Neoliberalism, Brexit (and Bernie)

Doesn’t his “anyone” include voters? TPP is moving forward because most people don’t even know it exists. Let alone what its passage would mean.

insert Why-not-both? girl

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win for tribalism

Well, if you say so. But I don’t see that.

although we are still beating that dead horse flash with a stick

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Things are getting bad when Andrew Lloyd Webber is the answer.

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So it wasn’t that the Capitalist barrow boys in the City blew all the money on a series of financial adventures?

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They don’t actually care about the deficit. Bush started 2 wars and cut taxes at the same time. If I cared about no owing a ton of money, I certainly wouldn’t buy two mansions and then quit my job.

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True, however Flash is dying thanks to the additions of the video and canvas tags in HTML 5. Both of which (if I remember correctly) were WHATWG proposals added very late in the specification draft. It would be interesting to find out how WHATWG was able to upset the status quo of the W3C. I wonder if we could use those types of techniques to infiltrate and upset other markets. Allowing the market to still be a market but the outcomes benefitting a greater number of people. I could be wrong and the outcomes of my example were simply a happy byproduct of companies competing and there is nothing to learn.

My googling suggests that there IS a $15/hr minimum wage in the platform, along with a new Glass-Steagal act. TPP and Fracking (and Palestine occupation, apparently) are things that were debated - the “diversity of opinions” on the issue lead to the status quo prevailing in those cases, it seems. But that’s just a few local elections away from changing.

In theory, a universal basic income combined with small-business-friendly regulatory environments would produce an environment where the risk-taking of opening a new business was substantially less risky. I’ve personally got some confidence that if we give people food and a place to live and some basics of life, they’ll find ways to contribute more to the world, even if only in small ways. I’d rather not have to depend on large, multi-national corporations to ‘give’ us jobs - I’d prefer to see people finding a need in their community and filling it because they can and it brings them joy. OR because it’s something that needs to be done and so you get paid quite well if you’re willing and able to do it (things like garbage collection).

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This gives a lot of people too much credit. It appeared on paper to be beneficial to people who were willing to accept extremely simplistic analysis based on an obviously failed model of human decision-making. The only reason we trust economists at all is a collective unwillingness to face the regret of having been so stupid.

Pensions are not socialist redistribution. They are a ponzi scheme developed on the premise that the population will keep growing forever and interest rates will remain high. But then we went and lowered interest rates. That’s where the money went.

We largely can’t stand to watch people literally dying in the streets so we usually end up treating life-and-death emergencies regardless of ability to pay. That ends up meaning that providing free medical care before things get that bad saves money because emergency room visits are the most expensive way to deliver health services. Either medical care should be provided free to all (yes, including poor non-citizens) or we need to harden ourselves on the watching poor people die issue. The middle ground of not paying for doctor’s visits and then paying for emergency surgery after the gangrene has set is the “crap business model”. And if you are advocating for the latter option, just say so.

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The average government per capita spending for the top 20 OECD countries is c. $16000 pa ranging from c. $11000 in the US (close to the bottom) to c. $40000 pa in Norway (at the top). There is a considerable amount of activity requiring complex organisation and long-term commitment on the part of individuals which cannot or should not be provided by multinational corporations or the self-employed or small businesses. Garbage collection is at one extreme but medicine might be at the other where skills need constantly to be developed to remain relevant. Just because people work to earn money doesn’t mean they don’t also work to benefit others. A universal income in and of itself doesn’t remove the stigma of unemployment. I’d be quite happy for some people to do no work at all, if that’s what they want, as long as they are not stigmatised and do not suffer exclusion and inequality of outcome from inequality of income.

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The United Kingdom was going to die at some time anyway.

Which is scarier, the death of the UK or an independent England?

@Daedalus

The convention isn’t till July 25. So there isn’t really a current national DNC Platform for about a month. And whatever suggestions might be on the table, actual debate and decisions do no start until the convention does.

Whatever they passed last time still technically holds. And the state parties have separate and different platforms from the national party. Apart from that the platform does not really matter all that much. Conceptually its the list of policies the party plans to push for the next 4 years. But in practice its more of an internal bureaucratic process for placating or binding various groups and interests internal to the party. Noone really cares about the platform, its entirely non-binding, usually quite vague, and seldom used for anything. The GOP have done slightly more with it over the past few cycles than the DNC. Using it as a sort of PR campaign, and by the Tea Party to shame and attack things they dislike (like critical thinking, brown people, other GOP members, and separation of Church and State). For all the noise about the DNC platform this year, I wonder if anyone who gives it so much weight can state what was in the 2012 platform without looking it up.

There’s no reason that couldn’t shake out now. But there’s also no reason that that impetus would do anything to change the economic damage that’s already started or how severe it will be going forward. And neither would it change the negative effects on those parts of the UK that voted to remain and now must involuntarily leave. Nor would it effect the the negative effects on other nations that will result. Particularly The Republic of Ireland. The UK is their largest export market and trading partner. A huge portion of Ireland’s economy is based on foreign business looking for access to the UK and the EU. And in terms of NI all of the greater cooperation and involvement of the Republic in that comes via EU routes. As does the open border and free movement of people within Ireland as a whole. Whatever the impetus behind an exit, and whatever approach they take coming out. All of that is gone, or at least significantly at risk until the UK exits and new agreements of a thousand different sorts can be hammered out. Which is a process that typically takes years to decades.

So how much does your social security system owe for pensions?

Present value only, for past contributions only

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Correct.

So why engage in policies where that is the long term outcome?

How does interest rates affect the state pension systems?

With no assets you can assume any rate you want. Heck, you could even assume you had invested in apple shares.

Zero assets at whatever rate you want means your future assets are zero.

The money was redistributed along socialist lines.

The ponzi bit comes because they went down the same route as Bernie Madoff and his accounting. Namely leaving how much the socialist welfare state owes.

Can’t be capitalist - no capital.
Can’t be neoliberal - predates that
The money was redistributed - socialism.

So the obvious question, I guess you’re in the US. How much does your social security system owe?

In the UK, the crash was caused by people not paying their debts. Same as any other banking crisis.

The bail out cash has all been repaid in full at penal rates.

That leaves Gordon Brown’s share trading. Went as well as his gold sales.

But which people was it not paying their debts, and who allowed those debts to accumulate in the first place?

Canada’s CPP has $278.9B in assets. UK State pension has over £30B. Social Security in the US has $2.8T-ish in assets. If you think pensions have no assets then you don’t know how pensions work.

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I don’t believe in that damage. None of the scenarios depict have to come to pass. Now is the time for negotiations. The immense economical damage everyone’s threatening is Project Fear, and all it does is, ultimately, drive away Remain voters.

Project Fear also worked very badly in the Scottish independence referendum, where the unionists nearly won, but due to their fearmongering and lies about “devo max” won the worst possible victory, ensuring independence will happen next time around. Could we move on to something substantial, please.