Monopolies and Billionaires

Monopolies are bad for the economy and billionaires are bad for capitalism. 

We have a bunch of amendments to our constitution. The first ten are called the Bill of Rights. There is no Right of Wealth.  In fact, it's pretty clear that too much wealth is a serious problem. A person with enormous wealth tends to think they are more important than their neighbors with less wealth. I've heard a CEO of a company claim he works much harder than the people cleaning his lawn...the people who have three part time jobs to make ends meet. The irony is that the CEO in all likelihood has much more fun, figuring out how to keep a company running, than his worker who rakes leaves all day. Clearly one job is more difficult, more demanding, even more important than the other. But it doesn't mean the raker of leaves should be impoverished while the CEO owns the town.

We all live in a great big community and we have created a bunch of laws so that we can live comfortably and amicably together. Among other things those laws protect people who manage to make a lot of money. The laws protect their businesses and their finances. 

We also have laws that attempt to protect people starting up new businesses. Strangely the people with established businesses, who at one time profited from the laws helping a business get started, don't like it when the new businesses try to compete for the same products and customers. Wealth and success seem to morph into greed. Sometimes I wonder if progressive taxes aren't really a way to help the rich stay human and humble.  But enough philosophy. Barring the dangers of inflation (caused by too much money in the economy) and illegitimate power (caused by the ability to buy ALL the media in a given location), let the wealthy keep their wealth. 

Clearly we need to prevent inflation, so some money has to be taken out of the economy each year. It's just common sense that one would take more from the billionaire than from the guy making $15 per hour. Obviously a flat tax will take more from the billionaire than the poor guy. And if that's enough tax to prevent inflation, great. But if it's not enough, common sense (and decency) says get the extra money from the rich guy. Hence "progressive" taxes.

Clearly we need to prevent monopolies, and we actually have laws that do that. Back in 1890 we passed the Sherman Act and twenty-four years later in 1914 we strengthened restrictions on anti-competitive behavior with the Clayton Act and the FTC Act. We just have to enforce them. Capitalism works largely because people think it's fair. Monopolies will break capitalism because people will stop thinking it's fair.

We do our nation a service when we regulate wealth, our whole nation, the rich and the poor. The strongest, most vibrant nation, will be that with the fewest poor. And the most successful economy, in a capitalist system, will also be that with the fewest poor. We've clearly done a great job protecting and promoting billionaires. It's time to turn our focus to those of us less well off.

Change the law

We are deporting our neighbors, many who have been here for decades, because they entered the country illegally or overstayed a visa. They have no other offense. This is madness. Is it the law? Yes. Is it sensible? No!

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) Section 237(a)(1)(B) [8 U.S.C. § 1227] classifies any nonimmigrant who remains in the U.S. beyond their authorized period (Form I-94 expiration) as a "deportable alien". This is a bad law. We should change it. 

The penalty for overstaying a visa or for entering the country illegally is disproportionate to the crime. It's like saying people who get a speeding ticket should go to jail for a year. Frankly, the speeder is likely to do more damage (cause an accident) than the person who snuck in or overstayed a visa. 

We have plenty of penalties for our illegal aliens: they can't vote and they can't get government assistance even though they pay taxes. We don't need and should not have "deportation" as a penalty. It's bad for the community as well as being unreasonable and overly harsh. We are robbing our communities of hard workers, kind neighbors, energetic friends. When's the last time you picked up and left your homeland to try making it in a foreign country. It's incredibly hard. It takes drive, hard work, resilience. These are qualities we have always admired. These are qualities that made America strong. Squandering them is not only cruel, it's foolish. 

By all means keep "deportation" for people who commit serious crimes. But deportation should not be a penalty for someone whose only crime is overstaying or entering illegally....or speeding. Our system is broken. We built it. We can fix it. 

Change the law.

p.s. A friend suggested we grandfather in people already here, but going forward make it completely illegal for anyone to stay who has overstayed or arrived illegally. His worry...."we'll be opening the floodgates, everyone will come." My thought....these are the people who make America great. Let them come. We need their heart, their passion, their daring.

Where is Rumeysa Öztürk now?

