Pen and Papers: Making Money on Line

Ross Douthat is right to say that worrying about what would happen if Ron Paul seized ultimate power and decreed America a minarchy probably isn't a good use of anyone's time. But where Douthat thinks that minarchy is used as a way to dismiss libertarians, in practice, I've tended to find it their first line of defense -- the right's version of "well, Marxism has never really been tried."

To some degree, you see it in Douthat's post, when he quotes Conor Friedersdorf lamenting "that libertarians hold very little power in this country." The reality is that the sort of incremental libertarianism that aligns with the interests of rich individuals and corporations has quite a lot of sway in Washington, but it routinely manages to escape the consequences of its ideas because, libertarians argue, the world we live in isn't the world they would've built, and so how can they be asked to answer for it? It's the "don't blame me. I voted for minarchy" defense.

But if the argument is that incremental libertarianism deserves more respect, then it also deserves more accountability. Desperate storytelling about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aside, the financial crisis was, in large part, the product of the idea that massive financial markets that we didn't understand would effectively regulate themselves. Alan Greenspan, perhaps the only man in America with the unilateral power to have prevented the blowup, has been quite clear on the flaw in his thinking: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder's equity — myself especially — are in a state of shocked disbelief."

To a first approximation, that was a failure of not just a crucial pillar of libertarian economic thought, but of libertarian practice: We spent the '90s not just deregulating, but much more dangerously, refusing to enact new regulations even as the financial system changed dramatically. One of the key players there was Sen. Phil Gramm, who certainly has his fans at the Cato Institute. His was the sort of libertarianism that is politically potent because it is backed by lots of money and lots of elites who combine to push it into the public discourse.

Taxes are another example. Plenty of libertarians have lined up for repeated tax cuts under the theory that they would stoke enough growth, and force enough compensatory budget cutting, to put the country on a more sustainable fiscal path. Plenty of wealthy individuals and firms have pumped a lot of money into propagating that theory and rewarding politicians who vote they way it asks them to. That theory, however, has been a disaster as a policy matter, even as the individuals and firms have made a lot of money.

And there's a lot of power, of course, lined up against anything that gets us close to single-payer health care. Most of the arguments made in that debate are fundamentally libertarian ones: that it will reduce freedom, or that government programs are inevitably bloated and wasteful ("Like going to the DMV? You'll love government health care!"). Cato's policy wonks spent much of 2009 on television arguing against reforms that would mean more government intrusion into the marketplace. Politicians and political organizations, meanwhile, received a lot of money and support in exchange for making those arguments. But it's of course true that America, being the developed country with the least nationalized health-care system, also spends the most and has the highest rate of uninsurance.

So when Douthat says that "a more-empowered libertarianism could have a salutary impact on debates over, say, the future of the entitlement system," it's worth asking what impact semi-empowered libertarianism has already had on debates over the entitlement system. That libertarian dreams of a privatized (or completely dismantled) Medicare system haven't come to pass is no more relevant than dreams of minarchy. What has come to pass is an aggressive and successful effort to stop America from following other countries' paths to national health-care systems. And the result can be seen here: If our costs had followed their costs, we'd have no budget deficit to speak of. Libertarians shouldn't have to answer for minarchy. But they do have to answer for that.

Weekly Pulse: GOP Plays Chicken with the Debt Ceiling

By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is calling for a "big showdown" over the upcoming vote to raise the nation's debt ceiling to $14.3 trillion from $13.9 trillion. The debt ceiling is simply the maximum amount the government can borrow.

Congress routinely raises the debt ceiling every year. It's common sense: Since the government has already pledged to increase spending, Congress must authorize additional borrowing. (Remember that the government is now forced to borrow billions of extra dollars to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, which Republicans insisted on.) If the ceiling isn't raised, the United States will be forced to default on its debts, with catastrophic consequences.

