Green New Deal

[mspohr]

How Not to Create Jobs Opinion | How Not to Create Jobs

This was more or less what economists who have been studying the issue expected to see. There have been huge swings in the size of the unemployment supplement since the pandemic began, from nothing to $600 a week, then back to nothing, then back to $300 a week. Those swings didn’t seem to have much effect on employment. For example, a study by Peter Ganong and co-authors that used detailed individual data found some effect of unemployment benefits on the rate at which unemployed workers found jobs, but this effect was small.

Well, conservatives always seem to believe that social programs severely reduce the incentive to work, that we’re becoming a “Nation of Takers” in which low earners are better off living on the dole. In most cases the disincentives created by social programs are, in fact, much smaller than people on the right tend to claim, but that fact probably hasn’t gotten through.

So the evidence that cutting off unemployment benefits has produced a lot of pain for very little gain — another recent study, by Arindrajit Dube and co-authors, finds that only one of every eight people losing benefits found a new job, and that earnings made up for only seven percent of the lost benefits — probably won’t cause any regrets among those responsible. The pain isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

 

[mspohr]

The death of the job

What if paid work were no longer the centerpiece of American life?

www.vox.com

Once upon a time, there were good jobs. These jobs paid people enough money to live on, even enough to support a family. They provided health insurance so people could go to a doctor if they got sick. They even came with pensions so that once you’d worked for a certain number of years, you could actually stop working. You could rest.

But the pandemic has also been a turning point for many workers, leading them to reevaluate their jobs in the face of new dangers — or a realignment of priorities brought on by a once-in-a-lifetime public health disaster. Indeed, the pandemic has led to record numbers of people quitting their jobs — 4 million this April alone, a phenomenon so widespread it’s been called the Great Resignation.

But some experts have proposed bigger changes to decouple jobs from Americans’ most basic needs. A team at the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy has proposed a guaranteed annual income of $12,500 per adult and $4,500 per child, phasing out at the national median income. Giving people money is “the most direct and parsimonious way to eliminate poverty,” Darrick Hamilton, the director of the institute and one of the authors of the plan, told Vox.

The plan isn’t meant to put an end to jobs — it should actually be coupled, Hamilton said, with a federal job guarantee. People would still work; some research shows that providing people with a basic income actually increases employment. But they would have more power to demand fair conditions or to quit an abusive job and find a better one because they would have a basic safety net in place. The plan would give workers “authentic agency,” Hamilton said, something that’s lacking in a system where poverty leaves millions of Americans — disproportionately people of color and women — vulnerable to exploitation.

 

[juliusa]

Nancy Pelosi delays vote on infrastructure bill. This is the "largest investment in clean energy transmission and EV infrastructure in history; electrifying thousands of school and transit buses across the country; and creating a new Grid Deployment Authority to build a clean, 21st century electric grid" according to the White House.

House votes to advance Biden's jobs and infrastructure plans, breaking logjam

To tame a rebellion from centrist holdouts, Democratic leaders offered a Sept. 27 deadline to vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[jimm01]

The death of the job

What if paid work were no longer the centerpiece of American life?

www.vox.com

Once upon a time, there were good jobs. These jobs paid people enough money to live on, even enough to support a family. They provided health insurance so people could go to a doctor if they got sick. They even came with pensions so that once you’d worked for a certain number of years, you could actually stop working. You could rest.

But the pandemic has also been a turning point for many workers, leading them to reevaluate their jobs in the face of new dangers — or a realignment of priorities brought on by a once-in-a-lifetime public health disaster. Indeed, the pandemic has led to record numbers of people quitting their jobs — 4 million this April alone, a phenomenon so widespread it’s been called the Great Resignation.

But some experts have proposed bigger changes to decouple jobs from Americans’ most basic needs. A team at the New School’s Institute on Race and Political Economy has proposed a guaranteed annual income of $12,500 per adult and $4,500 per child, phasing out at the national median income. Giving people money is “the most direct and parsimonious way to eliminate poverty,” Darrick Hamilton, the director of the institute and one of the authors of the plan, told Vox.

