Bank of America tries to seize widow's home while forgetting to mention that her loan was insured

by Walter Einenkel

Laura Coleman Biggs and her experience with Bank of America is absolutely criminal. When her husband George Mitchell passed away, 12 years ago this month, Ms. Biggs continued paying off her mortgage.

George “Kenny” Mitchell had taken out a special lender-pushed insurance policy to pay off most of his loan if he died.

But when he passed away on April 26, 2003, the subsidiary of Charlotte-based Bank of America did not arrange a payoff of the $100,000 policy and continued to charge his widow an insurance premium every month along with her mortgage payment.

Richard Eskow: Social Security Trust – or, Never Lend Money to a Conservative

Never lend money to a conservative. That’s one conclusion to be drawn from recent attacks on Social Security by Bloomberg View columnists Megan McArdle and Ramesh Ponnuru. Apparently promises, even legally executed ones, don’t mean much to their crowd.

McArdle recently expended 1249 words attempting to evade the government’s debt to the Social Security Trust Fund, never really getting much beyond the five-word assertion that “the trust fund isn’t real.” Ponnuru tried to argue that a cut isn’t really a cut.

Dean Baker: A Simple Progressive Economic Agenda for Hillary Clinton (or Anyone Else)

In the week since Secretary Clinton announced she is entering the presidential race there have been numerous stories asking about the agenda she will adopt in her campaign. In her announcement video, she indicated she wanted to be a champion for the average worker against the wealthy.

While many policies will be needed to improve the situation of the poor and middle class, there are three simple ones that could make a big difference: a more competitive dollar, a Federal Reserve Board committed to full employment and a financial transactions tax to rein in Wall Street. If Clinton or any other presidential candidate wants to level the playing field, these policies would be a great place to start.

The Big Cheat: Why Teachers Are Going to Prison While Charter School Operators Get Accolades

By Jeff Bryant

No one likes a cheater.

So you’d think plenty of people would be pleased to hear that educators in Atlanta, on trial for cheating on standardized tests, were found guilty of those charges and sentenced “harshly,” according to the New York Times.

As CNN reports, of the 12 educators who went on trial for “inflating test scores of children from struggling schools,” 11 were convicted of racketeering—a crime normally associated with mob bosses—and other lesser crimes. Of those who have been sentenced so far (one sentencing has been postponed), eight have been given jail or prison time and three will serve at least seven years. Only those who admitted guilt and waived appeals were spared.

Paul Krugman: Greece on the Brink

“Don’t you think they want us to fail?” That’s the question I kept hearing during a brief but intense visit to Athens. My answer was that there is no “they” — that Greece does not, in fact, face a solid bloc of implacable creditors who would rather see default and exit from the euro than let a leftist government succeed, that there’s more good will on the other side of the table than many Greeks suppose.

But you can understand why Greeks see things that way. And I came away from the visit fearing that Greece and Europe may suffer a terrible accident, an unnecessary rupture that will cast long shadows over the future.

The TPP: Toward Absolutist Capitalism

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Lambert Strether

There are many excellent arguments against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), two of which — local zoning over-rides, and loss of national sovereignty — I’ll briefly review as stepping stones to the main topic of the post: Absolutist Capitalism, for which I make two claims:

1) The TPP implies a form of absolute rule, a tyranny as James Madison would have understood the term, and

2) The TPP enshrines capitalization as a principle of jurisprudence.

Zoning over-rides and lost of national sovereignty may seem controversial to the political class, but these two last points may seem controversial even to NC readers. However, I hope to show both points follow easily from the arguments with which we are already familiar. Both flow from the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, of which I will now give two examples.

Republicans who limit what medical students can learn doom us to stupid doctors

Some legislators want to keep women from having abortions by prohibiting anyone from teaching doctors how to perform one

Jessica Valenti

Most people expect their physicians to be smart – skillful, schooled and, perhaps above all else, knowledgable. So it’s somewhat baffling (and entirely infuriating) that some Republicans want to keep important medical knowledge from soon-to-be doctors.

A North Carolina bill introduced this month would prevent state medical school departments from allowing employees to perform abortions or to “supervise the performance of an abortion”. Essentially, the bill’s sponsors and supporters wants to make teaching how to perform an abortion – a safe, legal and necessary medical procedure – illegal. As The New Republic’s Jamil Smith wrote, if passed, the bill would “produce less intelligent doctors.”