The ability to dissent is at stake in the Rumeysa Ozturk case, in the Mahmoud Khalil case, in many, many of the recent ICE detention cases.

Our government is engaging in McCarthyite practices again, arresting people for exercising their rights of free speech and speaking out against people in power. Our government officials ought to be in jail, not the people they are harassing.

We should fight the administration's use of ICE to silence protestors who are simply using free speech to denounce Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

Our government was wrong when it legalized slavery in our Constitution.

Our government was wrong when it continued to condone slavery with segregation laws after the Civil War.

Our government is wrong today as it supports Israel who is committing genocide against enemies in Gaza. 

I don't dispute that Israel has enemies in Gaza who deserve to be killed. However I don't support genocide as a means to fight those enemies.

People may disagree with the Israelis or with the Palestinians. They should not be deported or thrown in jail for their disagreements.

ICE's authority to act on national security matters and detain people is grounded in federal statutes, including the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and other laws related to homeland security. These laws should be amended so that our government cannot infringe on free speech on controversial issues.

Thoughts from my granddaughter upon Donald Trump's victory

My granddaughter called me the day after Trump won:

"We ask women why they don't come forward when sexually assaulted. It's because we live in a world where an abuser can become President."

"No matter what happens, it saddens me deeply that rape, felonies, trying to overthrow our democracy, misogyny, racism and transphobia are somehow not deal breakers for tens of millions of Americans. People need to stop being so careless with each other's lives and rights."

Admit Mistakes and Name the Enemy

I'm confused why the democrats are not crushing the republicans. 

I think there are two reasons:
1) the democrats made some serious mistakes and won't admit it.
2) the democrats are afraid to name the real enemy.

What are the serious mistakes. Sadly, there are a bunch. But before I even describe them, you should understand why naming mistakes matters. When we name mistakes, own mistakes, then people start to trust you. Then they might even vote for you.

Our latest mistake is saying that corporations are more important than the people in this country. When we support corporations who move jobs overseas, we say those corporations are more important than the people in America who used to work in those companies. Corporate profits went up while our people lost their jobs and that is OK. And you wonder why voters don't trust us?

Another mistake is praising President Obama's Affordable Health Care Act even though it is the costliest and most poorly run health care system in the developed world. Yes, it insured many people who were previously uninsured, and, of course, that is a GREAT thing. But it is still using an insurance model to pay for health care rather than tax dollars, and that is criminally expensive. The only reasons we don't switch to a Medicare For All system are because the very wealthy don't want higher taxes and other wealthy people don't want to forgo the profits they are making on the insurance that the rest of us are paying. 

We complain about price gouging by food companies when we should be enforcing anti-trust laws and breaking up the food monopolies, and the internet monopolies, and the media monopolies.

There is some good news. We used to be a party of racists, but we are slowly crawling our way out of that morass.

We were racists for centuries....way before there was a democratic party even, but the point is that as soon as there was a democratic party, the people in control of the party continued their racism. You want examples? Slavery for starters. Then lynchings for the next hundred years after slavery was supposedly illegal. Land grabs from Native Americans. Chinese exclusion laws. Japanese internment camps while Japanese-American soldiers were defending America. You've got to be impressed with the chutzpah of FDR to imprison Japanese citizens and ask Japanese American men to fight at the same time. 

We do apologize now for the most egregious internments, and acknowledge that Blacks still face rampant job and wage discrimination and offer up platitudes to Native Americans for living on their lands. But we don't sincerely apologize or offer compensation to the descendants of the Ancestors we treated so brutally. We could do that, offer the compensation. Our government prints money all the time, money for bombs and guns, so don't pretend we can't print money for past misdeeds. We can. We just don't want to. And you wonder why people don't vote for you?

Do you want to know the enemy we are afraid to name? Capitalism Run Amok

Yes, it is Capitalism Run Amok. You can also call it Capitalism Without Government Intervention, but I think Capitalism Run Amok gets the point across. We are afraid to criticize our capitalistic market place, like it is some deity that deserves unwavering praise and adoration. What malarky. We have Capitalism all right. It's Capitalism Run Amok and it is polluting our air waves, causing inflation in our stores, and damaging the trust in our democracy. 

