If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
If you have something to say...
Say it on the Huffington Post
The Blog
There's a new scarlet letter in town. Actually, it's the same letter -- "A" -- but it stands for a different word that's increasingly regarded as shameful: Austerity. The darling idea of 2010 and 2011 has become the pariah concept of 2012. And the evidence of profound change is all around, from France and Greece to Germany and -- gasp -- the Republican Party. The change, when it comes to the conventional wisdom on austerity, has come from a combination of public pressure and leadership: one pushing up from below, the other pressing down from above. None of this means that we should break out the Keynesian champagne any time soon. But it's clear the forces of austerity are in retreat. And that's a very good thing.
By investing in our small businesses, we invest in job growth. One of the best ways to help small businesses lift more Americans into the middle class is to remove the economic barriers that are holding small businesses back.
A government that would cut support to middle-class families trying to support their disabled children so the wealthy can get more tax breaks would be a government with no decency.
What if the Treasury borrowed $2 trillion dollars in a series of 100 year bond offerings at say 4.5%? Rather than have the government waste the money on unneeded projects or squander it on more bank bailouts, the $2 trillion of proceeds could be distributed to the American people.
Of course, there are Latino libertarians out there. But in general, talking Hispanics into espousing the Ron Paul agenda is only slightly easier than getting the pope to show up at the Stonewall Inn for a drink.
It would behoove us to remember that slow and steady often wins the race, just as a more balanced approach to work life can be more beneficial than the helter-skelter mindset of our cut-throat labor market.
All Wall Street needed to do was deliver a fair price -- an honest price -- to the common, middle-class investor. Instead, what they delivered was a shafting of the retail investor to the benefit of their best customers; the venture capitalists, prime brokers and inside institutions.
Long derided as "corporate raiders" only interested in making a fast buck often to the long-term detriment of their target companies, some recent successful activist investor campaigns have done much to rightfully disprove this long-held misconception.
Romney is identified hand and fist with Wall Street's interests. Yet it is still early in the campaign. It would be a coup were his campaign to look to that singular personage in government who fought tooth and nail for the interests of everyday America.
f we are to negotiate the coming years safely, we may need a new kind of leadership. We need the rediscovery of an ancient kind of leadership that has rarely been given the prominence it deserves. I mean the leader as teacher.
Four global forces, as they are leveraged and exploited by American business and political leaders, will help the United States recreate itself and revive into a 21st century economic powerhouse by 2025.
You might think that the declining price of gasoline means that we don't have to pay attention to all that talk about oil speculation driving up the price of oil. Right? Wrong.
Put simply, Wall Street has more than recovered while the American people sink further and further away from economic security.
Mitt Romney has periodic breakdowns when asked questions about the economy because he sometimes forgets the need to lie, as happened recently in an interview with Time magazine.
The question isn't whether we need a central bank: We do. The question is, Why is it dominated by the people who have already ruined the economy once -- and who have a clear conflict of interest?