The Ivy League’s favorite war criminal: Why the atrocities of Henry Kissinger should be mandatory reading

In an appearance at Yale last week, the Nixon official's horrific record was casually glossed over. But why?

Omer Aziz

Ex-government officials have always occupied a particular sweet spot for members the Ivy League. Regardless of what one did while in power, regardless of how disreputable or immoral or even criminal one’s actions, the elite academy has been all too willing to embrace even the most dubious of former officials.

So it was that last Friday night, Henry Kissinger spoke at Yale — to which he has donated an archive of personal documents, where he occasionally participates in a course with Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, and where he give an invite-only talk just a year ago. Last week’s “conversation” was moderated by Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, who is also Henry Kissinger’s official biographer. As if to underscore the incestuous insider game on display, sitting in the third row was Paul Bremer, the “Administrator” of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, the man who de-Baathified the country, threw millions of people out of work, and helped destroy the Iraqi state, which spurred the insurgency, the Sunni-Shia civil war, and later the transmogrification of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia into the Islamic State. A record to proudly burnish in and around Yale University.

Cities And States Paying Massive Secret Fees To Wall Street: Report

By David Sirota, Matthew Cunningham-Cook

California’s report said $440 million. New Jersey’s said $600 million. In Pennsylvania, the tally is $700 million. Those figures are public worker pension fees being paid annually by taxpayers to Wall Street firms, and they have kicked off an intensifying debate over whether such expenses are necessary. Now, a report from an industry-friendly source says those huge levies represent only a fraction of the true amounts being raked in by Wall Street firms from state and local governments.

In all, CEM Benchmarking concludes that America’s public pension funds are paying billions of dollars in undisclosed fees to private equity firms.

A call to US educators: Learn from Canada

Ontario has taken a cooperative road to education reform

Boston College

CHICAGO, IL (April 18, 2015) - As states and the federal government in the U.S. continue to clash on the best ways to improve American education, Canada's Province of Ontario manages successful education reform initiatives that are equal parts cooperation and experimentation, according to a Boston College professor and authority on educational change.

"Although there have been battles in the past, the hallmarks of Ontario's education reform efforts are cooperation and experimentation - with an emphasis on cooperation," said Lynch School of Education Professor Dennis Shirley. "Ontario has struck the right balance. Unfortunately, in the U.S., we squander a lot of energy by fighting with each other. Instead, we should be pulling together to do the real work of improving teaching and learning."

Elizabeth Warren: The Unfinished Business of Financial Reform

Remarks at the Levy Institute’s 24th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, As Prepared for Delivery

Thank you all for being here today.

We’re here to ask a critical question at a critical time: what are we to make of Dodd-Frank five years later? To answer that question, I think we should start by looking at how the government responded to the last major financial crisis – the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

After the 1929 crash, policymakers diagnosed what had gone wrong and changed the laws to make sure that excessive speculation and risk-taking on Wall Street couldn’t push the economy over a cliff.

The great American voting scam: How political insiders are gaining the power to steal our elections

If you thought the 2000 election debacle was bad, just wait until we have online voting

Brad Friedman, The Brad Blog

BRAD BLOG reader “Plumb Bob” left this comment recently, following our short piece on concerns about the results of last week’s Mayoral race in Chicago:

This alleged rigging of a lottery drawing reported today: http://arstechnica.com/t…to-score-winning-ticket/So if one guy can do it with all the security measures (and lottery dollars are government money) and only get caught because he can’t figure out how to cash the ticket…He did this for a measly $14 mil; what’s a state wide or national election worth? Either in dollars for the mercenary, or in effort for the true believers?

Explain again how electronic voting is secure? This sure looks like a contrary proof to me.

New investigation reveals 3.4m displaced by World Bank

By Sasha Chavkin and Michael Hudson, April 16, 2015, 12:00 am

The World Bank regularly fails to enforce its own rules protecting people in the path of the projects it bankrolls, with devastating consequences for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet, a new investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Huffington Post and more than 20 other media partners have found.

Dams, power plants and other projects sponsored by the World Bank have pushed millions of people out of their homes or off their lands or threatened their livelihoods, the investigation found.

