Trains were the first large-scale industry in the United States.  And it was an enormous challenge to get railroads built.  The government got involved in the rail industry by means of transportation regulations and land grants which gave large pieces of land to the railroads that could be sold for a profit or used to build track.  Trains were profitable at first because they offered a much cheaper alternative to overland transport when marketable goods were moved from place to place.  Passenger fares were less profitable than commercial fares.

When trains raised the rates that passengers were paying, the government stepped in to regulate the fares.  After years of transportation regulations, trains were less profitable.    Like the railroads, the interstate highway system was built with government investments from tax dollars.  Both of the American transportation systems, rail and highway, were aided with government money. When the interstate highway system was built, trains met with new transportation competition. And increasing competition between two government subsidized industries didn’t help the railroads.

If you study the effect of regulated train fares what you find is that the public seems to win for only a short time because they get cheaper fares.  But their taxes eventually have to supplement the money that the passengers aren’t paying.  So there’s no real savings.  Public taxation subsidizes train fares (which externalizes costs to non-users).  What also happens is that government regulation of train fares undermines the train industry until it stops being profitable.  When the government remains involved, the trains lose their ability to manage and run their business until it becomes less well maintained, less well-managed and unable to improve.

I read and hear people commenting about healthcare.  Some of them wishfully think that a single payer system will get rid of the insurance middleman and make healthcare more affordable.  But the healthcare system is already showing huge inflation that has been caused by government programs like Medicare and Medicaid.  In fact, government interference in the healthcare marketplace started during the Great Depression.  In 1933, FDR wrote government sponsored healthcare into his social security bill.  The 1933 AMA opposed this move as government sponsored healthcare, so that version of it didn’t pass into law at that time.  But soon thereafter, insurance companies like Blue Cross got started selling health insurance under hospital sponsored plans.  And nowadays, health insurance co-pays hide the very high rate of inflation in pharmaceuticals and the costs of healthcare generally.

With 20 trillion dollars of government debt, the idea that more government interference in healthcare will reduce prices is only a wish.  There’s no historical reason to believe it would happen.  If you look at railroads, government involvement destroyed a once profitable industry which had to receive government subsidies in order to run at reduced fares.  That was taxes paying what the trains couldn’t charge customers according to regulations.  Government was powerful but it couldn’t use its power to change the nature of the train business.  Lower fares weren’t enough to keep the railroads healthy.  And the railroad industry became less nimble and less robust.  Some would say that it wasn’t even a real industry anymore–just a hollowed out shell of its former self.  Eventually the government had to buy it.

The healthcare industry is larger and more complicated than the railroad industry.  Government interference in healthcare has already raised prices and encouraged monopoly.  Single payer would further harm or even destroy the healthcare marketplace and it would serve interests outside of caring for sick people.  Government intervention in the healthcare marketplace has already harmed both doctors and patients.  “Single payer” isn’t any kind of remedy to our healthcare problems.  It would only worsen harms to patients and doctors.

If you would like to learn more about how we got to our current place in history, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com today.

sources:

Wikipedia, History of Health Care Reform in the United States, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_in_the_United_States, accessed 20 Mar 2017.

R. Kent Weaver, The Politics of Industrial Change: Railway Policy in North America, The Brookings Institution, Washington D.C., 1985.

What if the idea of a national healthcare program is flawed because we can’t afford it under current economic conditions?  Setting aside the twenty trillion dollars of government debt for a moment, consider just the question of a patient’s payments.  What if there’s (1) no way to tax the people (over there) in the shrinking middle class living with less money every year to (2) pay for the poorest people (over here) who can’t afford to pay for the inflated price of healthcare in order to (3) make a huge profit for insurance companies everywhere and (4) make a huge profit for pharmaceuticals and (5) create inflation in the economy that disguises poor GDP performance?

