Can we really say the US economy is in recovery?

The latest US Federal Reserve Bank Bulletin – (Volume 100, No. 4) was released on September 4, 2014 and – Changes in U.S. Family Finances from 2010 to 2013: Evidence from the Survey of Consumer Finances provides a very deep insight into what has been going in America over the period since 2010 with some comparative data from 2007-2010. So we get a glimpse of what happened during the crisis period in family incomes and wealth holdings (by a number of different characteristics) and then see what has transpired during the so-called ‘recovery’. The results will lead you to question the extent to which using the term ‘recovery’ is meaningful. In the growth period 2010-13, only the top 3 per cent of the income distribution have enjoyed real income gains whereas the bottom 40 per cent have seen major real cuts. A similar story relates to changes in family wealth. The reality is the highest income earners are capturing the real income growth at the significant expense of the rest notwithstanding the overal decline in unemployment. It is a recipe for disaster – an increasingly unequal society where some cohorts have virtually no chance for upward mobility.

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Same old story – poor getting poorer and more indebted and the rich …

I have started to research the idea of the disappearing or shrinking middle class as part of a book project (for 2015) I am amassing materials for. The idea is simple but the conceptualisation and demarcation of the idea is rather complex. The hypothesis is that Capitalism is now striking at the income and wealth segment that has helped give it stability (which in this sense relates to not having a revolution rather than eliminating major economic cycles and mass unemployment). Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses that kept them in line whereas in modern times it is mass consumption and credit that seems to keep the middle class in line. The rise in income and wealth inequality over the last 3 decades under the watch of neo-liberalism is obvious and initially showed up as a widening 90/10 gap (the numbers being deciles in the relevant distribution). But as the lowest income groups were marginalised, the dynamic moved on and started hollowing out the middle deciles. Real wages have lagged well behind productivity growth and mass unemployment is infiltrating the middle-income cohorts who typically have superior education, which has insulated them from job loss. The US Census Bureau provides excellent data on – Wealth and Asset Ownership, which allows us to trace the trends in household net worth and debt in the US in some detail. This blog just documents some of the characteristics of those distributions – it is preliminary work for me but of interest nonetheless.

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Large-scale employment guarantee scheme in India improving over time

Today I am reflecting on employment guarantees. I ran into a mate in a computer shop in Melbourne yesterday, totally by accident. He happens to be one of the big players in the job services sector – the unemployment industry. We exchanged our usual pleasantries and then we got angry together about the government policies – the usual interaction. Then I said well what we need is all you guys and the related charities (such as the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the Smith Family) and other groups (such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International etc) all getting out of their comfort zones and agreeing that being angry is stupid and that action is required. These are the people who lobby government. Academics only create ideas and write them out. I suggested that these groups use their significant public profiles to organise a coalition of support for the Job Guarantee and really push it hard – if only to expose the denials and failures of the orthodoxy that besets us all. Anyway, that conversation just happened to dove-tail with an article I read last week about employment guarantees in practice that I found interesting and which was exposing the deniers for what they are – ideological sycophants. That is what this blog is about.

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Austerity does not necessarily require a cut in government spending

The Bloomberg Op Ed article (August 19, 2014) – European Austerity Is a Myth – is about as flaky as it gets. The author is intent on justifying the article title by examining changes in government spending (as a per cent of GDP). He produces what he claims is “more appropriately called the ‘graph of the decade'”, which would mean it was some graph, but in reality tells us very little and does not provide the basis for his conclusion that rising government spending since 2007 is evidence that austerity has not been imposed. Oh dear! Some points need to be made.

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MMT is not conservative thought

Last night I sent the final manuscript of my Euro book to the publisher and felt somewhat downcast – that always happens after an intensive piece of work is finished. But this morning, I woke up free of that and focusing on the next task in the list. The list is always bubbling away and one juggles multiple projects at the same time, with more or less intensity. Curiosity demands that. But at some point more effort goes into one to complete it and the others wait in the queue for their turn. My next major deadline is an Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) compilation commissioned by my publisher Edward Elgar. The compilation will be my version of the roots of MMT and the development of its major ideas and influences. I have to write an overview piece explaining why I selected the literature and how it fits into the intellectual MMT tradition. It will obviously be an eclectic exercise and there is no certainty that my other original developers of what is now more broadly known as MMT will agree with my compilation or emphasis. I plan to start with Theories of Surplus Value – for reasons I explained in this blog – We need to read Karl Marx. I also do not plan to eulogise John Maynard Keynes, even though many of my colleagues think he is the most important link in the chain. It is here that I have to walk the fine line between technical detail and a broader reflection on how values intersect with what we might call the facts.

