Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,145
10
81
A great rolling stone article!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...s-millennials-should-be-fighting-for-20140103

1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody

Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector. There are millions of people who want to work, and there's tons of work that needs doing – it's a no-brainer. And this idea isn't as radical as it might sound: It's similar to what the federal Works Progress Administration made possible during Roosevelt's New Deal, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. vocally supported a public-sector job guarantee in the 1960s.

A job guarantee that paid a living wage would anchor prices, drive up conditions for workers at megacorporations like Walmart and McDonald's, and target employment for the poor and long-term unemployed – people to whom conventional stimulus money rarely trickles all the way down. The program would automatically expand during private-sector downturns and contract during private-sector upswings, balancing out the business cycle and sending people from job to job, rather than job to unemployment, when times got tough.

Some economists have proposed running a job guarantee through the non-profit sector, which would make it even easier to suit the job to the worker. Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions. Sounds nice, doesn't it?

2. Social Security for All

But let's think even bigger. Because as much as unemployment blows, so do jobs. What if people didn't have to work to survive? Enter the jaw-droppingly simple idea of a universal basic income, in which the government would just add a sum sufficient for subsistence to everyone's bank account every month. A proposal along these lines has been gaining traction in Switzerland, and it's starting to get a lot of attention here, too.

We live in the age of 3D printers and self-replicating robots. Actual human workers are increasingly surplus to requirement – that's one major reason why we have such a big unemployment problem. A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating."

Put another way: A universal basic income, combined with a job guarantee and other social programs, could make participation in the labor force truly voluntary, thereby enabling people to get a life.

3. Take Back The Land

Ever noticed how much landlords blow? They don't really do anything to earn their money. They just claim ownership of buildings and charge people who actually work for a living the majority of our incomes for the privilege of staying in boxes that these owners often didn't build and rarely if ever improve. In a few years, my landlord will probably sell my building to another landlord and make off with the appreciated value of the land s/he also claims to own – which won't even get taxed, as long as s/he ploughs it right back into more real estate.

Think about how stupid that is. The value of the land has nothing to do with my idle, remote landlord; it reflects the nearby parks and subways and shops, which I have access to thanks to the community and the public. So why don't the community and the public derive the value and put it toward uses that benefit everyone? Because capitalism, is why.

The most mainstream way of flipping the script is a simple land-value tax. By targeting wealthy real estate owners and their free rides, we can fight inequality and poverty directly, make disastrous asset price bubbles impossible and curb Wall Street's hideous bloat. There are cooler ideas out there, too: Municipalities themselves can be big-time landowners, and groups can even create large-scale community land trusts so that the land is held in common. In any case, we have to stop letting rich people pretend they privately own what nature provided everyone.

4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody

Hoarders blow. Take, for instance, the infamous one percent, whose ownership of the capital stock of this country leads to such horrific inequality. "Capital stock" refers to two things here: the buildings and equipment that workers use to produce goods and services, and the stocks and bonds that represent ownership over the former. The top 10 percent's ownership of the means of production is represented by the fact that they control 80 percent of all financial assets.

This detachment means that there's a way easier way to collectivize wealth ownership than having to stage uprisings that seize the actual airplanes and warehouses and whatnot: Just buy up their stocks and bonds. When the government does that, it's called a sovereign wealth fund. Think of it like a big investment fund that buys up assets from the private sector and pays dividends to all permanent U.S. residents in the form of a universal basic income. Alaska actually already has a fund like this in place. If it's good enough for Levi Johnston, it's good enough for you.

5. A Public Bank in Every State

You know what else really blows? Wall Street. The whole point of a finance sector is supposed to be collecting the surplus that the whole economy has worked to produce, and channeling that surplus wealth toward its most socially valuable uses. It is difficult to overstate how completely awful our finance sector has been at accomplishing that basic goal. Let's try to change that by allowing state governments into the banking game.

There is only one state that currently has a public option for banking: North Dakota. When North Dakotans pay state taxes, the money gets deposited in the state's bank, which in turn offers cheap loans to farmers, students and businesses. The Bank of North Dakota doesn't make seedy, destined-to-default loans, slice them up inscrutably and sell them on a secondary market. It doesn't play around with incomprehensible derivatives and allow its executives to extract billions of dollars. It just makes loans and works with debtors to pay them off. Sounds nice, doesn't it?

If that idea – or any of the others described in this piece – sounds good to you, there's a bitter political struggle to be waged. Let's get to work.






soo what do you guys think!? great plan or what! this is failproof i don't see any problems! well ok..