What if that government sponsored healthcare model can no longer be sustained and that’s why Obamacare is failing and why it must fail?  Of course, it may also be failing just because it was a bad product that served as (1) a vehicle to inflate healthcare costs while (2) offering less care, and (3) less healthcare security and (4) virtually no privacy or information security.  One example of healthcare inflation is the cost of Novolog insulin.  It has gone up in price over the last five years by 248% (see note below)!  No one in the pharmaceutical industry can explain why this product should cost diabetics ever more money in our shrinking economy.  Why does it cost so much?

Part of our problems with healthcare begin with regulatory politics.  When you look at the regulations that came about during the modern liberal era from 1861-1944, there were a lot of regulations designed to prevent harms.  For example, regulations in the Food and Drug Administration established in 1906.  When a business failed to respect regulations designed to keep the public safe, it could be sued in civil court for monetary compensation.  A contrast can be seen by comparing the modern liberal and classical liberal period.  During the classical liberal era, which happened from 1776-1861, instead of trying to prevent harms through the growth of the regulatory state, courts allowed parties who were harmed to seek damage claims in criminal court and sometimes the court would revoke the operating licenses of businesses that caused harms.  During the neoliberal period from 1944-the present, damages have been pursued in civil court and large sums have sometimes been awarded.  In healthcare, that has increased costs by adding fees that doctors now pay for malpractice insurance.  And also now, doctors are ordering unnecessary testing just to avoid a malpractice claim under standards of care that create more billable tests.  That increases costs, too.

What if the Trump Administration isn’t able to revamp and reinstall the government’s involvement in healthcare?  Because it doesn’t work.  Healthcare inflation was always expected as a side effect of government healthcare programs.  And now we see that healthcare inflation has gone cost-crazy.  What if the government stopped guaranteed payment of pharmaceuticals at a constantly inflating price?  Wouldn’t the price come down?  What if the insurance middleman went away?  Wouldn’t that reduce costs?  What if people acted as their own agent in paying for healthcare and choosing their doctor?  What if this allowed them to re-energize their patient doctor relationship?  Instead of being at the mercy of insurance providers and doctors that don’t care about patients anymore?  Wouldn’t that decrease costs by increasing competition among doctors for patients?  What if the number of billable tests went down instead of increasing?  Wouldn’t that decrease costs?  What if bad doctors were removed from practice and the need for malpractice insurance went down?  Wouldn’t that decrease costs?  What if the government’s involvement in healthcare has been a terrible economic mistake that is now destroying the healthcare marketplace?  What if?

I realize that our media keeps banging the drum for “replacement” and not just for “repeal.”  In fact the very idea that fundamental changes are needed in healthcare is strictly avoided by the media which proposes that the U.S. government should continue to interfere with American healthcare, despite the obvious failure of Obamacare.  Media outlets that say we need to “replace” Obamacare are really saying, “we need government sponsored healthcare.”  Even though most Americans didn’t sign up for the healthcare exchanges.  Because they didn’t want Obamacare.  And I think that many Americans who have wanted Republicans to repeal the Affordable Care Act didn’t want to replace it.  They saw that the government’s involvement in American healthcare was bad.  It invades privacy because it allows government encroachment into people’s private health concerns.  It also invades privacy because computers are vulnerable to computer espionage.  Because we are mortal, government healthcare makes us vulnerable to healthcare denial and inflation.  Ouch!  Those are two harms we want to avoid.  Perhaps instead of replacing the ACA, it should just be allowed to die the death that it deserves.

Note:   It may be hard to imagine a 248% increase but that means that if a vial of insulin cost $113.59 five years ago, it now costs $281.72!  (A diabetic uses many vials per year.)  The same runaway inflation is happening in other medicines too.  Insurance companies, pharmacy companies and the subsidized and protected medical profession needs Obamacare and medical insurance programs in order to ramp up medical costs this dramatically.  Co-pays hide the real costs.  A real market wouldn’t hide these price increases and the public wouldn’t tolerate them.

For source material on date, see: US Food and Drug Administration, https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/WhatWeDo/History/, accessed 13 Mar 2017.

