and doesn't do anything right, yet as the middleman, transferring tax dollars between citizens and private speculation, it's the go-to guy? And, for some reason, the all-knowing market and the ultra-savvy entrepreneur, in all their perfection, can't seem to achieve optimal outcomes without the inefficient and inept government leading the way?

Wow. I get such a kick out of the trickle-down, supply-side, market-humping privateers. You can just make up stuff as you go along to defend subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of the majority of taxpayers. Heck, some even claim it as a theory; as if there is actual evidence behind it. Simultaneously bad-mouthing the government, while using government as a tool to extract start-up money, for private speculation, from taxpayers.

And, even though trickle-down has been a total failure in application over the last three decades (as evidenced by decreasing retirement security and health care coverage, alongside increasing inequality of incomes and stagnating wages for most workers), by just claiming "it's in the best interest of the people" and simply repeating trickle-down is accomplishing everything as intended (which it clearly isn't), the lie persists.