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Barry Finger's blog
Social Security and the 1%
| Barry Finger | October 17, 2011 |
New Politics’ co-editor, Betty Mandell, recently championed Social Security as a fundamental universal right rejecting any recourse to selectivity through means testing. This is the first line in any robust defense of this “entitlement,” the right to live in dignity with a modicum of comfort in retirement. What is upheld in this is the fundamental distinction between a social insurance program of deferred benefits and a social assistance program.
Jobs and Deficits: Obama Squares the Circle
| Barry Finger | September 10, 2011 |
President Obama outlined his new American Jobs Act before a packed Congress, more than half of whom believe the poor and jobless are undertaxed moochers and that the government does not create jobs. The Democrats will have their hands full.
Hyperactive Deficit Attention Disorder: the economic dyslexia of the Right
| Barry Finger | September 4, 2011 |
Many on the left find it difficult to understand the right wing arguments against countercyclical activity. And I suspect no source of clarification will originate among the knuckle dragging idiots contesting the field for the Republican presidential nomination. Their pronouncements are as exasperating as they are primitive and self-contradictory. But to understand the mindset of the modern reactionary—to impart to it a coherency that it normally cannot do on its own, one cannot avoid plumbing the depths of gold bug-ism.
The Economy Again in Crisis Mode
| Barry Finger | August 5, 2011 |
"Debt crisis: stock markets panic" was the first entry to the Guardian on line in the aftermath of the Dow's recent 4 percent rout. Bloomberg News noted that more than $4.5 trillion has been erased from the value of equities worldwide since July 26th. The Los Angeles Times headlined that "Global sell-off intensifies pressure on governments to stave off recession."
Once Again on Libya
| Barry Finger | April 11, 2011 |
The basic issue for socialists in confronting the Libyan situation is this: we wish Qaddafi to be defeated, but we are not indifferent to who defeats him. That is because who defeats Qaddafi involves how the regime is brought down and the consequences of that downfall. We are not in support of capitalist imperialism being the agent of that defeat, even though almost any conceivable regime that replaces Qaddafi would most likely be a “lesser evil” to this, one of the world’s most horrific police states.
Something Fishy about the Pew Report
| Barry Finger | March 3, 2011 |
Everyone knows that there's an enormous looming crisis of underfunded public pensions, a veritable ticking time bomb that will saddle every man, woman and child with insurmountable debt. We know this because, among other reasons, the widely respected Pew Center for the States published a study entitled, "The Trillion Dollar Gap." We know this because it echoes through the media -- print, internet or talking head. A Google search shows more than 29,000 results for this pairing.
Why Socialists Should be Deficit Hawks
| Barry Finger | October 24, 2010 |
Christina Romer, the former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, argues in today’s (October 24) New York Times that “Now Isn’t the Time to Cut the Deficit.” Her argument, which is unexceptional among liberal economists, is simply that “tax cuts and spending increases stimulate demand and raise output and employment; tax increases and spending cuts have the opposite effect.” This, she reassures her readership, is a “basic message of macroeconomics.”
A Rejoinder to the Monthly Review-Keynesian Debate
| Barry Finger | May 3, 2010 |
Monthly Review magazine, which long continues to have cache on the left—especially with regard to economic analysis—is currently hosting a debate on the so-called “Minksy moment.” MR, of course, long defends the view advanced in the 1960s by Paul Sweezy’s and Paul Baran’s book Monopoly Capital. In brief, that book advanced the thesis that the method of accumulation in modern capitalism differs significantly from its more competitive past due to significant changes in the level of concentration and centralization, that is because of the monopolization process itself.
How the Democrats Lost Control of Health Care
| Barry Finger | August 31, 2009 |
How far the debate has come from 1954, when President Truman called for the creation of a national health insurance fund to be run by the federal government!