Would you like to understand how our laws have changed since the founding of the nation?  Would you like to understand what has motivated those changes?  If you want answers to those questions and more buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, available at Amazon.com.

According to Thomas Sowell in his book Basic Economics, markets operate according to profits and losses.  The profits tell producers what to produce and the losses tell them what to stop producing.  When market forces are working, producers respond to what people need and want and also to what they can afford.  That makes the market responsive to society.  But under neoliberalism, economic interventionism creates a different less responsive marketplace.  Instead of responding to people want, need and can afford, the market produces more of what the government provides subsidies for.  Subsidies can be tax reprieves, for example.  Or, instead of a subsidy, a low-interest loan can allow a corporation that isn’t profitable to continue making what no one wants, what no one needs, and what no one can afford.  Another word for making things that no one wants, what no one needs and what no one can afford is “malinvestment,” and malinvestments waste economic resources and cause society to suffer.  Sowell writes, “Profits as a realized end-result are crucial to the individual business, but it is the prospect of profits–and the threat of losses–that is crucial to the functioning of the economy as a whole.”  And of course he’s right about that.

Something to ponder today, if you’re in the mood to ponder the economy, is whether low-interest loans and tax subsidies and imported cheaper labor serve the public’s interest in terms of keeping the market healthy.  Is the market providing what people want at a price that they can afford?  How much malinvestment surrounds us?  And since the market clearly isn’t healthy and hasn’t been healthy now for a while, maybe we can see a failure of economic interventionism and a failure of neoliberalism.  (A failure of TARP, a failure of QE, a failure of the ACA, a failure of Obama’s economic stimulus programs, a failure of wars in the Middle East, nearly 95 million working age people who aren’t working because the neoliberal economy is so bad that there isn’t enough prosperity in it to provide employment opportunities to those people).

The Commerce Clause in the U.S. Constitution was interpreted differently during the modern liberal period from 1861 to 1944.  Congress’s power expanded under the Commerce Clause to help the nation make the most of new markets that formed during railroad transportation improvements.  Article One, Section Eight is a long list of Congressional powers.  The Commerce Clause reads, “The Congress shall have Power To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States; and with the Indian tribes;”.  As the economy continues to lack prosperity, I hope that Congress will stop using the Commerce Clause for economic interventionism.  I hope that Congress will count the terrible costliness of their harmful interventions.  Because they have interfered enough to destroy the market mechanism of market self-regulation.  Not only have they interfered with the self-regulation of markets, they have stimulated the growth of monopolies across the nation.  In doing so they haven’t added to their influence but instead have undermined the U.S. economy and prosperity.

If you want to read more about how Americans have navigated challenging economic times over our history and through three different political ideologies, then buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com today.

The quote came from:

Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics, Third Edition, (Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, NY, 2007), 173.

 

 

I wonder how many more times I will read about globalization and discover once again that globalization is misrepresented.  Let me clarify twenty-first century globalization for you.  First of all, twenty-first century globalization comes with neoliberalism and financialization.  They are a triple threat to prosperity for most of the world’s people.  The combination of globalization, financialization and neoliberalism is why this 21st century version of globalization is so harmful.  Also, globalization isn’t new.  Even in the classical liberal past, from 1776 until 1861, well-to-do people in portraits wore finery imported from around the world.  Similarly, globalization was part of the modern liberal period, from 1861 until 1944.  As global populations grew, globalization grew.  Globalization sharpened competition for raw materials to use in industrial processes.  Nations competed for those raw materials until WWI and WWII broke out.  Now in the neoliberal period, mobile capital through international banking gives the largest capital holders financial advantages over people and groups that have less capital.  And that financial advantage becomes power over markets and even over nations.  And neoliberalism, or state sponsored corporatism, makes it all possible.

If you want to learn more about how we find ourselves in a lackluster economy with economic and political insecurity buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.  I take you step by step through the political and economic changes that bring us to the present.