The plan isn’t meant to put an end to jobs — it should actually be coupled, Hamilton said, with a federal job guarantee. People would still work; some research shows that providing people with a basic income actually increases employment. But they would have more power to demand fair conditions or to quit an abusive job and find a better one because they would have a basic safety net in place. The plan would give workers “authentic agency,” Hamilton said, something that’s lacking in a system where poverty leaves millions of Americans — disproportionately people of color and women — vulnerable to exploitation.

“What do you expect?" he said. "For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men-and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful any more. Their whole culture's been shot to hell.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

 

[jimm01]

We call it “greenwashing,” but that’s too technical a term. We should call it what it is: people with a vested interest are learning how to slow-walk this crisis. They’ve done it with a thousand other crises, too, of course—one thinks of how, following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, segregationists managed to delay action for a decade or more, focussing on a single phrase in the decision: “with all deliberate speed.” But here they’re doing it in the face of an absolute deadline imposed by science. As the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made clear, we must cut emissions in half by 2030 or our chances of meeting the targets that we set in Paris just six years ago fall by the wayside. Slow-walking is sabotage—smiling, and deadly.

And, in the course of that slow-walking, Big Oil is figuring out how to game the system in every way possible: as Inside Climate News recently reported, energy companies and their lobbyists are filling the infrastructure bill with billions of dollars for carbon-sequestration projects—essentially, getting taxpayers to fund equipment to capture the climate-destroying gases that Big Oil’s products emit. That’s absurd: it would be much cheaper to simply shut down those power plants and build out solar and wind power instead. But, for the fossil-fuel industry, preservation of the business model is paramount—they want to burn the stuff they own, no matter the consequences. The Biden Administration is caught in a very hard place: the White House is sincerely trying to accelerate climate action, but to do so it has to get past industry allies in the Democratic Party (Joe Manchin, for instance, who fears that we’re “going to the EV” too fast), not to mention a business-friendly judiciary, which has, for instance, blocked Biden’s plans to stop new drilling leases on federal lands. That’s why, one guesses, you get leaders who know better, like the domestic-climate czar, Gina McCarthy, repeating old bromides about “all of the above” energy supply, or ignoring the increasingly bitter protests over follies like the Line 3 tar-sands pipeline, which runs through Minnesota.

Slow-Walking the Climate Crisis

“Greenwashing” is too kind a term; this is more like careful sabotage.

www.newyorker.com

 

[navguy12]

not to mention a business-friendly judiciary,

Nothing changes...

I've been reading this book:

https://www.amazon.ca/Three-Roosevelts-Patrician-Leaders-Transformed-ebook/dp/B004I6DD0G/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+three+roosevelts&qid=1572637753&sr=8-1

...and over 110 years ago, Teddy Roosevelt (as quoted in this book) was being frustrated with that exact same issue...amongst other issues from vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

 

[mspohr]

The Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?

The comedian Bill Maher once noted that the United Nations’ annual world happiness rankings were led by “socialist-friendly” countries like Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada, asking: “If socialism is such a one-way ticket to becoming the nightmare of Venezuela, then why do all the happiest countries in the world embrace it?”


Even within the US, it can be argued that the publicly funded elements of education, healthcare, media, transport and welfare – including a new child tax credit that aims to cut child poverty in half – are inspired by socialism. Yet the ideology is still used as a bogeyman by Republicans and rightwing media who point to the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries to warn that it would destroy America. Bridge responds: “I’m not an expert on any of those places but we don’t need to look to those examples as failures; we can look in our own country for successes like the Bank of North Dakota. They are able to have really fantastic public schools and universities and libraries and their infrastructure is really strong because there’s no private interest taking the money out and the people get to have a say in how that money is invested.


“I think capitalism and democracy are incompatible. When you have more money, you use your wealth to help write the laws and legislation and put in judges and politicians that are going to protect your interests, and so it becomes a vicious cycle.”

 

[jimm01]

From 2012 but worth reading.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

Opinion | The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent (Published 2012)

The top 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society.

www.nytimes.com

 

[mspohr]

From 2012 but worth reading.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

Opinion | The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent (Published 2012)

The top 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society.

www.nytimes.com

Insight from Karl Marx

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

 

[mspohr]

Western economies can’t return to ‘business as usual’ after the pandemic | Michael Jacobs

As western economies emerge from the pandemic, their governments face a choice: do they seek to address the profound problems that Covid exposed, or try to return to “business as usual” as quickly as possible? Their problem is that many of the issues exacerbated by the pandemic, such as wage stagnation, precarious work and rising inequality are not bugs in an otherwise well-functioning system, but inevitable outcomes of the way that western economies are now organised. So a business-as-usual approach simply won’t work. Much more fundamental change is needed.