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Intergenerational fairness improved by fiscal deficits

There was an interesting article in the UK Guardian today (August 6, 2014) – Debt and housing costs make young worse off than past generations – which reported on the so-called ‘intergenerational fairness index’ published by the – Intergenerational Foundation, which is a UK-based organisation which “researches fairness between generations” and believes that “government policy must be fair to all”. The – 2013 Edition – is the most most recent published version of the index. The UK Guardian journalist has the most recent index, which has not yet been publicly released (probably in London later today). The points I wish to make are not dependent on knowing the detail of the 2014 result. My concern is about principles and basic neo-liberal macroeconomic myths that are embedded in an otherwise reasonable exercise. A case of progressives shooting themselves in the foot again!

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When the left became lost – Part 1

I read a book a long time ago (1994) called “The Principle of Duty: An Essay on the Foundations of Civic Order”. I note it was republished in 2009. The book by David Selbourne – who is a British philosopher and these days writes regularly for the British Magazine New Statesman. His latest article (July 24, 2014) – How the left was lost: the need to relearn what true progress means – reprises the argument made in his book. He has been making the argument for a long time, which, in itself is not a bad thing if it a reflection of a good idea being ignored. At the time I read the book the Dark Age of neo-liberalism that we are within was forming but its internal contradictions had not yet manifested fully. But the left had certainly lost direction by then, getting caught up in a Post Modernist haze with career politicians and their union buddies abandoning progressive principles and, instead, adopting neo-liberal economic stances to prove that they were ‘responsible’. The aim – to get power. That was the end game. Selbourne’s book and current article captures a lot of that but, I think, also misses some vital parts of the story.

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Australian government now engaged in psychological torture of its citizens

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the US legislation – Economic Opportunity Act – introduced by Democrat president Lyndon B. Johnson. The law created the so-called local Community Action Agencies, which were directly regulated by the US Federal government. The aims of that legislation were relatively straightforward – “eliminate poverty, expand educational opportunities, increase the safety net for the poor and unemployed, and tend to health and financial needs of the elderly”. The legislation came out of the President’s – State of the Union Address – delivered on January 1964, where he made the famous statement “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort”. The Economic Opportunity Act became known as the – War on Poverty. Times have changed. 50 years later, federal administrations around the World have declared a new type of War! The War on Poverty has become the War on the Poor. In Australia, this has manifested in recent weeks as an outright attack on the victims of mass unemployment – the unemployed. The Australian government has introduced what I have described in a number of press interviews with the national media as advanced psychological torture.

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When you’ve got friends like this – Part 11

I received two E-mails yesterday informing me that at the upcoming NSW State Labor Conference (this weekend) the delegates would be asked to vote for the inclusion of a Federal Job Guarantee, along the lines that I have been working on since 1978 (more or less), in Labor Party policy. For readers abroad, the Labor Party is the major federal opposition party at present having lost government in 2013. It began life as the political arm of the trade union movement. Anyway, that was a pleasing development I thought. A little later, I received an E-mail and a follow up telephone call telling me that the same conference, the delegates would be asked to vote on a motion put forward by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, which is the strongest ‘left-wing’ union in Australia, that says that the ALP “should be focused on maintaining government solvency” and maintaining “low and stable Deficit to GDP ratios” and ensure the “tax base is adequate to fund Labor’s priorities”. Then I read a news report from the UK from earlier in the year about the Labour Party’s commitment in the upcoming election to shore up its “fiscal credibility” by eliminating the fiscal deficit with the leader Ed Miliband claiming that “When we come to office … there won’t be lots of real money to spend, things will be difficult”. Bloody hell! This is progressive politics – neo-liberal Groupthink style. At least there are a few truly progressive people who see that a federal Job Guarantee is the way forward as a first step.

