The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Trump, Shapiro and the War on Social Security The death of "Entitlements" DONALD JEFFRIES Ben Shapiro, the smarmy young elitist who co-founded conservative platform The Daily Wire, took a break from fondling the Wailing Wall the other day. Next to enthusiastically shilling for Israel, his key issue seems to be eliminating Social Security. You know, the primary income most retired people rely on. Shapiro came out with both guns blazing, firing away at….American senior citizens. He called retirement itself a “stupid idea” and said it was “insane” that the retirement age hasn’t been raised. This has long been a Stupid Party staple- just keep raising the retirement age. That way there will be less of the old, useless eaters to pay. Shapiro inaccurately referred to the fact that Americans are living longer, when actually the life expectancy rate in this country has been falling for the past several years. That’s because of our crack Medical Industrial Complex, and our preservati

The Fed’s Austerity Program to Reduce Wages By Michael Hudson Preface: The Federal Reserve Board’s ostensible policy aim is to manage the money supply and bank credit in a way that maintains price stability. That usually means fighting inflation, which is blamed entirely on “too much employment,” euphemized as “too much money.” [1]  In Congress’s more progressive days, the Fed was charged with a second objective: to promote full employment. The problem is that full employment is supposed to be inflationary – and the way to fight inflation is to reduce employment, which is viewed simplistically as being determined by the supply of credit. So in practice, one of the Fed’s two directives has to give. And hardly by surprise, the “full employment” aim is thrown overboard – if indeed it ever was taken seriously by the Fed’s managers. In the Carter Administration (1777-80) leading up to the great price inflation of 1980, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker expressed his economic philosophy in a note ca

Thanks to St. Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... Do Americans Know What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is? What it Means When I Say America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country umair haque I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just  life  is. For no good reason at all. When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over.  American life is the biggest ripoff in the world .  Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now  stay poor . Ameri