There’s no reason for you or anyone else to be surprised by the neoliberal age now in 2017.  Neoliberalism got started after WWII and it’s been ongoing since then.  If you aren’t aware of it by now, you haven’t been paying attention.  Neoliberalism is government sponsored corporatism.  It is the modus operandi that explains why the TPP was being written in closed sessions during the Obama Administration.  And it was being written by corporate entities and their lawyers seeking to protect various vested interests by writing the treaty.  When the public realized what NAFTA had done and decided that the TPP was worse, many of them wrote their Congress members to oppose its passage.  They broke through from indifference to an understanding that saying “no” to the TPP was essential to protecting their access to opportunities that would be lost to them if it was passed.  And Congress listened.  And President Trump also listened.

Neoliberalism also explains why insurance companies played such a large role in drafting the ACA during President Obama’s Administration.  It was supposed to make a lot of money for insurance companies until most people in the public turned their backs on it.  Even without clear reporting about the ACA (several Freedom of Information requests were ignored by the Obama Administration) the public realized that the ACA wasn’t a viable plan for the nation’s healthcare.  Most of the ACA sign ups were accomplished through the welfare bureaucracy to bring in people on Medicaid.  Writing legislation with corporate interests in mind has been going on for a long time.  It is the way Washington does its political dance now in 2017.

I was reading a recent criticism that President Trump has too many corporate players involved in government as though that should be surprising.  But corporations and governments have been dancing together since 1944.  Why act surprised about that?  Government started thinking of corporate welfare as more important than individual welfare starting in 1944.  After 1944, laws were gradually changed in the United States to support corporate interests, starting with tax laws.  If you wish to change our government and reactivate the government’s interest in your welfare, then pay attention to policies being argued over in Washington D.C..   Understand that you should look carefully at new legislation because it may affect your interests.  There isn’t a professional class of bureaucrats and elected officials that you can rely upon to look out for you except when you remind them what you want them to do.  Don’t expect them to automatically work on your behalf when corporations have played such a large role in motivating our government’s policies since 1944.

I don’t know if President Trump will be able to change policies to bring jobs back to the jobless, or revoke the ACA in a time of healthcare racketeering, or rebalance international trade agreements to improve the American economy, or re-mobilize and reorganize our military to decrease its empire role and refocus it as a capable defensive force to protect us here at home.  But whatever he does, he is doing in the neoliberal age.  So there’s no need to act surprised about that.  And when various people step forward and speak about politics, you should be aware that it may not be your interests that they keep close to their hearts.  Your interests may not concern them at all.  Finally, both the Democrats and the Republicans are completely loyal to neoliberal politics.  You can tell that’s true if you look at how your share of the political and economic pie keeps shrinking.  It’s up to you to speak up and reject more interference from them in your interests.  Because neoliberals will put you and your interests last as often as you let them.

If you want to increase your awareness of the neoliberal age, then buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.  I explain neoliberalism’s origins, timing and how it grew to become so influential. I identify the people who brought in neoliberal ideas in economics and how neoliberalism affected American politics.

The Good Society was originally published by Little Brown and Company in 1937.  In it, Walter Lippmann argued that modern liberalism is better than communism or fascism.  Modern liberalism was the dominant American political ideology from after the American Civil War until World War II ended.  Lippmann tried to make modern liberalism, a mild form of socialism, seem like a modern political approach that was unlike other forms of collectivism.  He imagined that American courts could protect Americans from the problems faced in other collectivist societies.  The Good Society may be the best book to explain American modern liberalism.  But it also can help us to understand what has happened after modern liberalism was replaced by neoliberalism.  Here’s a quote from The Good Society that I think describes today’s neoliberal problems that arise when governments operate under the goal of limitless power.

“The predominant teachings of this age are that there are no limits to man’s capacity to govern others and that, therefore, no limitations ought to be imposed upon government.  The older faith, born of long ages of suffering under man’s dominion over man, was that the exercise of unlimited power by men with limited minds and self-regarding prejudices is soon oppressive, reactionary, and corrupt.  The older faith taught that the very condition of progress was the limitation of power to the capacity and virtue of rulers…All the wishing in the world, all the promises based on the assumption that there are available omniscient and loving autocrats, will not call into being men who can plan a future which they are unable to imagine, who can manage a civilization which they are unable to understand.”