Anti-Choicers Are Going to Take Away Second-Trimester Abortion Without Much Notice

by Amanda Marcotte

Kansas and Oklahoma, both of which have passed laws banning the dilation and evacuation (D and E) procedure that is used in most abortions after 13 weeks, have graduated to a new level in their efforts to stamp out reproductive rights. As Dahlia Lithwick at Slate explained, these laws “are radically different” from those of the past few years, which have tried to tried to chip away at abortion access by using phony concerns about women’s health as a cover; instead, Kansas and Oklahoma’s new legislation is simply a vehicle “to overturn Roe once and for all.” So getting the Supreme Court to agree with the anti-choice side about these bans would open the door to just banning abortion outright—no pretending to care about women necessary.

Paul Krugman: That Old-Time Economics

BRUSSELS — America has yet to achieve a full recovery from the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. Still, it seems fair to say that we’ve made up much, though by no means all, of the lost ground.

But you can’t say the same about the eurozone, where real G.D.P. per capita is still lower than it was in 2007, and 10 percent or more below where it was supposed to be by now. This is worse than Europe’s track record during the 1930s.

The Public Deserves to Know Exactly What’s in the Trans-Pacific Partnership

By Dan Gillmor

In the next few weeks, Congress may give special status to a massive “free trade” treaty that you are not allowed to read. Based on leaks of portions of the deal, however, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) appears to be at least partly a grab bag of special favors for corporate interests—among them the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries—and an end-run around domestic law.

Naturally, given that Congress seems increasingly owned by moneyed interests, this mockery of thoughtful governance and policy may well happen. But there's still time to modify it, or block it outright if the worst provisions remain, and I'm glad to see an emerging coalition aiming to do just that.

Indisputable proof that Republicans are warriors for the aristocracy

GOP contenders are pretending to care about inequality. But it's all for show — and Congress is about to prove it

Heather Digby Parton

It’s been quite interesting to see Republicans embrace the notion that wealth inequality (or any inequality) is something to worry their pretty little heads about. Over the winter we heard numerous reports of various GOP luminaries expressing serious concern that average Americans were getting the short end of the stick while the wealthy few reaped all the rewards. Ted Cruz might as well have put on a blond wig and called himself “Elizabeth” when he railed against it after the State of the Union:

“We’re facing right now a divided America when it comes to the economy. It is true that the top 1 percent are doing great under Barack Obama. Today, the top 1 percent earn a higher share of our national income than any year since 1928,”

And here we thought that was supposed to be a good thing. Aren’t they the “job producers”? That’s how weird the GOP’s messaging has gotten lately. Mitt “47 Percent” Romney clutched his very expensive opera-length pearls, wailing that “under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before.” Rand Paul channeled his heretofore unknown inner Bernie Sanders, proclaiming that “income inequality has worsened under this administration. And tonight, President Obama offers more of the same policies — policies that have allowed the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer.” It seemed to many observers at the time that this was a very odd choice of issue for potential Republican presidential aspirants to take up, since every item in the domestic GOP agenda would make wealth inequality even worse. This certainly wasn’t something they lost any sleep over before now.

Republicans push for a permanent aristocracy

By Dana Milbank

Give credit to Republicans in Congress.

They’ve discovered, belatedly, that income inequality is a problem, and they’re no longer proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Now they are proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans.

BPA exposure affects fertility in next 3 generations of mice

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- When scientists exposed pregnant mice to levels of bisphenol A equivalent to those considered safe in humans, three generations of female mouse offspring experienced significant reproductive problems, including declines in fertility, sexual maturity and pregnancy success, the scientists report in the journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology.

Danish innovations in water sector keep pollution at bay

In Denmark, tap water is as pure as spring water and the sea off city harbours are clean enough to swim in. How is that so?

by Tan Cheng Li

WHEN it comes to good examples of managing water resources, Denmark comes to mind. The country is touted as a world leader in the water sector, and it must be doing something right – its water consumption has dropped almost 40% since 1980. Its treated water is of such high quality that everyone drinks straight from the tap; there’s even a national competition for the best-tasting tap water. And its non-revenue water is a mere 7% (Malaysia’s is over 30%).