Why would default be catastrophic? The principle is the same for countries and consumers alike: If you have a good track record of paying your bills, lenders will lend you money at lower interest rates. If you don't pay your bills on time, or default on your obligations altogether, lenders will demand higher interest rates.

Congressional Republicans say they oppose raising the debt ceiling because they favor fiscal responsibility. This kind of rhetoric is the height of recklessness. The interest on our debts is a big part of government spending. Even idle talk about defaults could spook some creditors into raising interest rates on U.S. debt and cost taxpayers dearly.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly quotes Austan Goolsbee, chair of the White House's Council of Economic Advisers, who says that congressional GOP members are flirting with the "the first default in history caused purely by insanity."

Making work pay (for real)

An astonishing 80% of full-time minimum wage workers can't afford the necessities of life, according to new research by labor economist Jeannette Wicks-Lim of the Political Economy Research Institute, featured on the Real News Network.

Wicks-Lim argues for a two-part solution to the crisis of working poverty in America: i) raising the federal minimum wage to $12.30/hr from $7.50/hr; ii) Increasing the earned income tax credit to 40% of income. She estimates that these two policy changes would raise the income of a minimum wage worker from $15,000 to about $36,000 at a manageable cost to employers and taxpayers.

Her proposal is a revamp of President Bill Clinton's attempt to "reform" welfare by cutting social service benefits and shifting government spending to tax credits. Currently, the Earned Income Tax Credit is a subsidy for the working poor that is designed to "make work pay"--i.e., if workers aren't making enough in wages to secure a decent standard of living, the government provides an income subsidy to reward them for working.

However, if a decent standard of living remains out of reach for 80% of full-time minimum wage workers, Wicks-Lim argues that the minimum wage is too low and the subsidies are too modest to achieve the stated goal of making work pay.

Colorado minimum wage inches up

Speaking of minimum wage issues, Scot Kersgaard of the Colorado Independent reports that the minimum wage in the state ticked up from $7.25 an hour to $7.36 on January 1. The modest increase represents the annual adjustment for inflation. Every bit counts, but Colorado families are falling further behind. According to a new report by the Denver-based Bell Policy Center, 8.3% of working families in Colorado live below the federal poverty line, which is $22,050 for a family of four. Fully one-fourth of Colorado families do not earn enough to meet their basic needs, which requires an income approximately twice the FPL, according to the report.

Colorado is one of only 10 states that automatically adjust their minimum wages for inflation.

Wage theft epidemic

Unscrupulous employers are stealing untold millions of dollars from hardworking Americans, Dick Meister reports in AlterNet:

The cheating bosses don't take the money directly from their employees. No, nothing as obvious as that. The employers practice their thievery by underpaying workers, sometimes by paying them less than the legal minimum wage. Or they fail to pay employees extra for overtime work, or even force them to work for nothing before or after their regular work shifts or at other times. Some employers make illegal deductions from employee wages. And some withhold the final paycheck due employees who quit.

In New York City alone, an estimated $18 million worth of wages is stolen every week. Workers in the restaurant, construction, and retail sectors are at increased risk of wage theft. Wage thieves disproportionately target undocumented workers because they assume that these employees will be less likely to report the crime.

Debt collection from beyond the grave

The dead don't tell tales, but they have been known to sign debt collection papers, Andy Kroll reports in Mother Jones. Martha Kunkle died in 1995, but her printed name and signature appear on paperwork filed by the debt collection agency Portfolio Recovery Associates as late as 2006 and 2007. The ruse was discovered and PRA, facing a fraud lawsuit, agreed in 2008 that the "Kunkle's" documents couldn't be used in court. That didn't stop the agency from trying to use them again in 2009.

The attorney general of Missouri has announced that he will investigate whether any of Kunkle's handiwork was used to support debt collection in his state. The attorney general of Minnesota is already investigating whether debt collectors have used fraudulent paperwork in court.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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Thursday 6 January 2011

Making Money on Line

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