To summarize Walter Lippmann, he’s saying that granting more power to our government won’t make government bureaucrats and elected officials smarter or more able than they would be without such terrible power.  Giving them more power doesn’t mean that they will accomplish more.  Americans should keep this in mind when they want our government to tax (others) more and do more (for their friends or themselves).  With twenty trillion dollars of debt, our government can’t do whatever people imagine it can do for them.  Twenty trillion dollars in the hole and an economy that still hasn’t recovered since the Great Recession is a lot of failure.

Wish fulfillment isn’t what a government does, anyway.  And that is especially true with twenty trillion dollars of debt.  I have been puzzled to hear political proposals for free tuition and free healthcare.  We can see that neither goal has been realized.  Warfare in the Middle East can’t continue either.  Neoliberals have tried to externalize corporate and government spending to ordinary Americans.  They risk capital in risky ventures backed up by tax payer dollars (remember the sub-prime mortgage crisis: unqualified borrowers, debt default, tax money instead of bank failure).   Such mal-investment wastes society’s resources as much as war and failed government programs do.  In fact, by imagining endless power by printing more money (a policy that has failed with horrible results many times over history), American political and economic policies have veered off from trying to accomplish what’s possible to striving for what’s impossible.  Just look at the mess that our policies are causing.

Most people understand that “there’s no sense crying over spilled milk.”  That after the milk has spilled it has gone to waste.  Most people understand that a person’s opportunity can be wasted or an investment that hasn’t paid off has been wasted.  And after it’s wasted, its value isn’t still obtainable.  When our economy isn’t working well to build prosperity, money that a healthy economy might have created isn’t hiding somewhere, it’s gone.  When you consider how many working age people aren’t employed in the U.S., that represents a waste.  Isn’t it time to change what’s not working?

Walter Lippmann, The Good Society, Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA, 2005, 40-41.

If you want to read more about Walter Lippmann, he is featured in Political Catsup with Economy Fries, which will bring you up to speed on American political ideologies and their everyday resonances in today’s politics.  Just go to Amazon.com and order your copy today.

There are plenty of news sites available on the internet.  I don’t like them.  I want them to omit entertainment fluff and get down to information that I can use.  Stop abusing my thinking-brain with horrible empty content.  I hate stories that don’t help any Americans to understand better about what’s happening to us all in the twenty-first century.  There are topics galore that are being neglected.  Here are some examples.

How about telling Americans what happens to workers and non-workers in a shrinking economy that has fewer jobs?  What policies and circumstances caused those fewer jobs?  Please show evidence.  Are we seeing the destruction of the market economy?  What kind of economy can take its place?

How can the U.S. continue its fiscal overspending and monetarism under the situation we see around us where production has been eclipsed by speculation and opportunity has been shut out by the excessive pursuit of risk?  How about explaining the consequences of mal-invested capital (under a system of financialization and bank deregulation)?  Money has been wasted when it could have been better used.  Can we change our malinvestment habit (by ending financialization and re-regulating banks)?  What are examples of some better uses for American capital?  How can we begin to re-build wealth in the USA?

How about explaining what the “post-industrial economy” is?  What do the Saudis mean when they talk about their “post-oil economic future?”  What will it mean for us?  Is there a new energy economy on the horizon?  How can we each benefit from it?

And please stop talking about how robots have taken over the job market and how hopeless the job horizon is for all of us (American jobs have been diminished mostly through malinvestments like hostile takeovers, and outsourcing, not robots) .  Financialization and tax rules that consider asset depreciation have encouraged the purchase of robots in the car industry.  But without low-interest loans and tax breaks, assembly-line robots probably wouldn’t have made sense (so that’s a policy issue involving economic interventionism).  And without these added costs from robotics, would cars be cheaper (so would you have a newer car)?