These achievements are derived from: charging consumers the real cost of water; “save water” campaigns; and a strong focus on reducing leakage in water pipes. Also, mandatory benchmarking against best practices in the industry has driven innovative and cost-effective ways to manage water and wastewater.

Wall Street’s Wealth Transfer System Is Imperiling the U.S. Economy

By Pam Martens: April 13, 2015

For nine years now we have written about Wall Street’s institutionalized system of transferring wealth from decent, hardworking Americans to the denizens of Wall Street and those it selectively chooses to favor in the one percent class. The methods of wealth transfer are as diverse as they are diabolical, thus even well intentioned members of Congress cannot stem the havoc on the financial well being of the average American and the overall economy.

One facet that all of these wealth transfer systems have in common is that they all masquerade under a benign sounding name. The 401(k) plan is viewed by most Americans as a way to save for retirement. That’s a good thing – right? It is not a good thing when two-thirds of your savings over a working lifetime end up in Wall Street’s pocket, as carefully demonstrated by Frontline and math-checked by us.

Dean Baker: Bonanza for the Super-Rich: The Fund Managers' Tax Break

The reason most of us have seen little gain from economic growth over the last three decades is that the rich have rigged the rules to ensure that money flows upward. Through their control of trade policy, Federal Reserve Board policy, and other key levers of government, they have structured the market to weaken the bargaining power of ordinary workers and benefit the CEOs and Wall Street crew. As a result, the typical worker has seen almost none of the gains from economic growth over the last four decades.

Most of this rigging comes in before-tax income. The big gains to the rich have not been primarily because they have become better at avoiding taxes than they were four decades ago, but there are some notable exceptions. At the top of this list is the fund managers' tax break (a.k.a. the carried interest tax deduction). As tens of millions of people prepare to file their tax returns this week, it is a good opportunity to celebrate this tax deduction which gives billions of dollars every year to some of the richest people in the country for no reason whatsoever.

Paul Krugman: It Takes a Party

So Hillary Clinton is officially running, to nobody’s surprise. And you know what’s coming: endless attempts to psychoanalyze the candidate, endless attempts to read significance into what she says or doesn’t say about President Obama, endless thumb-sucking about her “positioning” on this or that issue.

Please pay no attention. Personality-based political analysis is always a dubious venture — in my experience, pundits are terrible judges of character. Those old enough to remember the 2000 election may also remember how we were assured that George W. Bush was a nice, affable fellow who would pursue moderate, bipartisan policies.

Warren Buffett's mobile home empire preys on the poor

Billionaire profits at every step, from building to selling to high cost lending

By Daniel Wagner, Mike Baker

Denise Pitts walked into the pawn shop not far from where she bought her mobile home in Knoxville, Tennessee, and offered up her wedding rings for $100. Her marriage wasn’t over, but her husband was battling cancer and, Pitts said, her mortgage company told her the only way to keep a roof over his head would be to sell everything else.

Across the country in Ephrata, Washington, Kirk and Patricia Ackley sat down to close on a new mobile home, only to learn that the annual interest on their loan would be 12.5 percent rather than the 7 percent they said they had been promised. They went ahead because they had spent $11,000, most of their savings, to dig a foundation.

Wall Street has gobbled up billions of New York City pension dollars

Apr 09, 2015 9:27am PDT by Laura Clawson

Wall Street, not retired workers, has been getting the profits from New York City's pension funds, according to the city comptroller's office. Management fees have sucked up more than $2 billion over 10 years, virtually erasing gains for the funds that provide pensions for 715,000 city workers:

Most of the funds’ money — more than 80 percent — is invested in plain vanilla assets like domestic and foreign stocks and bonds. The returns on those investments are generally reported after the fees, which are usually paid as a percent of the assets each firm manages.

Over the last 10 years, the return on those “public asset classes” has surpassed expectations by more than $2 billion, according to the comptroller’s analysis. But nearly all of that extra gain — about 97 percent — has been eaten up by management fees, leaving just $40 million for the retirees, it found.

In the “private asset classes,” fees have been an even bigger drag on returns, Mr. Stringer said. To figure out just how big was not easy, he said.