That one company can own hundreds of media outlets in America is Capitalism Run Amok. That one company can own half the grocery stores in a state is Capitalism Run Amok. That private equity can buy up all the hospitals and doctor practices in a state is Capitalism Run Amok. That private equity can buy up hundreds of homes in a city is Capitalism Run Amok. That people cannot run for Congress unless they are millionaires is Capitalism Run Amok.

Do you want voters to trust you? Do you want voters to vote for you? Be honest. Name the real enemy. It's not our neighbors. It's not people who don't look like us? It's not people desperate for a low paying job. It's a system that permits some people to be billionaires while others are impoverished. The system is Capitalism, it has run amok, we created it, and we can fix it. So name the problem and get on with it. I think you'll have the votes.

Health Insurance....Follow the Money

We're the only major developed nation in the world without universal health care. I know we got close to it with Obamacare, but that was a poor implementation and the republicans much preferred to kill rather than fix Obamacare...if for no other reason than it sounds African. (If you don't think the republicans resented a black man in the oval office, I have some real estate on the moon you might be interested in. Wouldn't it be ironic if the real estate mogul they elected in 2016 were the last republican elected for decades. Ironic. Unlikely. Yet one can hope.)

There's an explanation for our struggle with universal health care: the big government-small government debate. Those in favor of small government lost the social security debate and they lost the universal-health-care-for-old-people debate (medicare) and they lost the universal-health-care-for-poor-people debate (medicaid) but so far they have won the universal-health-care-for-everyone-else debate. They support their position by throwing out horror stories: death panel juries, government control of your health, year-long waits to see the doctor. Those stories get debunked but they stuck with enough voters to obscure the real issues.

Proponents of insurance believe the market place is a better vehicle for all things monetary. More on this argument in a minute.

Very wealthy proponents of insurance prefer we all pay insurance for health coverage rather than taxes for health coverage, because the very wealthy pay much higher taxes than the rest of us. If you earn $50,000 a year and pay 15% in taxes, your tax bill is $7,500. If you earn $500,000 a year and pay 15% in taxes, your tax bill is $75,000. If you earn $5,000,000 a year and pay 15% in taxes, your tax bill is $750,000. Ignoring the 85% that we all get to keep, one might feel sorry for the poor soul paying more in taxes in a single year than the average Joe earns in 15 years. One might feel sorry. If only we could forget the $4,250,000 the poor soul kept that year. It will take 85 years for our average Joe to earn $4,250,000. One might feel sorry.

Regarding the market place's superiority for business, I don't think health care is a product like a car, a house, a cell phone, or a piece of fruit. Those items can be bought cheaply or extravagantly and you usually get what you pay for. It should be up to the buyer to decide if she wants or can afford a fancy or a simple house, a souped up or basic car or no car at all. Health care, however, shouldn't be a luxury that comes in various qualities according to your income. I mean basic health care. We should all be entitled to equal health care. The wealthy may want fancier rooms, and they can pay for them, but we should all have access to the same drugs, surgeries, and medical advice. As surgical discoveries and new drugs emerge, we should all have equal access. Why? Why you ask.

We should all have equal access to health care because as a society we can afford equal access and as a society we should legislate equal access.

But wait. Why can't every law abiding citizen pay for their own darn health care? We all pay for our own food, our own housing, our own clothes, don't we. Heck, why can't we all pay for our own schooling too? How about our own fire fighters, and cops? 

Oh, you want to keep the cops on the public payroll? Maybe the fire fighters too? Why is that? They protect all of us in our hard-earned homes. They enforce the laws that allowed the smartest and luckiest of us to make real good wages. Wages so good that we really don't have to fret much, even during a huge financial crisis. Wages so good that we can have a gosh darn PANDEMIC, and we still won't be worrying about how to pay the mortgage or where the next meal is coming from. 