And a lot of work needs to get done that robots can’t do.  Robots lack human dexterity and computers aren’t intelligent (they haven’t passed the Turing Test).  While it’s true that the telephone, electrical grid and sewage treatment plants of the world have been revolutionized by microprocessors, a microprocessor is a very small and humble kind of switch that isn’t a robot.  To call a microprocessor a robot seems to me an exaggeration.

Microprocessors have taken over telephone switching, and electrical plant operations and water treatment centers so that fewer people are needed to operate those facilities.  But those microprocessors are vulnerable in the case of an electromagnetic pulse.  They aren’t a replacement that is as reliable as a person.  And hardening those systems isn’t considered affordable (without a government program that pays for the upgrade) by the private companies that have adopted microprocessors.  Private companies have cut their costs to increase their profits by using microprocessors, but in doing that, they have made our electrical, communication and water treatment systems vulnerable.

New opportunities that aren’t present in a centralized economy could rejuvenate our cities if small business taxes are reduced.  Bad policies like high taxes that harm innovation don’t have to continue.  How about declassifying new technologies and opening them up for private development?  If you would like to understand how we got to our American political and economic here and now, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com right now.

To learn about EMP threats see: “Report of the Commission to Assess the Treat to the United States from Electromagnetic (EMP) Attack: Critical National Infrastructures,” Dr. John S. Foster, Jr., Mr. Earl Gjelde, Dr. William R. Graham (Chairman), et al, April 2008.

Americans are known around the world for their acceptance and welcoming of immigrants.  So why controversy now?  I think that it’s the shrinking economy.  The U.S. Government is reporting a low percentage of economic growth but the government adds government spending to the GDP numbers even when that spending represents debt (a Keynesian strategy).  And debt isn’t really any kind of production that indicates growth.  I don’t see significant growth in the U.S. economy that would matter to families in metrics such as employment (for example an abundance of well-paying and secure full-time jobs that allow a family to enjoy some economic security), home ownership (right now home-ownership is the lowest it’s been in fifty years), real estate construction (it has not recovered since the subprime mortgage crisis), car purchases (the average age of the American car is 11.5 years), small business start-ups (many have closed), etc.  While there’s capital growth in the stock market because of Federal Reserve market interference, it doesn’t represent real market demand.  Quantitative easing and corporate stock buy-backs have plumped up the stock market.

There are more than a single group of immigrants.  For example, within the scope of this discussion, there are H1-b applicants who have an education and there are refugees with or without an education.  But without economic growth, immigrants aren’t likely to find lasting prosperity here.  And neither are some Americans who live here already.  Most Americans know that it’s a bad idea to bring more people into the nation when there are already not enough jobs to go around.  It seems like a bad idea, too, to bring impoverished immigrant refugees to cities like Detroit, where people haven’t experienced a healthy economy in decades.

One issue is when neoliberals have wanted to use debt or taxes to educate people from other nations and then hire them to fill technical jobs here.  There’s a myth that Americans holding technical degrees aren’t unemployed in the U.S. but that isn’t true.  How many times have you heard that people who can’t find a job aren’t qualified because they don’t have a degree (so it’s their fault)?  Or that people with a college education are more likely to find work whereas those without a degree can’t?  There are plenty of unemployed engineers, mathematicians and scientists all over the United States.  And an employer will often hire a younger immigrant at a lower wage than an older and more experienced American STEM worker would be able to earn.  That shortens the usefulness of a STEM degree and kicks experienced workers out the door.

Neoliberals can get foreign workers who have been educated in the U.S. and then pay them less than they would pay American technical workers.  And doing that undercuts the opportunities of Americans in two ways.  First, by providing government scholarships to educate foreigners when many Americans can’t afford tuition and second by letting those same people replace Americans in the workforce.  Even if a foreigner was educated in a foreign university so that American taxes didn’t pay for their education, they shouldn’t be hired in place of a qualified American worker.  Original H1-b guidelines prohibited that.  And using foreign laborers also brings in people who may accept workplace behaviors outside the norm because they don’t know what’s normal here.

