'Sharing-economy' workers moving toward unions

The more things change.... Uber's business model of making taxi drivers into "independent contractors" is -- surprise, surprise! --leading more and more of those drivers to the conclusion that they must unionize and organize to protect their rights and wages [emphasis mine]:

Uber’s disruption of the cab industry has been welcomed by nearly everyone except those who rely on the cab industry for their livelihoods. It’s arguably made on-demand car rides easier, cleaner, safer, more accessible and, in some cases, even cheaper.

Indeed, such disruption is overdue. The high prices of regulated taxi medallions have kept a small number of bosses in control, while drivers pay high gate fees in order to access their cars and wages. Uber is right that the traditional system is not well suited to drivers’ or customers’ needs.

But the new boss is not so different from the old boss. Uber’s revolution is not actually its technology but its market power. It has disrupted the cab industry in ways so many others can only dream of by leveraging the labor of thousands of workers who are exceptionally underprotected. 

[...] Only four years after the service debuted in San Francisco, Uber drivers nationwide are getting organized and demanding better treatment.  And this could have huge implications for the trajectory of the peer-to-peer economy. As work changes, so will the ways workers seek to protect themselves and their livelihood.

Recently, one of my main bearded liberal economists Dean Baker wrote about the new "sharing economy" embodied by Uber and Airbnb that may seem like a good deal for consumers but is actually a net ripoff.

Thankfully, it seems that just as fast as Uber has disrupted the old model, actual workers and common sense are moving to disrupt Uber.

God bless the working man!

To get a fair share, sharing-economy workers must unionize

By Susie Cagle

June 27, 2014 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/6/uber-sharing-economyunionstaxis.html

Baker: Stimulus worked, but it was too small

Two-fisted liberal pride!  Don't ever back down!  The GOP watered down the stimulus with 1/3 tax cuts and cut the overall amount from more than $1 trillion that was required to about $700 billion.  

Sums up Dean Baker: "In other words, we were trying offset a loss of $1.4 trillion in annual demand with a stimulus package of $300 billion a year. Surprise! This was not enough."

Even so, the stimulus helped avoid a second Great Depression.  

My progressive comrades: don't ever apologize, don't ever make excuses. THE STIMULUS WORKED.  The fact that it couldn't do more is entirely the fault of Republicans.

Now read below to get the numbers.

Why the stimulus just couldn't do it

By Dean Baker

February 20, 2014 | CNN

When President Obama proposed his stimulus in January 2009, the economy was in a freefall, losing more than 700,000 jobs a month. The immediate cause of the plunge was the freezing up of the financial system after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but the deeper cause was the loss of demand after the collapse of the housing bubble.

The bubble had been driving the economy both directly and indirectly. The unprecedented run-up in house prices led to a record rate of construction, with about 2 million homes built at the peak in 2005.

In addition, the $8 trillion in housing equity created by the bubble led to an enormous consumption boom. People saw little reason to save for retirement when their home was doing it for them. The banks also made it very easy to borrow against bubble-generated equity, which many people did. As a result, the personal saving rate fell to 3% in the years 2002-07.

The bubble also indirectly enriched state and local governments with higher tax revenue. And there was a mini-bubble in nonresidential real estate, but that came to an end in 2008 as well.

The economy had already been in recession for nine months before the collapse of Lehman because the bubble was deflating, but the Lehman bankruptcy hugely accelerated the pace of decline. This was the context in which Obama planned his stimulus package before he even entered the White House.

At that point, most economists still did not recognize the severity of the downturn, just as they had not seen the dangers of the housing bubble that had been building over the previous six years.

The Congressional Budget Office projections, which were very much in the mainstream of the economics profession, showed a combined drop in GDP for 2008 and 2009 of 1%, before the economy resumed growth again in 2010. This is with no stimulus. By contrast, the economy actually shrank by 3.1% in those years, even with the stimulus beginning to kick in by the spring of 2009.