The 1 percent are parasites: Debunking the lies about free enterprise, trickle-down, capitalism and celebrity entrepreneurs

The rich don't generate jobs. Rising tides do not lift all boats. And they probably built that with government help

Andrew Sayer

‘When did you last get a job from a poor person?’ So goes my favorite Tea Party slogan. The Americans are good at slogans but the Tea Party specializes in discombobulatingly daft ones. Of course you won’t get a job from a poor person, we wearily concede, but it doesn’t follow that the rich create jobs, as if they have special powers that turn their gains into a gift of jobs to the rest of us. U.S. billionaire Nick Hanauer is refreshingly honest about this: ‘If it was true that lower taxes for the rich and more wealth for the wealthy led to job creation, today we would be drowning in jobs.’ So why hasn’t the spectacular shift in income and financial wealth to the rich over the last four decades led to unprecedented jobs growth?

Scapegoat Economics 2015

By Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | News Analysis

As economic crises, declines and dislocations increasingly hurt or threaten people around the globe, they provoke questions. How are we to understand the forces that produced the 2008 crisis, the crisis itself, with its quick bailouts and stimulus programs, and now the debts, austerity policies and deepening economic inequalities that do not go away? Economies this troubled force people to think and react. Some resign themselves to "hard times" as if they were natural events. Some pursue individual strategies trying to escape the troubles. Some mobilize to fight whoever they blame for it all. Many are drawn to scapegoating, usually encouraged by politicians and parties seeking electoral advantages.

Toxic Weed Killer Glyphosate Found in Breast Milk, Infant Formula

The widely-used herbicide glyphosate, now classified as probably carcinogenic to humans by the World Health Organization (WHO), has been found in a number of items, including honey, breast milk and infant formula, according to media reports.

“When chemical agriculture blankets millions of acres of genetically engineered corn and soybean fields with hundreds of millions of pounds of glyphosate, it’s not a surprise babies are now consuming Monsanto’s signature chemical with breast milk and infant formula,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of Environmental Working Group. “The primary reason millions of Americans, including infants, are now exposed to this probable carcinogen is due to the explosion of genetically engineered crops that now dominate farmland across the U.S.”

Paul Krugman: Where Government Excels

As Republican presidential hopefuls trot out their policy agendas — which always involve cutting taxes on the rich while slashing benefits for the poor and middle class — some real new thinking is happening on the other side of the aisle. Suddenly, it seems, many Democrats have decided to break with Beltway orthodoxy, which always calls for cuts in “entitlements.” Instead, they’re proposing that Social Security benefits actually be expanded.

This is a welcome development in two ways. First, the specific case for expanding Social Security is quite good. Second, and more fundamentally, Democrats finally seem to be standing up to antigovernment propaganda and recognizing the reality that there are some things the government does better than the private sector.

Raising Wages From the Bottom Up

Three ways city and state governments can make the difference.

By Harold Meyerson

In 1999, while he was working at a local immigrant service center in Los Angeles, Victor Narro began encountering a particularly aggrieved group of workers. They were the men who worked at carwashes, and their complaint was that they were paid solely in tips—the carwashes themselves paid them nothing at all.

At first, the workers came by in a trickle, but soon enough, in a flood. Narro, whose soft voice and shy manner belie a keen strategic sensibility, consulted with legal services attorneys and discovered that while every now and then a carwash was penalized for cheating its workers, such instances were few and far between. “There were no regulations overseeing the industry,” Narro says. The state’s labor department conducted no sweeps of the carwashes to investigate what looked to be an industry-wide pattern of violations of basic wage and hour laws. When Narro took a new job at UCLA’s Labor Center, he had researchers survey L.A. carwashes. They reported that roughly one-fourth of the industry’s 10,000 workers were paid only in tips.

The rush to humiliate the poor

By Dana Milbank

Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law.

Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits “to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.”

How America Became an Oligarchy

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Ellen Brown

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t...You have owners.—George Carlin, The American Dream

According to a new study from Princeton University, American democracy no longer exists. Using data from over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded that rich, well-connected individuals on the political scene now steer the direction of the country, regardless of – or even against – the will of the majority of voters. America’s political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy, where power is wielded by wealthy elites.

“Making the world safe for democracy” was President Woodrow Wilson’s rationale for World War I, and it has been used to justify American military intervention ever since. Can we justify sending troops into other countries to spread a political system we cannot maintain at home?

The Minimum Wage: Could the Democrats Please Give Consideration to the Idea of Ceasing to Betray Working People?