The US government seems to recognise this. Joe Biden’s economic plans are a radical departure from the era that stretches from Reagan to Obama, when governments sought to keep taxes and public spending low and focused principally on globalised trade and the education and training of the workforce. Unlike his predecessors, Biden is pursuing large-scale public spending and taking advantage of ultra-low interest rates to borrow for infrastructure investment. His stimulus plans target the climate crisis while creating green jobs and expanding health, education and childcare – the “social infrastructure” that is essential to the economy but has often been ignored by mainstream economists.

The 2008 global crash demonstrated that a new form of capitalism dominated by finance had become deeply unstable. This was followed by long years of austerity and slow growth, stagnating wages, stalling productivity and extreme inequality. Meanwhile, climate and environmental breakdown threatens catastrophe for even the richest economies. Grappling with these problems, a growing number of economists have explicitly rejected the orthodoxy of free markets and hands-off government that has dominated western economic policy over the past 40 years.

Economic thinking is shifting in response to the climate and nature crises. It is no longer sufficient to use a few market-based environmental taxes and product regulations. To achieve net-zero emissions, the whole economy needs to be geared towards these goals. At the same time an active industrial strategy is needed to support greener technologies and consumption patterns, with job creation programmes for workers and communities adversely affected by the green transition.

 

[nwdiver]

I hope folks like paying 10 bucks for a gallon of gas.

What is a 'gallon of gas' and why would I want to buy it?

 

[h2ofun]

What is a 'gallon of gas' and why would I want to buy it?

You, your call. Me, yep, no way there is ANY ROI to buy an EV!

 

[nwdiver]

You, your call. Me, yep, no way there is ANY ROI to buy an EV!

Even when a 'gallon of gas' is 10 bucks?

 

[h2ofun]

Even when a 'gallon of gas' is 10 bucks?

Lets see, if I were to drive 10000 miles a year, at 20 miles per gallon, thats 500 gallons of gas. So at 10 bucks, thats 5000 per year. What is the cheapest EV? Extra insurance cost Now in my case I have a 1990 with 120K miles, and I drive like 1500 miles a year. So, show me how you would invest in this ROI?

 

[Merrill]

You know there is more to driving an EV than saving money.

 

[nwdiver]

What is the cheapest EV? Extra insurance cost

Here's one for ~$13k and I doubt there would be any extra insurance cost over a vehicle that requires fools fuel. So that would be a ~3 year payback....

 

[h2ofun]

Here's one for ~$13k and I doubt there would be any extra insurance cost over a vehicle that requires fools fuel. So that would be a ~3 year payback....

View attachment 703831

No thanks, a death trap. I am a mini van family man. Again, with paying so little for gas, even that price is a long ROI

 

[nwdiver]

Again, with paying so little for gas, even that price is a long ROI

Definitely need $15/gal for gas then

Anyone dumb enough to keep causing so much damage deserves to get fleeced.

 

[David_Cary]

Your thinking that a Leaf is a death trap compared to a 1990 minivan is mostly irrational.
That being said, I support your decision to keep it. Definitely the best environmental choice for your unique situation.

 

[jimm01]

Definitely need $15/gal for gas then

Anyone dumb enough to keep causing so much damage deserves to get fleeced.

When it comes to tax-advantaged investments for wealthy or sophisticated investors, one commodity continues to stand alone above all others: oil. With the U.S. government's backing, domestic energy production has created a litany of tax incentives for both investors and small producers, and oil is no exception.

Oil: A big investment with big tax breaks

Oil and gas investments can provide unmatched tax deduction potential for accredited investors.

www.investopedia.com

Then there’s the environmental cost we all pay for no matter what. And potentially there are other costs:

Air pollution linked to more severe mental illness – study

Exclusive: research finds small rise in exposure to air pollution leads to higher risk of needing treatment

www.theguardian.com