Given this background, it was easy to see that the stimulus was far too small.  It was designed to create about 3 million jobs, which might have been adequate given the Budget Office projections. Since the package Congress approved was considerably smaller than the one requested, the final version probably created about 2 million jobs. This was a very important boost to the economy at the time, but we needed 10 million to 12 million jobs to make up for jobs lost to the collapse of the bubble.

The arithmetic on this is straightforward. With the collapse of the bubble, we suddenly had a huge glut of unsold homes. As a result, housing construction plunged from record highs to 50-year lows. The loss in annual construction demand was more than $600 billion. Similarly, the loss of $8 trillion in housing equity sent consumption plunging. People no longer had equity in their homes against which to borrow, and even the people who did would face considerably tougher lending conditions. The drop in annual consumption was on the order of $500 billion.

The collapse of the bubble in nonresidential real estate cost the economy another $150 billion in annual demand, as did the cutbacks in state and local government spending as a result of lost tax revenue. This brings the loss in annual demand as a result of the collapse of the bubble to $1.4 trillion.

Compared with this loss of private sector demand, the stimulus was about $700 billion, excluding some technical tax fixes that are done every year and have nothing to do with stimulus. Roughly $300 billion of this was for 2009 and another $300 billion for 2010, with the rest of the spending spread over later years.

In other words, we were trying offset a loss of $1.4 trillion in annual demand with a stimulus package of $300 billion a year. Surprise! This was not enough.

That is not 20/20 hindsight; some of us were yelling this as loudly as we could at the time.  It was easy to see that the stimulus package was not large enough to make up for the massive shortfall in private sector demand. It was going to leave millions unemployed and an economy still operating far below its potential level of output.

We are still facing the consequences of an inadequate stimulus. The reality is that we have no simple formula for getting the private sector to replace the demand lost from the collapse of the bubble.

Contrary to what Republican politicians tell us, private businesses don't run out and create jobs just because we throw tax breaks at them and profess our love.  If the government doesn't create demand, then we will be doomed to a long period of high unemployment -- just as we saw in the Great Depression. The government could fill the demand gap by spending on infrastructure, education and other areas, but in a political world where higher spending is strictly verboten, that doesn't seem likely.

The one alternative, which has been successfully pursued by Germany, is to reduce the supply of labor through work sharing. Companies reduce all their employees' hours and pay so everyone keeps their jobs. The government then pays the workers part-time unemployment benefits -- cheaper than paying someone full-time unemployment.

Germans have used this route to lower their unemployment rate to 5.2%, even though their nation's growth has been slower than ours.

Some bipartisan baby steps have been taken in this direction; we will need much more if we are to get back to near full employment any time soon. In a world where politics makes further stimulus impossible, work sharing is our best hope.

Baker: Technology didn't kill middle class jobs, public policy did

Baker doesn't mention other advanced countries like Germany that did not lose their middle class and manufacturing jobs, even though they are subject to the same global, technological forces that ostensibly destroyed U.S. wages and jobs. Why? Because their politicians protected their unions and domestic manufacturers, among other things.

Technology didn't kill middle class jobs, public policy did

By Dean Baker

November 25, 2013 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3kka7

Baker: Glass-Steagall now, tomorrow and forever

Here's how Baker sums it up [emphasis mine]:

What is striking about the argument on re-instating Glass-Steagall is that there really is no downside. The banks argue that it will be inconvenient to separate their divisions, but companies sell off divisions all the time.

They also argue that foreign banks are not generally required to adhere to this sort of separation. This is in part true, but irrelevant.

Stronger regulations might lead us to do more business with foreign-owned banks since weaker regulations could give them some competitive edge. That should bother us as much as it does that we buy clothes and toys from Bangladesh and China.

If foreign governments want to subject themselves and their economies to greater risk as a result of bad financial regulation, that is not an argument for us to do the same.  Are we anxious to be the next Iceland or Cyprus?

Glass-Steagall now: Because the banks own Washington

By Dean Baker

August 5, 2013 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/08/201384183347752450.html

Baker: Errors by deficit-hawk economists cost how many jobs?