Posted on April 8, 2015 by Lambert Strether

Let’s begin by noting that the current minimum wage is miserably inadequate and a flat insult to working people. The MIT Living Wage Calculator project[1] has this to say:

While the minimum wage sets an earnings threshold under which our society is not willing to let families slip, it fails to approximate the basic expenses of families in 2013 [or today]. Consequently, many working adults must seek public assistance and/or hold multiple jobs in order to afford to feed, cloth, house, and provide medical care for themselves and their families.

An analysis of the living wage using updated data from 2013 and compiling geographically specific expenditure data for food, childcare, health care, housing, transportation, and other basic necessities, finds that:

The minimum wage does not provide a living wage for most American families. A typical family of four (two working adults, two children) needs to work more than 3 full-time minimum-wage jobs (a 68-hour work week per working adult) to earn a living wage. Across all family sizes, the living wage exceeds the poverty threshold, often used to identify need. This means that families earning between the poverty threshold ($23,283 for two working adults, two children) and the median living wage ($51,224 for two working adults, two children per year before taxes), may fall short of the income and assistance they require to meet their basic needs.

A Vote in April on Fast Track & TPP?

by Gaius Publius

A what-to-expect note on TPP. There will be several battles; the first is coming in the Senate Finance Committee, likely in April, with a vote on "Fast Track" enabling legislation. ("Enabling" legislation means Fast Track enables TPP by disabling Congress's ability to debate and amend it.) If Fast Track passes out of committee, it will go to the Senate floor. If it passes the Senate, it will go to the House. If Fast Track passes both houses of Congress, TPP will be introduced. If Fast Track fails at any of these points, TPP will never see the light of day (unless Wikileaks leaks more of it).

Therefore, the first chance we have to kill TPP is to kill Fast Track in the Senate Finance Committee. (To help that effort, see the last few paragraphs below, about Sen. Ron Wyden. Then send him a nice note discussing his re-election.)

One Food Security Remedy in the Face of Global Crises

By Jon Letman, Truthout | Report

LIHUE, Hawaii - Political instability, poverty, war, disease and climate change are testing humanity like never before, but in a world beset by rapidly compounding crises, one thing remains constant: People need to eat.

Even as Western industrialized and rapidly developing nations face an epidemic of health problems related to obesity and associated "lifestyle illnesses," the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reports that approximately one in eight people in developing nations is chronically undernourished. According to a 2014 FAO Hunger Map, that number has fallen by some 100 million in the last decade, but still remains around 805 million worldwide. Progress in fighting malnutrition in Latin American and Southeast Asia is offset by widespread chronic hunger in sub-Saharan Africa (nearly one in four) and Southern Asia (over half a billion).

‘National Competitiveness: A Crowbar for Corporate and Financial Interests

Posted on April 6, 2015 by Yves Smith

Yves here. We’ve regularly derided the notion of “national competitiveness” as a an inevitable accompaniment to the oversold notion of “free trade”. Economists are aware of, yet choose to ignore, the Lipsey-Lancaster theorem, which says when an idealized state cannot be attained, moving closer to it may not be an improvement; it can often produce worse outcomes. You need to evaluate the “second best” options specifically and not go on faith.

But economists and policy makers treat “free trade” as an article of faith, and with that comes the idea that countries must compete to find customers overseas. There is too little consideration of the fallacy of expecting countries to be competitive and by implication, seek to be exporters. It is impossible for all countries to be net exporters. Moreover, countries are often better served to design their policies primarily for the benefit of domestic workers and markets, and to promote export-oriented programs only to the extent that they do not undermine conditions at home, or will clearly produce a net benefit.

Three Reasons Why the United States Is Broken, Bloated and Bleeding

By Pierce Nahigyan, Truthout | Op-Ed

I've heard both EPA Chief Gina McCarthy and "The Newsroom's" Will McAvoy say that the United States used to be a lot tougher than it is now. "We have not shied away from difficult decisions," McCarthy told the American Meteorological Society in January. "We didn't scare so easy," said McAvoy in 2012.

Those sound like fine virtues, but I'm 28 years old, and I can't recall a time I ever felt like the United States wasn't scared of something. I already know the super patriots will castigate me based on the title of this piece alone.