According to Karl Denninger writing from MarketTicker.com, there’s been HI-b visa abuse across America for too long.  Since the 1970’s, neoliberals have used labor arbitrage to lower their production costs by going abroad to get cheaper workers.  We call that “out-sourcing.”  For a while now, American corporations, especially in Silicon Valley, have wanted to reduce labor costs in the U.S. by using HI-b visas to bring cheaper foreign workers here.  This practice displaces qualified American candidates, even though the H1-b visa program is supposed to avoid displacing the qualified American worker.  Denninger says, “…as a direct consequence of the abuses I can not recommend to any teen today that they go into a STEM field, particularly a computer related field.”  H1-b abuses have been destroying American job opportunities for years and they should be stopped.  President Trump should stop these abuses and he seems to be aware of these problems.

Americans will probably return to a renewed acceptance of immigrants when the economy is growing again.  But for now, I think that there’s little mystery in the growing American attitude against HI-b visas.  While importing cheaper scientists, mathematicians and engineers might make it cheaper for employers, it undercuts the American STEM workforce.  Are there any STEM job opportunities in America for a fresh American graduate?  How about for an older engineer, scientist or mathematician who was educated twenty years ago?  Because it’s not clear where a job with job security exists that will provide a return on an American scientist’s, engineer’s or mathematician’s educational investment.

To conclude, H1-b visa abuses should stop even though corporatists enjoy a savings in wage costs.  Impoverished refugees probably shouldn’t be introduced to already impoverished American cities.  Because it causes unnecessary suffering among displaced American workers and foreigners won’t always find a job that lasts.  Refugees from the Middle East are suffering in part because of failed neoliberal military policies of making war in the Middle East.  I would like for the U.S. to stop interfering in the Middle East by bombing it or using drones.  These methods have caused catastrophes that have harmed Middle Eastern families and created the refugee crisis which has only worsened under these terrible policies.

If you want to get some statistics and references to support the statements I just made, then buy Political Catsup with Economy Fries at Amazon.com where I discuss these very same issues and others that explain how we got to our current place in economics and politics in the United States.

To read the article written by Karl Denninger, “H1b Abuse and Reform: Destroy Those Who Speak Against,” see http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231801, accessed 03 Feb 2017.

There’s another great article on H1-b visa abuses by Norm Matloff that I found on the Economic Populist.  Here’s the reference:

Norm Matloff, “H-1B and Related Guest Worker Visa Reform,” http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/h-1b-and-related-guest-worker-visa-reform-6043, Dec 15, 2017, accessed Feb 15, 2017.

If you’re tired of bias and errors in the media’s reporting,  you have an alternative.  You can still be a responsible citizen monitoring the news of the nation.  Just go to Visitor Access Records/www.whitehouse.gov., where you can find rebuttals to phony press coverage and you can also get details on what’s really happening and what’s new under the new Presidential administration.   You can discover the latest news about executive orders.  You can keep up on what President Trump is saying and doing.  So far, it seems that he’s keeping his campaign promises in his early executive actions.  And he’s directing his comments to the American worker and not-working-citizen who would be working if a job were available for them.  So you’ll know what’s happening in your country.  So far, President Donald Trump has his feet on the ground and his feet are in motion.  Go Trump, Go!  It’s such a relief as compared with the frozen policies under the last president.

I have visited http://www.whitehouse.gov to catch up on what President Trump is doing.  I am hoping that the economy can improve under his leadership.  He is appears to be a neoliberal from the corporate group instead of one from the political/lawyer group.  Neoliberalism is government sponsored corporatism.  It remains to be seen whether he will stick to neoliberal tools that strive to control and manipulate economic outcomes.  Those very same tools haven’t been working well for the United States or for the rest of the globe.  Will a better trade balance be enough to restore prosperity?  Stay up to date by visiting this site.  And for more information about how we got to our current political and economic reality, buy a copy of Political Catsup with Economy Fries available at Amazon.com.