[HT: Vern.]  This is a somewhat technical piece, but it suffices to say that it takes down one of the principle economic arguments for austerity and deficit reduction.

How much real-world damage was caused by policy makers acting on R&R's flawed economic analysis by cutting public expenditures during an economic crisis thereby exacerbating the economic downturn?

Getting economics right matters to millions of real people!

How Much Unemployment Was Caused by Reinhart and Rogoff's Arithmetic Mistake?

By Dean Baker

April 16, 2013 | CEPR

URL: http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/how-much-unemployment-was-caused-by-reinhart-and-rogoffs-arithmetic-mistake

Baker: 10 years of economic doldrums ahead

With a recalcitrant GOP House and sequestration coming, if Obama sticks to his guns but makes no progress in negotiations, then we'll have spending cuts and tax increases in 2013, or austerity by default.  And zero chance of more necessary fiscal stimulus.  

Here's how liberal economist Dean Baker sums up U.S. economic prospects:

The number of jobs in the economy is roughly 9 million below the trend level. The recent pace of job growth has been approximately 170,000 a month. The economy needs to generate 100,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with the growth of the labor force.

This means that it would take almost 130 months, more than 10 years, for the economy to generate enough jobs to make up its 9 million shortfall at its recent growth rate. That is not a very good picture.

It is difficult to envision a scenario that looks much better. The housing market is recovering and that will provide a modest boost to growth, but it is not likely we will return to the construction rates of the boom years. Trade may be a small positive in the years ahead, but with the economies of most U.S. trading partners also weak, it is unlikely that trade will provide much of a boost in the near future.

The Post-Election Economic Blues

By Dean Baker

November 16, 2012 | Counterpunch

URL: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/16/the-post-election-economic-blues/

Baker: Why isn't Social Security an election issue?

Why Big Bucks Donors Don't Want President Obama to Champion Social Security

After stock market shocks and the housing bubble, social security more vital than ever before. But the money men hate it.

By Dean Baker

October 25, 2012 | AlterNet

URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/why-big-bucks-donors-dont-want-president-obama-champion-social-security

Baker: 'Tough on China' = Tough on U.S. business

Good point:

[I]f Romney or any other president were to crack down on China over its currency, not only would he be forced to first overcome the opposition of the firms that directly profit from the over-valued dollar, he would also have to overcome the objections of many powerful corporations who want their own issues with China to be given priority.

In short, the issue is not really one of finding a president who is prepared to stand up and be tough against a cheating China, the issue is finding a president who is prepared to stand up and be tough with US corporate interests. Romney can certainly blame President Obama for not taking the tough stand against US corporations in his first term. The question is whether there is reason to believe that Romney would be any tougher on his friends and former business partners.  

Cracking down on China means cracking down on Mitt Romney

Romney's ads claim that he will declare China to be a currency manipulator and take retaliatory measures.

By Dean Baker

October 1, 2012 | Al Jazeera

URL: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/10/201210163746943822.html

Baker: Failing arithmetic on national debt

Baker is the first pundit I know of who has made this point:  

While our debt to GDP ratio is approaching levels not seen since the years immediately following World War II, there is another key ratio that has been going in the opposite direction. This is the ratio of interest payments to GDP. This fell to 1.3 percent of GDP in 2009, its lowest level since World War II. While it has risen slightly in the last couple of years, the ratio of interest payments to GDP is still near a post-war low.

This gives us yet another example how the U.S. Government is not like a household.  How many of us can pay a lower interest rate as our debts grow bigger?  You and I can't.  But the USG can and does.    

Baker goes on to illustrate how interest owed on the national debt is more important than the absolute dollar value of outstanding debt, or the debt-to-GDP ratio:

Suppose that we issue $4 trillion in 30 year bonds at or near the current interest rate of 2.75 percent. Let's imagine that in 3 years the economy has largely recovered and that long-term interest rates are back at a more normal level; let's say 6.0 percent for a 30-year bond.