1) where the jobs going to come from again!?

2) oh SS for everyone. nevermind about those jobs..it don't matter! you get paid for NOTHING!

3) lol landlords don't do anything? hahahahahh oh man. this one is kinda funny over all.

4) sure sure. everything owned by everybody. worked well in russia.

5) i really don't get this one. can someone clue me in?
 

yllus

Elite Member & Lifer
Aug 20, 2000
20,577
432
126
I was going to say that I was pretty sure that the piece was tongue-in-cheek, but it looks like Mr. Myerson is actually a communist. Guess Rolling Stone was trolling for page views on a slow news day.
 
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OverVolt

Lifer
Aug 31, 2002
14,278
89
91
Wow its like, the exact opposite of what millennials should be doing.

#1 if it worked, we'd have solved poverty already
#2 same as #1
#3 location matters what a dumbass
#4 This is the definition of communism :/
#5 He means nationalizing over privatizing. Never a good idea. Cuba virtually runs all their businesses, what an economic powerhouse they are.

My only take away from that article is the rolling stones must think millenials are dumb :p
 
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Matt1970

Lifer
Mar 19, 2007
12,320
3
0
It would work this time because damnit, we mean it now. Surely there is enough free shit to hand out to everybody.
 

ralfy

Senior member
Jul 22, 2013
485
53
91
The only way out is to cut down heavily on borrowing and spending across the board, i.e., households, corporations, and government. Unfortunately, this can't take place if the economy is heavily dependent on borrowing and spending to ensure growth.
 

Jaskalas

Lifer
Jun 23, 2004
33,382
7,445
136
A great rolling stone article!

http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...s-millennials-should-be-fighting-for-20140103

1. Guaranteed Work for Everybody
2. Social Security for All
3. Take Back The Land
4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody
5. A Public Bank in Every State

I wonder how many Millennials are communist, as trained by their educators and their peers. The writer of this article is under the impression that the elimination of private property is a benefit. Yet this nation was founded precisely to protect individuals. Not to seize them, not to claim ownership of them by the State.

Seems difficult for me to imagine freedom when one answers to a master. I am always confounded by fellow Americans who prefer to wear the shackles this nation once cast off.

Perhaps if such ideals can be found successful, they must not first be experimented on by those of us most opposed to the very concept.
 

Zaap

Diamond Member
Jun 12, 2008
7,162
424
126
I was going to say that I was pretty sure that the piece was tongue-in-cheek, but it looks like Mr. Myerson is actually a communist.
And yet this article reads *exactly* like a compendium of virtually every leftwing-loon economic non-argument we're all subjected to on a daily basis.

One does like to think that belief in such old, discredited ideas is just tongue-in-cheek, but no, people actually believe such horseshit. Unfortunately, far too many holding a public office as well.
 

Specop 007

Diamond Member
Jan 31, 2005
9,454
0
0
Why not simply move to Cuba or Venezuela? You'd get all those things right away!
 
Nov 8, 2012
20,828
4,777
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It's great to see the Hippy movement is something that just never dies.

Hippy movement? As much as I want to think millennials - this just seems like a page taken directly from the word "Socialism".... please show me WHERE they are indicating otherwise in that garbage mess of an opinion article?

By the way, awesome laughs OP
 

yllus

Elite Member & Lifer
Aug 20, 2000
20,577
432
126
And yet this article reads *exactly* like a compendium of virtually every leftwing-loon economic non-argument we're all subjected to on a daily basis.

One does like to think that belief in such old, discredited ideas is just tongue-in-cheek, but no, people actually believe such horseshit. Unfortunately, far too many holding a public office as well.

There aren't any communists holding office in the United States. There aren't even very many socialists. Give your hyperbole muscle a rest for just a millisecond.
 

blankslate

Diamond Member
Jun 16, 2008
8,581
472
126
Going off the points you listed the ones that interest me are 1, 2, and 4.

point #1
There is supposedly about 2 or 3 people applying for every available atm according to some blurb I heard on the radio.

There should be something done to increase the number of jobs available. One thing that comes to mind is the infrastructure (yeah it's temporary but the infrastructure is rated C so it would be going for a while).

Sadly anything like that is impossible in the current political climate.




point #2

Oddly enough Social Security isn't just for the elderly in some instances

http://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/quickfacts/stat_snapshot/

according to this site about 66% of people who are on Social Security are over 65. Which means that there is a sizable minority of people under 65 who are beneficiaries.

