Indeed where were the liberal economists when seniors were being cheated out of their cost of living adjustments? Where were they when Bush trotted out gains that were losses in GDP? Besides Dean Baker who brought these changes to the attention of the left economists agenda, where were they?

And now, even Baker is on the Globalization kick. More trade is fine, as long as we punish the professionals and patent holders, as long as we advocate for environmental and labor protections that won't be monitored or enforced.

We can either use tariffs to keep jobs, add jobs, increase our tax base , strengthen our dollar and pay down debt ...

or

Stay the course and lose even more jobs, lose our tax base and watch our dollar crash down around us.

When will liberal economists advocate for real people instead of utopian crap?

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I like Kevin Philips, but he better rethink this one. He says that conservative economics get it wrong because they think that only money supply expansion can cause inflation. OK, just what does he think is causing this inflation? The Tooth Fairy? Monetary expansion is the definition of inflation. (Only money supply can "inflate" or expand like a ballon. That's what the word means. Prices cannnot.)

In fact, the reason the Fed stopped reporting M3 money supply figures is due to the wild expansion of those numbers to double digit rates. MZM (money at zero maturity) is also growing substantially. The money supply, both in the US and abroad, is all that you need to focus on to see where prices will eventually go.

It’s good that someone in the mainstream media is finally attacking this bunk from Washington, but his theories need some tweeking.

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Only an economist would put forth the idea that a fictional string of numbers, or the serial numbers on federal reserve notes, should have more value than a bushel of wheat or an acre of land. That's just the start of their break from reality.

Any economist that claims that the levels of inflation, unemployment, or education in the US are reasonable and sustainable (most) is crackers. Inflation in housing, food and health care, stuff you have to have, has exceeded wage growth since 2000 for almost everybody earning under $70K yearly. Meanwhile real jobs, full time jobs that you can raise a family on, are thin on the ground.

The repeated mantra that the "Free Market" rewards the efficient distribution of resources is belied by homeless people that sit at the very foot of Wall Street while empty houses are destroyed for the salvage value of the copper inside.

"Free Market" economics just means that the families that send their kids to Brown and Harvard on C grades get first crack at the candy bowl. Then they go and trade candy with similiar inside game families in other countries and pretend they got their positions by "merit." Could somebody please explain the merit of keeping an executive team at GM that loses a billion dollars a month? By any reasonable standard they would be lined up against a wall and shot and the remains used for bio-diesel and bone meal fertilizer.

Any reasonable civil engineer or soil scientist will tell you that economsts regularly make statements that are flatly impossible on the physical world level. Why we keep pretending they are making any sense is a mystery to me.

The truth is that we have crashed the biological supports for human life on this planet. We've emptied the oceans of fish. We've cut down and degraded the forests. We've destroyed the best farmland and paved it over for our suburbs. Worst of all we've cranked up the thermostat on our atmosphere.

The economists will keep getting on TV and telling you that you aren't hungry, sick, too cold in the winter and way too hot in the summer. Get used to it.

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Perhaps those money mangers would have different view of CPI increases of less than 3 percent if THEIR wage increase were limited to that figure .
I think that all Seniors should storm the Halls of Congress if they try to tell us that our cost of living Increase next year will be as paltry as these guys indicate . I saw a show on rising Food prices Flour up 48% , eggs up 24% , Milk up the same 24% . We are all aware of the enormous increase in the price of gasoline and Home Heating Oil . These ripple through the economy driving up ALL prices .The insanity of Ethanol which has caused corn to be much more expensive and actually costs more energy to create than it produces is ample proof of the Irationale Economic Behavior that
exists in this country . We have had 40 years of politicians talking about weaning us from our dependence on oil and NOTHING to show for it EXCEPT big Oils RECORD profits .

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Like other economic realists, Phillips is thrust ever closer to the classic Hobson’s Choice. He can acknowledge that capitalism is the ultimate pyramid scheme, which would provoke the ruling class to instant retaliation of such magnitude he would be silenced forever. Or he can continue to serve our ruling-class masters -- maintaining the myth that capitalism is an ultimate good that needs only reformation -- this in the hope he will be allowed to redeem himself, at least in his own eyes, by disclosing occasional tidbits of truth. A writer and former journalist myself -- my heresies banished me from the mainstream press decades ago -- I fully understand the dilemma. One either obeys the Propaganda Lords and dutifully whores for the Barons of Big Business, or one commits professional suicide, which -- in today’s U.S.A. (with its deliberate policy of socioeconomic cleansing by the euthanasia of deprivation and neglect) -- typically guarantees one a lonely, miserable death.

Therefore I applaud the courage of Phillips’ disclosures -- though the reality is probably far worse than he dares portray. For example, living in the Pacific Northwest and thus paying the highest grocery prices in the contiguous United States, my own grocery bill has increased nearly 70 percent in the past year (April 2007 through April 2008). That includes such genuine (and genuinely infuriating) shockers as a 100-percent increase in the price of toilet paper, a 63-percent increase in the price of quality bread and a 40-percent increase in the price of dairy products. Of course it is the skyrocketing cost of gasoline and diesel, itself up nearly 50 percent, that is driving all this other inflation and -- to the diabolical glee of the Decider and his henchmen -- fattening the bank accounts of the ruling class even as it thrusts the rest of us ever deeper into the cesspool of abject poverty.

As someone reasonably versed in history, I understand too well what is happening. Even so, I watch it with a horror unlike anything I have felt in all my 68 years, a horror many times intensified by the fact I recognize I am powerlessness to defend myself against what is being done to me. But the old Kübler-Ross mechanism of death and dying applies as much to the nation as to the individual: hence a dawning, unspeakably bitter acceptance the United States is over. The flag of course will live on, but the nation itself is finished as anything more than a collection of forcibly gentrified enclaves of plutocracy (think post-Katrina New Orleans) sustained by a continent-sized sweatshop -- the latter complete with characteristic goon-squads and deliberately murderous prisons. It should surprise no one a defining mark of our era is that we elderly folk are damned as subversive merely because we remember better times.

Though I will vote for Obama, I will do so knowing the forthcoming election will alter nothing beyond the vocabulary of our subjugation. Whether we are overseen by Democrats or Republicans, the poverty and degradation so inflicted is inescapable. It is inescapable because -- given the death of the both the Communist Manifesto and the American Dream -- it is obvious there are no remaining alternatives to the master/slave tyranny that has been the human norm since the ancient matriarchies were overthrown thousands of years ago. Thus our species’ 300-year flirtation with liberty has clearly ended. Thus too the economic hardships we are now experiencing will only worsen as the oil runs out, as terminal climate change intensifies and, most of all, as the neo-manorial aristocracy becomes ever more savage in its quest for self-preservation -- the common thread that unites all U.S. socioeconomic policies since the advent of Nixon. I thank whatever deities may exist I have not that many more years of life remaining.

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In order for an economy to function well healthy workers must be able to buy what the economy produces.Duh!!!!!!!!!

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