In this case the bond price would fall by over 40 percent meaning, in principle, that it would be possible for the government to buy up the $4 trillion in debt that it issued in 2012 for just $2.4 trillion, instantly lowering our debt burden by $1.6 trillion, almost 10 percentage points of GDP. If we had been flirting with the magic 90 percent debt to GDP ratio before the bond purchase, we will have given ourselves a huge amount of leeway by buying up these bonds.

Of course, this would be silly. The interest burden of the debt would not have changed; the only thing that would have changed is the dollar value of the outstanding debt. Fans of the 90 percent debt-to-GDP twilight zone theory may think that the debt burden by itself could slow the economy, but in the real world this doesn't make any sense.

Let's recall that America's debt-to-GDP ratio was nearly 120 percent after WWII.  "Yeah, but that was WWII!" you might say, "And after the Great Depression! No comparison!"

Well, yeah, it's hard to compare a war that lasted four years with two simultaneous wars that have lasted about 10 years and counting.  Meanwhile, the Great Recession wiped out $15.5 trillion in U.S. wealth -- about equal, coincidentally, to one year of U.S. GDP, and our total federal debt.  

And Dubya's Great Recession cost us 8.8 million jobs (more than the previous four recessions combined); as a result, many of those jobless people have qualified for "income security" payments built into our system that didn't exist in the 1930s, such as unemployment insurance, disability pay, food stamps, housing assistance, etc. Income security outlays increased from $431 billion in 2008 to $533 billion in 2009 to $622 billion in 2010 to $597 billion in 2011.  Next, more people opted for early Social Security benefits, plus they got a 5.8 percent cost of living increase in 2009, and for the first time the program ran a deficit.  Social Security outlays jumped from $617 billion in 2008 to $683 billion in 2009 to $706 billion in 2010 to $731 billion in 2011.  And let's not forget national defense spending, which increased from $616 billion in 2008 to $661 billion in 2009 to $693 billion in 2010 to $705 billion in 2011.

Finally -- and this is the factor so many people, especially on the right, overlook -- decreased economic activity -- combined with an extension of Dubya's tax cuts -- led to lower income and corporate tax receipts (and FICA receipts): down $419 billion in 2009 and $360 billion in 2010, compared to 2008.  

Meanwhile, overall spending increased $535 billion in 2009 (most of it thanks to Dubya) and $475 billion in 2010, compared to 2008.  

(See all the OMB's historical spending and revenue data here.)

So there are objective reasons why our deficits and debt have climbed.  It's ludicrous to blame it all on $475 billion in stimulus spending.

Next, let's look at the GAO's historical picture of annual net interest paid on the federal debt as a percentage of annual federal spending.  In 2011, interest payments were 6.4 percent of federal outlays.  From Reagan thru Dubya, that figure never fell below 7 percent.  In the decadent '80s it never fell below 8.9 percent.  In the dot-com '90s it never fell below 13.5 percent.  

Sure, interest rates will eventually go up as the economy recovers.  But first it has to recover.  Economic recovery should be our top priority right now, not paying off our debt when we enjoy historically low interest rates and suffer historically high unemployment.  Debt reduction now, which would cut GDP and raise unemployment, is putting the cart before the horse.

Just trying to put things in perspective.  Not that my Tea Partying friends will care....

Debt Worries: Economists Fail Arithmetic, Again

By Dean Baker

September 24, 2012 | Huffington Post

URL: http://huff.to/UzBh4o

Dean Baker: The $1.2 trillion healthcare tax

We Americans overpay $1.2 trillion a year for our medical care.  Whether it's paid to a private insurer or paid to the IRS for Medicare/Medicaid, it's still overspending.  

Land of the fee: The $1.2 trillion health care tax

By Dean Baker

August 21, 2012 | Al Jazeera

Economists tend not to be very good at economics, which is one of the main reasons that the world is facing such a prolonged downturn. Few economists were able to recognise the enormous imbalances created by housing bubbles in the United States and elsewhere, or to understand that the collapse of these bubbles would lead to a prolonged period of stagnation in the absence of a vigorous response by governments.