Now I'm sure those of us so well off we can shrug off a PANDEMIC, worked very hard and were very smart to be so fortunate. I'm also one hundred percent certain that we achieved our comfort and security thanks to the laws and structure of our community. We were lucky to be born in these last 100 years. And we owe our community thanks for our success. There is no way the riches we have acquired...the capital gains, the dividends, the interest, the million dollar salaries...there is no way this wealth came to us, impeded only by the taxman...not by swindlers, hit men, corrupt cops, dictators...there is no way this wealth came to us without laws and a powerful community supporting and caring for us. 

My point? If the laws and structure of the community work to the advantage of multi-millionaires and billionaires, those laws and that community should also work to the advantage of the average joe. The average joe should be able to walk into a doctor's office or an emergency room, show their ID, and get whatever help they and their doctor say they need. No bill. No debate.

Why are the wealthy against this? Two reasons. One, medical bills paid by taxes will increase taxes for the wealthy. Two, insurance companies will no longer be in the mix, and the wealthy are making big money investing in insurance companies. Doesn't it make you crazy that our health costs are high and investors in insurance companies are profiting from it? 

The Federal Deficit....of Imagination

I want to talk with you about our government and the money we spend to keep it running.

I see your eyes glazing over, but I've got a surprise for you.

We have a federal deficit. And that is GOOD. In fact it is FANTASTIC. It means that the federal government put a bunch of money into the economy and didn't take it all back. And it never needs to take it all back.

This is a big deal!

The federal budget is not like any other budget. It's not like our household or business or state or town budgets. All those budgets have to be balanced. Whatever they spend has to be covered by an equal amount of income.

That's not true for the federal government. The federal government can and does spend more money than it receives in taxes. 

What? Does that mean the federal government does NOT pay all its bills?? 

Of course not! The federal government can ALWAYS pay its bills. How? The federal government, and ONLY the federal government, is authorized to PRINT MONEY. In a word, it creates money out of thin air. That is the government's job. That may be the government's most important job. It needs to create money to do any of the things we want it to do, from education, to health care, to military readiness. 

This is all explained in great detail in a book by Stephanie Kelton: The Deficit Myth. There is also a film about it: Finding The Money.

But let me address briefly the first questions that come to mind. 

If the government can create money out of thin air, why do we need taxes? Great question. We need taxes for three reasons. 

First, we want people to work. For our economy to hum, we need folks to participate. If we tell everyone they are going to owe the government some taxes, they'll get jobs to pay those taxes.

Second, we need to encourage businesses to be equitable. If businesses pay some people $10 per hour and other people $1,000 per hour, we need to tax the high earners more than the low earners for reasons of simple fairness. We created rules to make it possible for businesses to thrive in our economy. We also need rules to make it possible for workers to thrive in our economy.

Finally, we need to pull some of the money out of the economy to avoid inflation. How much? Great question! You're not going to like the answer. 

We don't know!! 

"Good grief," you say. "Why should I trust you," you ask. "You don't know what the heck you are doing and you want me to support you?! You must be kidding!" 

"Fair statement," I say. "But would you rather I lied to you?" I ask. 

Wrestling with inflation....and jobs....is not easy. 

Do you remember the Great Depression? Of course not, you'd have to be over 90 years old. How about the Financial Crisis of 2008? Remember all the talk of another Great Depression?

That's when banks failed, businesses closed and the government took a HUGE gamble....it flooded our economy with money! Boy did a man named Ben Bernanke get a lot of flack!

The honest to god truth is that pretty much all economists thought inflation would go through the roof back in 2008. Talk about the right person in the right place at the right time. Two years earlier President Bush had appointed a man named Ben Bernanke to be chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Guess what Mr. Bernanke's field of expertise was. The Great Depression!

Mr. Bernanke knew that The Great Depression would have been LESS of a Great Depression if the federal government had put MORE money in the hands of impoverished citizens. When FDR took office in 1933 unemployment had reached 25%. It took him eight years to bring it down to 15%, largely through the creation of government jobs. The CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), CWA (Civil Works Administration) and the WPA (Works Progress Administration) created more than 14,000,000 jobs. Compared to FDR's predecessors, Presidents Hoover and Coolidge, FDR had turned the economic system on its head with this creation of jobs by the government. But after eight years there was still 15% unemployment. It was only due to World War II that unemployment dropped to 2%, three years later in 1943.