Social Security helps out if you have an accident that leaves you disabled and in need of assistance or if your parents die when your under 18 and have no income.

One thing that can be done to shore it up is to increase the cap at which an individual pays a percentage of income from about $105k to double that or to even remove the cap.





Point #5

There are Credit Unions which are widely available and they are a very good alternative to major banks already.

As for a State bank.
Here is an advocacy site for such institutions
http://publicbankinginstitute.org/advantages.htm
here are some of the main members of that site
http://publicbankinginstitute.org/board-and-staff

I haven't read enough about that issue to have a firm position but my positive experiences with my local Credit Union doesn't make this seem like an outrageous idea.

A regional bank that doesn't operate outside of a defined area would have a much harder time compared to a multi-national bank to become "to big to fail" it seems




3 and 4 are pipe dreams born of an imo utopian ideal. and utopian ideas of any stripe run afoul of practical considerations.




====
 

boomerang

Lifer
Jun 19, 2000
18,890
642
126
There aren't any communists holding office in the United States. There aren't even very many socialists. Give your hyperbole muscle a rest for just a millisecond.
NYC just elected de Blasio. He's about as close to a communist as you can get. Additionally, progressivism is rooted in Socialism. We've got a ton of progressives holding office that stop just short of labeling themselves as Socialists for obvious reasons. Your definition of what constitutes a Communist or a Socialist may differ from mine, but we've got a ton of them here.
 

ForumMaster

Diamond Member
Feb 24, 2005
7,797
1
0
  1. Yeah, what jobs? everything is being outsourced cause due to the wonders of capitalism, it is cheaper elsewhere. Also, people today don't apply for certain jobs cause they deem those jobs "unworthy". It's amazing how many basic jobs are needed (construction/drivers/handymen).
    And yet these jobs are being filled by mexicans and whatnot cause people don't want to do them.
  2. There's always going to be hardworking people, and lazy people. Why are there so many people that rely on food stamps? Because they can. If people don't have to work, they won't.
    In the 1950's, the early settlers in Israel that came from Russia (mainly) established "kibutz" which is a basically a communist style rural community. There are few if any left today and all have privatized their way of life. Communism just doesn't work. Man is greedy. If you don't force him to work, he won't.
  3. :rolleyes:
  4. Again communism. Doesn't work. We have proof.
  5. I don't really get what the point is trying to say. Down with wallstreet? In what sense? We don't want a central bank? No stocks? Down to capitalism? It's all over the place.
 

Zaap

Diamond Member
Jun 12, 2008
7,162
424
126
There aren't any communists holding office in the United States. There aren't even very many socialists. Give your hyperbole muscle a rest for just a millisecond.
You think every one of those stupid ideas is just awesome, don't you? Probably have spouted some variant of the same horseshit many times here, I'm guessing.

Who cares what label people want to slap on things? It's the same dumb, discredited ideas. But then, why would I expect anyone espousing stupid, outdated ideas to suddenly understand logic?
 

Moonbeam

Elite Member
Nov 24, 1999
72,327
6,040
126
The very first three words of the Constitution of the United States define communism. It is engraved in out National Seal.
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
82,854
17,365
136
  1. Yeah, what jobs? everything is being outsourced cause due to the wonders of capitalism, it is cheaper elsewhere. Also, people today don't apply for certain jobs cause they deem those jobs "unworthy". It's amazing how many basic jobs are needed (construction/drivers/handymen).
    And yet these jobs are being filled by mexicans and whatnot cause people don't want to do them.
  2. There's always going to be hardworking people, and lazy people. Why are there so many people that rely on food stamps? Because they can. If people don't have to work, they won't.
    In the 1950's, the early settlers in Israel that came from Russia (mainly) established "kibutz" which is a basically a communist style rural community. There are few if any left today and all have privatized their way of life. Communism just doesn't work. Man is greedy. If you don't force him to work, he won't.
  3. :rolleyes:
  4. Again communism. Doesn't work. We have proof.
  5. I don't really get what the point is trying to say. Down with wallstreet? In what sense? We don't want a central bank? No stocks? Down to capitalism? It's all over the place.

1. It isnt capitalism thats losing the jobs. Its the bullshit of big government that increases cost of production, forcing companies to slash costs so they can make a profit. Customers choose what to pay, not sellers (despite loads of popular opinion to the contrary).
2. I'd like the lazy people to die or get killed trying to loot, as opposed to leeching for multiple generations and get bigger each time around.
3. :awe:
4. Too busy, see you another night.