Economists' grasp of economics has not improved since the start of the downturn. There is little agreement within the profession on the appropriate way to bring the economy back to its potential level of output. Nor is there even agreement as to whether this is possible.

Instead, many economists are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, yelling that we have to do something about budget deficits. This concern is bizarre since it is easy to show that the current deficit in the United States is almost entirely due to the collapse of the housing bubble. The loss of revenue from this collapse, coupled with the measures taken to offset the impact of the downturn, explain almost all of the rise in the deficit since 2007, when it was just 1.2 per cent of GDP.

The financial markets presumably recognise this fact, which is why the interest rate in 10-year Treasury bonds remains near a 70-year low. The more serious among the deficit hawks will acknowledge that current deficits don't pose a problem, but then point to scary projections of large deficits 10 years and further down the road.

While some of these projections can look scary these projections are driven almost entirely by projections of exploding health care costs. If the United States paid the same amount per capita for its health care as people in Canada, Germany or any other wealthy country we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses, not deficits.       

This is where the response of the deficit hawks is truly bizarre and shows their poor grasp of economics. They invariably complain that health care costs are hard to control, so instead we must rely on cutbacks to public sector health care programmes, like Medicare and Medicaid.

The reason why this response is bizarre is that a bloated health care sector has pretty much the same impact on the economy whether or not the government pays for it. The bloated payments for health care have pretty much the same impact regardless of who pays the bill.

To be concrete, imagine that because of their ability to use licensing restrictions to limit the supply of doctors, physicians in the United States can charge twice as much as their counterparts in Germany or Canada (that's pretty close to the reality). These excess fees have roughly the same impact on the economy as if doctors got German or Canadian salaries and the government imposed a tax of $100,000 a year on each physician. In both cases, patients would have an excessive amount of money drained from their pockets to pay for their doctors' services.

It would be the same story with an insurance industry that adds $200 billion a year or more to the cost of health care in the United States. From the standpoint of the economy, there is little difference between a situation in which insurers drive up the cost of care by $200 billion and a situation in which we have a more efficient system of health care delivery and the government imposes a tax on health care of $200 billion.

The same can be said of all the other areas where the enormous inefficiency of the US health care system drives up costs: drugs, medical equipment and supplies, and hospital services. In total, the difference between the cost of care in the United States and the cost in countries with comparable care, like Germany or Canada, comes to more than $1.2 trillion dollars a year.  According to the OECD's health care data, this would be the annual savings to the United States if its per person health care costs were equal to those in either of these countries.

You would think that economists would be upset over a $1.2 trillion annual tax due to the inefficiency of our health care system. This is at least an order of magnitude larger than most issues that economists spend their time worrying over. Yet there are few economists who make this obvious point when debates over the budget come up. Instead, they typically chime in with the choir saying that we need to cut the budget, not fix health care.

The cynical among us might point out that fixing the budget mostly means beating up on older people getting Social Security and Medicare benefits. Fixing health care means going after powerful lobbies like the insurers, the drug industry, and doctors. But whatever their motive, the facts are clear. The vast majority of economists in the United States are not especially concerned about a $1.2 trillion annual health care tax; they have much less important matters to take up their time. 

Baker: What politicians won't say about U.S. economy -- MUST READ!

It's evident that Obama doesn't want to blame the bad economy on G.W. Bush, although he has every right to talk about the s**it sandwich that he was served up by his predecessor: two costly foreign occupations; 7 million jobs lost; and a burst housing bubble that removed $1 trillion a year from the U.S. economy.  I'm not sure most Americans understand the size of the hole we must dig ourselves out of.

Recently Obama got creamed by the media for saying the private sector was doing "fine," but in certain ways, it's doing better than just fine, as Dean Baker points out: corporate profits are at a 50-year high, and corporate taxes being paid are at a post-WWII low.  Gains in U.S. productivity are far outpacing gains in workers' wages.  And we have the best rating among larger countries for the ease of doing business.  Although my man Joe Stiglitz says our economy has hidden structural defects that the housing bubble only covered up, most economists, including my man Paul Krugman, believe the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are sound.  The problem is a gaping hole in aggregate demand.