Coming back to our latest crisis, the 2008 financial collapse had caused banks to stop lending, afraid that their loans would end up defaulting.  Businesses stopped hiring. Businesses failed. Mr. Bernanke, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, could not create jobs as FDR had. Only a President and Congress can do that. But Mr. Bernanke, as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, could send money to banks, hoping they would use that money to lend to businesses which would hire more people, creating jobs. And Mr. Bernanke knew from his research that as much as FDR had done, without World War II it would not have been enough to get us to full employment.

Chairman Bernanke sent banks money by buying their problematic mortgages (familiarly referred to as mortgage backed securities), as well as treasury securities (US government bonds...the safest investment in today's world!). Between 2007 and 2017 Mr. Bernanke bought $3.5 trillion dollars of securities. How did the Federal Reserve "buy" those securities? It just printed the money (using key strokes on a computer!). And our national debt grew from $9 trillion to $20 trillion. 

Wow. From 2007 to 2017, over ten years, the Federal Reserve Bank added $3.5 trillion to the economy and our national debt grew by $11 trillion. What happened to inflation? It must have gone through the roof! Right? 

Wrong! The average inflation rate for that ten year period was 1.8%.

Back to your question....how high can the deficit go before inflation takes over? Again, honestly, we don't know. But we DO know today's debt is not causing inflation, and we DO know that we can bring the debt down gradually over the next few decades, which President Biden has already started to do.

Thanks to tax cuts for the wealthy over the last several decades, our society is one of the most inequitable in our history. On April 11, 2024 Mother Jones reported that 806 billionaires in America own more wealth than the bottom 65 million households in our society. Eight hundred and six people own as much as 65 million. Mind boggling.

We can increase taxes on the wealthy, and they won't even notice. An alternative is to leave things as they are, risk hyperinflation, perhaps revolution, certainly massive disruptions. Even those 806 lucky oligarchs will notice that.

Forgive me the long winded explanation. But while it is reasonable to expect the value of the dollar to decrease (through inflation) if the government keeps creating dollars and never takes any back out of the economy, it is not accurate or reasonable to assume that the government must take as much money out of the economy as it put in. In fact that would be crazy. The federal government CAN and SHOULD keep more money in the economy than it removes. The federal government SHOULD  have a deficit, forever. 

By the way, the government does not use your tax dollars to pay interest on the deficit. Your tax dollars are simply dollars removed from the economy, as the federal government puts more money in the economy when it pays for stuff.

Taxes don't pay for stuff. Taxes keep the system fair and help keep inflation in check. The government has the authority to create money, tax some of it, and monitor inflation. That's what government does.

The important point is that we need good government to manage our free economic system. To those who say, leave the free market alone and it will do just fine, I have one question. Why are some people making $1,000 per hour and others $10 per hour. If you consider that "fine", I have to disagree. 

To sum up, we have the means to pay for our government. It's built into our Constitution. The government is authorized to print money. 

The real task is not finding the money. The real task is finding people for the jobs. We should and can have zero unemployment. We should and can have an economy in which everyone has a livable wage. The real challenge is getting the free market system and the government together to figure out what jobs we want in our economy. Do we want food, houses, smart phones, social workers, therapists, guns, bombs, national forests, highways, teachers. The list goes on and on. 

We need a government paying attention to the needs of our people in our towns and cities. The free market system is great at creating jobs. It's not so good at creating equity. And it's not suited at all to designing vibrant communities. That's not the job of a business. That's the job of government. 

Good government is vital to our country. We need talented people who aspire to making government an equal partner with our free market system, not folks who want government to heed only the wealthy and provide the bare minimum of service. 

We need good government and we can afford good government. Now you know how money is created. And you know that a federal deficit of money is absolutely OK. What's not OK is a deficit of imagination. Use your imagination to conjure up the society you would like to live in. Then use your votes to make it happen. And note, one person, one President, one Congressperson, is not going to make good government happen. It's going to take a whole team of dedicated people. If you're serious about imagining a vibrant society, you'll need to get a team of folks working on it. In the words of one of our most inspiring Presidents "Don't boo, vote!"