“Opportunity is what connects the politic and the economy; political policies affect people’s opportunities.” (1)

Nowadays, algorithms can also affect people’s economic opportunities.  I know about how algorithms can affect economic opportunities thanks mostly to Cathy O’Neil and her book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2).  But there’s been mention of algorithms and their effect on people’s chances in two other books I’ve read since the Great Recession: All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera (3) and Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier (4).  These books reveal that math formulas are being used to sort huge quantities of information, also called “big data”.  And these formulas can have uneven consequences to the wider economy when they are implemented.  That is to say that some groups will benefit from the use of these formulas and others might suffer.

Here are some examples:

Algorithms have affected everyone in big and small ways.  The Great Recession happened when risk model algorithms looked back only fifty years to estimate mortgage risk.  That fifty year window of time underestimated risk in subprime mortgages.  If the algorithm had gone back 100 years, there would have been a higher risk estimate.  Also, securitization had already moved risk from lenders to investors in the stock market (including municipal bond investors and retirement fund investors).  The Greenspan put was Greenspan’s promise to Wall Street that the Federal Reserve (and Treasury) would help in case of a stock market default on debt.  The Greenspan put spread Wall Street’s risk to Main Street.  But the risk was multiplied when derivatives were brought into existence.  And derivatives like credit default swaps had algorithms based on probability theory that assumed that more diversification was automatically less risky.  And that idea becomes bogus when unqualified buyers are provided loans that they can’t afford to pay.

Good American teachers have sometimes been fired when they couldn’t meet the No-Child-Left-Behind algorithm’s expectations of learning based on testing.  Some teachers have gamed the test, little realizing that they doomed the next teacher in line who couldn’t make up for an algorithm that had a wrong expectation that was based on a prior deception.  Many school districts have been subjected to these federal programs and they account for de-skilling in the teaching profession where teachers are expected to teach their students to pass tests instead of to think critically.  These algorithms may account for the shortages of teachers across the nation.

The Society for Human Resource Management claims in their report from October 12th, 2016, “Big data methods are being used in the employment setting.”  The report states “that 32% of HR professionals reported that their organization uses big data to support HR.”(5)  According to Cathy O’Neil, 60%-70% of prospective employees are subjected to personality testing when they apply for a job (2).

There are a lot of examples of how algorithms are affecting people’s economic opportunities.  From causing harm in the real estate market (30% loss of value initially and now lowest home ownership in 50 years) and banking sector (remember hundreds of failed banks during the Great Recession), to creating strife in the teaching profession, to evaluating employees based on hidden criteria that can disqualify a person and ruin their chance to get a job.  Parole boards can use algorithms to evaluate risk of re-offense.  Prisoners fill out a questionnaire and their answers tend to disqualify poor people in poor neighborhoods (2).

What’s so strange about avalanches of change caused by big data and algorithms is how little discussion is happening in the wake of catastrophies.  No one seems liable for the harms that algorithms are causing society or causing individuals.  Society is part of a grand experiment where algorithms are creating harms and no one is being blamed for them.  Algorithms can be stealthy ways to ruin people’s opportunity in the American landscape.

If you want to learn about how Americans find themselves in our current political and economic environment, there’s a book that outlines it for you: Political Catsup with Economy Fries, available at Amazon.com.

(1)     Mel Scanlan Stahl, Political Catsup with Economy Fries: Liberalism, Pragmatism, Opportunism, (Fast Car Publishing, Spokane, WA, 2015), 102.

(2)     Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, (Crown Publishing Group, New York, 2016).

(3)     Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, (Penguin Group, New York, 2010, 2011).

(4)     Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, (Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, New York, 2013).

(5)     Eric Dunleavy, Ph.D, Society for Human Resource Management, “Statement of Eric Dunleavy, Ph.D.,” October 12, 2016, http://www.shrm.org/hr-today/public-policy-issues/Documents/EEOC%20Testimony %20on%20Big%20in%20Employment.pdf, accessed Nov. 2016.