Thus Romney's recycled Republican campaign mantra of "unleashing the private sector" is especially deceitful.  Where is all the pent-up demand supposed to come from that business investments are going to meet?  In other words, who in the world has the purchasing power to buy all the stuff that "unchained" U.S. companies are ostensibly going to produce once Romney has slashed their taxes and chainsawed their regulators?  

The truth is that we're in for a long, painful recovery that could be made a bit shorter and less painful with more government spending.  The multipliers of that gov't consumption would grow the economy and replace the spending with more tax revenue, rather than continuing to slash, slash, slash government while the economy shrinks in unison.

The Story of the Housing Crash Recession That Politicians Don't Want to Tell

By Dean Baker

June 19, 2012 | Yahoo! Finance

The economy is certain to occupy center stage in the presidential race this fall. Unfortunately, neither Governor Romney nor President Obama is likely to give us an accurate account of the economic problems we are now facing.

Romney's efforts seem intended to convince the public that President Obama has turned the country into the Soviet Union, with government bureaucrats shoving aside business leaders to take the commanding role in the economy. He will have lots of money to make this case, which he will need since it is so far from reality.

Corporate profits are at their highest share as a percentage of the economy in almost 50 years. The share of profits being paid in taxes is near its post-World War II low. The government's share of the economy has actually shrunk in the Obama years, as has government employment. Perhaps Romney can convince the public that the private sector is being crushed by burdensome regulation and taxes, but that has nothing to do with reality.

A Better Explanation

Unfortunately, President Obama's economic advisors have not been much more straightforward with the American people, never offering a clear explanation of why the economy has taken so long to recover. They have pointed out that economies often take long to recover from the effects of a financial crisis like to the one we experienced in the fall of 2008, but that is not an explanation for why we have not recovered.

The basic story is actually quite simple. The housing bubble had been driving the economy prior to the recession. It created demand through several channels. A near-record pace of housing construction added about 2 percentage points of GDP to annual demand or more than $300 billion in the current economy.

The $8 trillion in ephemeral housing wealth created by the bubble led to a huge surge in consumption. Tens of millions of people borrowed against bubble-generated equity or decided that they didn't need to save for retirement. When house prices were going up 15 percent-20 percent a year, the house was doing the saving. The result was a huge consumption boom on the order of 4 percent of GDP or $600 billion a year.

In addition, there was a bubble in non-residential real estate that followed in the wake of the housing bubble. This raised non-residential construction above its normal levels by close to 1 percent of GDP, or $150 billion a year.

A Bubble Generated

Adding these sources of demand together, the bubble generated well over $1 trillion in annual demand at its peak in 2005-2007. When the bubble burst, this $1 trillion in annual demand vanished as well. That is the central story of the downturn.

To recover we must find some way to replace this demand; however, that is not easy. People will not go back to their old consumption patterns because they know they need to save more. Tens of millions of people have much less wealth than they expected at this point in their lives after they saw the equity in their homes largely vanish. Tens of millions of baby boomers are approaching retirement with almost nothing but their Social Security to support them.

Given the huge loss of wealth from the collapse of the housing bubble, it is not reasonable to expect consumption to rise to fill the demand gap. It doesn't make much more sense to expect investment to do the job. Historically, investment in equipment and software has been close to 8 percent of GDP. It is pretty much back to that level today. To fill the demand gap created by the collapse of the housing bubble, the investment share of GDP would have to nearly double to 14 percent.

This would be almost impossible to imagine at any time, but it is especially far-fetched at a time when much of the economy is operating far below its capacity. Businesses are unlikely to spend a lot of money expanding their facilities when the existing capacity is sitting idle regardless of how nice we are to job creators.