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Financial elites win with growth and austerity

I was thinking over the weekend about the concept of post nationalism in relation to the evolution of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe. As I complete my current book project on the euro-zone it is clear that by the end of the 1980s, the European financial and political elites were designing a system that they must have known would undermine the prosperity of their own nations. It was obvious at the time that the EMU would fail badly and so the question arises as to what was motivating them to act in this way. The is where ‘post nationalism’ comes into play. Characters such as Jacques Delors had moved from being a major promoter of French interests within the Franco-German rivalry to pushing the interests of international capital by the time he formed the Committee in 1989 to design the EMU. By then Monetarism, which came out of the American academy, had taken over the policy debate and was usurping national economic interests. The EMU was a major vehicle for transferring national income from workers towards capital interests. It allowed the banksters to reap financial harvests that were unprecedented in history. These ideas, which play out in my book, also links in with recent research published by Oxfam on income and gender inequality.

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Australia’s lowest wage workers continue to trail behind

The Fair Work Commission, the Federal body entrusted with the task of determining Australia’s minimum wage handed down its – 2013-14 decision – on June 4, 2014. The decision meant that more than 1.5 million of our lowest paid workers (out of some 11.6 million) received an extra $18.70 per week from July 1. This amounted to an increase of 3 per cent (up from last year’s rise of 2.6 per cent). The Federal Minimum Wage (FMW) is now $640.90 per week or $16.87 per hour. For the low-paid workers in the retail sector, personal care services, hospitality, cleaning services and unskilled labouring sectors there was no cause for celebration. They already earn a pittance and endure poor working conditions. The pay rise will at best maintain the current real minimum wage but denies this cohort access to the fairly robust national productivity growth that has occurred over the last two years. The decision also widens the gap between the low paid workers and other wage and salary recipients. The real story though is that today’s minimum wage outcome is another casualty of the fiscal austerity that the Federal Government has imposed on the nation which is destroying jobs and impacting disproportionately on low-paid workers.

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The Looters and Moochers are apparently back in Australia

Last week (June 11, 2014), the Australian Treasurer gave a speech at the right-wing Sydney Institute entitled – A Budget For Opportunity. The Treasurer was attempting to spin the impossible – that the May Fiscal Statement was fair (equitable) in that all Australians would be contributing to the deficit reduction. That is patently false. It is clear that the largest burden arising from the fiscal reduction will be borne by those with least income, including those reliant on public income support to scratch out the barest of existences. But in trying to make this impossible case, Hockey also invoked the classic divide and conquer strategy that conservatives use to segment and coopt certain sections of the population into agreeing with policy changes that will not only undermine their own prosperity but devastate the prosperity of other ‘segments’ who they manage to vilify. And while that is going on, the high income earners and wealthy, who are more likely to support the conservative political parties sit back sipping on their gins laughing their smug heads off. What a world it is.

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Options for Europe – Part 98

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Options for Europe – Part 90

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Options for Europe – Part 89

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Options for Europe – Part 82

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Options for Europe – Part 81

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Options for Europe – Part 64

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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Options for Europe – Part 52

The title is my current working title for a book I am finalising over the next few months on the Eurozone. If all goes well (and it should) it will be published in both Italian and English by very well-known publishers. The publication date for the Italian edition is tentatively late April to early May 2014.

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I fell off the left-right continuum today

Another relatively short blog today – it is holidays after all. There was an article in the New York Times (December 23, 2013) – Inequality for Dummies – by regular Op Ed columnist Bill Keller, who clearly thinks he represents the pragmatic, reasonable progressive “centre-left” as distinct from the “left-left” who have their heads in the sand and apparently are content to mouth of slogans to make themselves feel better but which do nothing to address reality or advance the progressive cause. My version of the topic is inverted. I usually think the “centre-left”, which used to be the centre-right or even further out to the right before neo-liberalism shifted the central point sharply so that it made Genghis Khan look downright reasonable, are gutless wonders who pretend to be progressives if it allows them to extra personal rents (rewards) and/or gain position of power in non-conservative political parties. I typically see the “centre-left” as part of the problem not part of the solution. So I read on.

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