I stumbled on this Bernie Sanders Alan Greenspan confrontation while hunting down, believe it or not, a Frida Kahlo video done by PBS. I found it worth watching, and some of you may also.
I'm bumping this because I think it will be sufficiently interesting to enough of you to warrant a bump.
First let me state my bias by saying that Greenspan's corpse should be swinging from a tree. He played a major role in facilitating the financial collapse, along with most of congress, both left and right. I don't disagree with a thing that Bernie said, with the exception that somehow raising the minimum wage would be a viable solution. Other than that he was and is right on the money. My problem with Mr. Sanders is that his solutions aren't going to work. There is no free anything, and that's especially true when we're talking about government programs. There is nothing, absolutely nothing more expensive than a free government program. Do the boardroom boyz deserve to have their asses handed to them? You bet. The question is how to do it without the miserable pricks bringing down the whole tent around us. They have all of us by the preverbal short hairs.
I share your opinion of Greenspan, though I'm OK with him just remaining out of the picture. I don't think he was qualified to be Fed chair when Nixon appointed him, but ironically he may have been well qualified by the time he stepped down. His on the job training was costly to the rest of us! I seems your opinion of Sanders proposals is widely shared. I respect that opinion, though the evidence against it being necessarily correct is strong. Of course there are no free programs. So to have a meaningful dialog on these issues, we have to move beyond that point and start the dialog at the point where we discuss how such a program might be paid for and what would be its benefits and disadvantages. Sanders has been explicit on how he would pay for the programs he proposes. It's covered on his website that I looked at sometime back. There are numerous examples where the programs Sanders has proposed appear to work fairly well to quite well. So when someone in the U.S. says Mr. Sanders solutions aren't going to work, I just assume what is meant is that in that person's opinion the U.S. is incapable of making them work. And that might very well be true. It is hard to argue against a reasonable guess. We may be the only developed country that can't provide adequate medical care to all its citizens, or the opportunity for education up to four years beyond high school without going into considerable debt. As I pointed out elsewhere, we are transforming ourselves from the nation envisioned by Roosevelt and nurtured by Eisenhower, who I believed would be shocked if he could see what's happened, into a radical, far right country approaching a fascist, militarized State -- really quite out of step with the rest of the developed world. We may indeed be incapable of puling off some of these things that other countries do well. In any case, it appears that only a minority want to try. Eventually, if enough articulate politicians such as Sanders keep hammering away at our intransigence, attitudes may change.
Wow, an unequivocal mea culpa from Greenspan. Do you think he removed all the pictures of Ayn Rand from his house?
Then you should be in complete agreement, because there are plausible arguments that higher minimum wages would not negatively affect employment and would likely have a net positive effect on the economy. And it's the right thing to do. If someone works full time at an honest job, then he or she should not be living below the poverty line. Take a moment and breathe that in. http://www.raisetheminimumwage.com/pages/job-loss http://robertreich.org/post/131476708345 http://www.alternet.org/economy/robert-reich-7-reasons-why-minimum-wage-should-be-raised-15-hour
You are one of the erudite guys here that realizes that Greenspan actually was very attracted to Ayn Rand "objectivism." It was obviously more than just a casual interest in his case. That , I believe, is one of the factors that helped underpin his belief in classical, economic equilibrium theory that turned out to be so faulty. Greenspan was the chief regulator, but ironically, being so firmly committed to Rand's philosophy, he did not believe in regulation. He thought, quite mistakenly as it turned out, that markets left alone will eventually return, harmlessly back to equilibrium. This is in dramatic contrast to Soros's views that markets have a natural tendency to move away from equilibrium and that they won't necessarily, harmlessly, and spontaneously return to equilibrium .
min wage jobs are not full time jobs. They cut them off at 38 hours so they don't have to pay overtime.
what is equilibrium? When I'm making good money and not paying too much in taxes I have all the equilibrium I want.
I don't disagree that someone doing an honest days work should not be living below the poverty line. However, there are some things to address in thinking that arbitrarily raising the minimum wage will bring these people out of poverty. First I don't think we can raise wages without having an impact on price of goods and services. Wages go up, price goes up. To believe otherwise denies reality. So what happens? The poverty line moves in tandem with that wage hike. Same people are still in poverty and this assumes that there will be no negative impact on the number of jobs. Secondly, we need to discuss what creates the poverty line itself. Is it just low wages? I don't think so. It's hidden inflation that we pretend doesn't exist. It's ridiculously high wages at the upper end of corporate America. It's inefficiency at all levels of business which causes price increase to cover that inefficiency. It's plain old greed, and yes, it's also plain old mis-management of the household budget by the working class. Add it all up and you have a broken system. There is no easy fix.