Boosting Demand

Over a longer term we can expect that net exports will fill the demand gap. If we bring our huge trade deficit close to balance by selling more abroad and importing less, it will provide a substantial boost to demand. However, this will require that the dollar fall in value relative to the currencies of our trading partners, making U.S. products more competitive. That is a process that will take time. With many of our trading partners also in severe slumps, we cannot expect any major improvement in our trade balance in the immediate future.

This leaves government as the only remaining source of demand. This is not a question of whether we prefer the government or the private sector. We need the government sector to fill the gap in demand because the private sector will not do it. And that will be true no matter how much we love the private sector and its job creators.

Until we get our trade deficit closer to balance, we will need large government deficits to fill the gap in demand created by the housing bubble. That is the simple reality that neither party seems anxious to tell the people.

Big Gov't does more than tax & spend

Baker's comments are worth keeping in mind when we debate taxes and the role of Big Gubument.

The Education of Robert Samuelson: Government Doesn't End With Taxes and Spending

By Dean Baker – "Beat the Press" blog

December 16, 2008  |  Prospect.org

 

Okay, someone has to take responsibility for educating the Washington Post's columnists. Mr. Samuelson is making the case that the rich don't have excessive power in the United States, because if they did, they would pay lower taxes.

 

While many rich people are in fact working quite hard to lower their tax burden (with considerable success), most of their benefits from government actually come on the before tax side of the equation. This should be especially obvious now, when the government is backing up trillions of dollars of questionable debt incurred by the wizards of Wall Street.

 

This is the story whereby Henry Paulson (in his Goldman Sachs days), Robert Rubin and other Wall Street luminaries made hundreds of millions of dollars trading on a free government insurance policy known as "too big to fail." These brave wizards of finance were able to get others to risk money with their banks because their investors rightly believed that the government would step in if the banks messed up too badly.

 

The financial shenanigans, that made so many of our richest people rich, would not have been possible without this free insurance policy from the government. Anyone doubting this should ask how many people would have invested with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup if they were told that there was an ironclad commitment from the government to let these institutions fail if they got into trouble?

 

Of course even wealthy people outside of the financial sector generally can trace their fortune to the hand of government. Bill Gates is one of the richest people in the world because the government gives him a monopoly on Windows. It will arrest anyone who sells the product without his permission. The patent protection that makes the pharmaceutical companies hugely profitable is also a gift from the government.

 

Copyrights and patents do serve a useful purpose beyond just making some people very rich, but where is the analysis that shows that these government granted monopolies are the most efficient mechanisms for supporting creative work and innovation? In fact, such analysis does not exist.

 

There are many other ways in which the government structures the market to redistribute income upward. Read my non-copyright protected book, The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer to get more of the picture.

 

The basic story is that the government's tax and spending policy is just a small part of the distributional picture. Samuelson is wasting his readers' time when he implies that they are the whole story.

Conservatives believe Fannie caused financial crisis?

Conservatives Don't Really Believe Fannie 'Caused' Economic Crisis
By Dean Baker
September 23, 2008 | Prospect.org

MarketPlace Radio Misleads the Public on the Crisis

Stephen Henn told listeners that free market conservatives "believe" that the financial crisis is attributable to the close government relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Actually, it is extremely unlikely that free market conservatives actually "believe" this assertion because it is so obviously not true.

Fannie and Freddie got into subprime junk and helped fuel the housing bubble, but they were trailing the irrational exuberance of the private sector. They lost market share in the years 2002-2007, as the volume of private issue mortgage backed securities exploded.

In short, while Fannie and Freddie were completely irresponsible in their lending practices, the claim that they were responsible for the financial disaster is absurd on its face -- kind of like the claim that the earth is flat. Free market conservatives know that the claim that Fannie and Freddie were responsible is ridiculous. They just say it because they know that news outlets like Market Place will treat it as a serious proposition and thereby muddy the waters in the mind of the public.

It is bad enough that Market Place repeats such an outlandish claim without giving its listeners any background information. It should not pass along the additional misinformation that conservatives actually believe such nonsense.