Sep 14, 2017

Losing it all

Peter Barnes comments on Hillary’s swing-and-miss on funding universal basis income from common wealth:

IN HER LATEST book What Happened, former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reveals that she was “fascinated” by the idea of using our national patrimony to pay every American “a modest basic income,” much as Alaska pays every resident yearly dividends from its oil wealth. Clinton spent weeks working with her policy team to see if this idea was “viable enough” to include in her campaign. Ultimately she decided that the numbers didn’t work, so she left the idea on the shelf.

Too bad. Whether or not embracing the idea would have swung the election her way, it would surely have sparked a lively discussion of our national patrimony — what’s in it, how much it’s worth, and who benefits most from it. Such a discussion would have shed surprising light on solutions to middle class decline, climate change, financial instability and economic stagnation. And it would have established that the numbers can work.

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Here are the 50 states, ranked from “most shortchanged” to “least shortchanged” by the U.S. government. The ranking is based on an index combining: (i) votes in the Electoral College per state resident and (ii) benefits received per tax dollars paid to the federal government.

States ranked

Source: New York Times.

Articles Uncategorized

Jul 13, 2016

Wasted: The high cost of laissez-screw finance

What has the flawed financial system cost the U.S. economy? Here’s your receipt:

Overcharged-Promo-Graphic-1

Read the accounting by Econ4’s Jerry Epstein together with Juan Montecino here. Excerpt follows:

A healthy financial system is one that channels finance to productive investment, helps families save for and finance big expenses such as higher education and retirement, provides products such as insurance to help reduce risk, creates sufficient amounts of useful liquidity, runs an efficient payments mechanism, and generates financial innovations to do all these useful things more cheaply and effectively. All of these functions are crucial to a stable and productive market economy. But after decades of deregulation, the current U.S. financial system has evolved into a highly speculative system that has failed rather spectacularly at performing these critical tasks.

What has this flawed financial system cost the U.S. economy? How much have American families, taxpayers, and businesses been “overcharged” as a result of these questionable financial activities? In this report, we estimate these costs by analyzing three components: (1) rents, or excess profits; (2) misallocation costs, or the price of diverting resources away from non-financial activities; and (3) crisis costs, meaning the cost of the 2008 financial crisis.

Uncategorized Videos

Jan 5, 2016

Econ4 Video Remix Contest: Great entries

It’s time to start sharing some of the great entries we’ve received in the Econ4 Video Remix Contest. Stay tuned for more!

Entries received by February 1, 2016, are eligible for cash prizes. You can enter here.

Articles Uncategorized

Oct 26, 2013

When the going gets tough, the tough build a new economy

Econ4’s Gar Alperovitz on building the new economy from the bottom up:

Deepening economic and social pain are producing the kinds of conditions from which various new forms of democratization—of ownership, wealth and institutions—are beginning to emerge. The challenge is to develop a broad strategy that not only ends the downward spiral but also gives rise to something different: steadily changing who actually owns the system, beginning at the bottom and working up.