May 2009
12 posts
The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American...
Symbolic analysts have been hit by the current downturn, just as everyone else has. But over the long term, symbolic analysts will do just fine – as long as they stay away from job functions that are becoming routinized. They will continue to benefit from economic change. Computer technology gives them more tools for thinking, creating and communicating. The global market gives them more potential...
The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American...
What’s the Administration’s specific aim in bailing out GM? I’ll give you my theory later. For now, though, some background. First and most broadly, it doesn’t make sense for America to try to maintain or enlarge manufacturing as a portion of the economy. Even if the U.S. were to seal its borders and bar any manufactured goods from coming in from abroad—something I...
Sotomayor and the Republicans
Put on your seatbelts. Many Republicans have been itching for this fight. They figure if they can make Sonia Sotomayor appear “too liberal,” “too activist,” or “intemperate” — and cause Obama to withdraw her nomination, or if they can defeat her outright — they can slow the Obamomentum that’s leading to universal health care, cap-and-trade,...
The Only Sure Way to Fund Universal Health Care
During the presidential campaign, I thought Obama made only one big policy mistake. He criticized John McCain for proposing to tax all employer-provided health benefits. McCain’s overall health plan was regressive – he would have turned the savings into tax credits for purchasing health care – but he was right about where the revenues should come from. I worried that Obama would come to regret the...
A Modest Plan For Paying College Costs
I’m just about to head off to a commencement here at U Cal Berkeley. The news that keeps banging around in my head is that the state has just announced a whopping 9 percent increase in fees for next academic year, the third fee increase in three years. The average young person now graduating from college anywhere in America has to repay almost $22,000 of student loans. That’s a record,...
What Industrial Policy Should Be
America now has a full-blown industrial policy. But it’s an odd one — a combination of lemon socialism and taxpayer-financed regulation. Consider GM and Chysler. To what purpose are our taxpayer dollars being put as we bail them out? Apparently only to help them survive, even as pale shadows of their former selves. Steve Rattner, the Administration’s auto expert, explained last...
The Health Care Cave-In
“Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the better” is a favorite slogan in Washington because compromise is necessary to get anything done. But the way things are going with health care, a better admonition would be: “Don’t give away the store.” Many experts have long agreed that a so-called “single-payer” plan is the ideal, because competition among...
The Truth Behind the Social Security and Medicare...
What are we to make of yesterday’s report from the trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds that Social Security will run out of assets in 2037, four years sooner than previously forecast, and Medicare’s hospital fund will be exhausted by 2017, two years earlier than predicted a year ago? Reports of these two funds’ demise are not new. Fifteen years ago, when I was a...
Obama on Health Reform: The Dog That Didn't Bark
The only troubling thing about the President’s statements today concerning health care reform was what he did not say: that he wanted a any health plan that emerges from Congress to include a public insurance option for Americans who do not want to buy private insurance. But without this option, there will be no pressure on private insurers to adopt all the other reforms to control costs or...
What Will Happen to Banks that Fail the Stress...
The outcome of the “stress tests” will be that the banks needing extra capital will get it from the Treasury. But where will the money come from, now that the TARP fund is almost exhausted and Congress is dead set against providing more bank bailout money? The Treasury will simply swap debt for equity – turning what the banks owe the government into shares of stock in the banks....
Obama and Pragmatism: Thinking Through Values
I keep hearing the White House staff describe the President as a pragmatist. David Axelrod, one of his chief advisors whom I admire enormously, recently called him a “ruthless pragmatist.” Soon, I expect, he’ll be called a “take-no-prisoners pragmatist,” or perhaps a “remorseless, merciless, and unrelenting pragmatist.” I’m relieved the President is a...
Why Obama is Taking on Corporate Tax Havens
Why, one may ask, is Obama taking on yet another huge fight by taking aim at foreign tax havens? Yes, it’s unfair that multinationals pay an average tax rate of only 2 percent on their foreign revenues, and it’s unfair that some wealthy Americans are avoiding taxes altogether by parking their fortunes abroad. But, hey, these have been true for decades. So why take them on now, when the...
