Video below of Bill Gates albeit from a while back in 2010, but still reveals the current out of paradigm thinking which I believe is motivating the current initiatives of the elite proponents of austerity in the form of so-called 'entitlement' cuts for our most vulnerable senior citizens currently.
This is how the discussion is described by the youtube channel:
Microsoft Chairman and philanthropist Bill Gates examines the impact that the misallocation of healthcare funds has on the education system. He pins some of the blame on excessive end-of-life care, asking whether extending life by three months is worth laying off three teachers.
To these disgraced out-of-paradigm thinkers like Gates here, all of the Peterson morons, the 'Fix-the-Debt" idiots, etc... the lot of them; this is 'how it works' for them: "We are out of money!"
They are NOT lying or committing ANY kind of 'fraud', whether 'innocent', 'control' or otherwise.
After watching this video of Gates here, you MMTers who think all of this is some sort of "neo-liberal fraud/conspiracy"; please explain to me how this is so.
This is the 'richest man in the world', if he is not a "neo-liberal" or whatever then who is?
Does the "conspiracy cohort" in MMT think that Gates here is being completely disingenuous and is fabricating this false but in his (I suppose in the view of the 'conspiracy cohort') "alleged" view that TINA and the "alleged" inevitable trade off we have to make between life for our seniors and education for our young ones because we "don't have the money" to do both? Please spare me.
You have to be believing that Gates is reading off of a script here, you have to.
MMT 'Conspiracy' cohort: You HAVE TO believe that Gates is completely making all of this up here and this is all scripted beforehand by his 'neo-liberal handlers' or something ... you HAVE to. If not please explain to me how your brain works because mine does not work that way.
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Gates here is exhibiting THE SAME behavior we hate as any of the individuals or groups that advocate 24/7/365 for the current form of deadly austerity directed at currently our seniors and then who else when they continue to see the (what are TRULY inevitable) Treasury deficits ?
To run an anti-fraud operation against what is really perhaps the largest problem with (I'll be as charitable as I can be) 'human cognition' in the history of the human race is FOOLISH and a WASTE OF TIME and IS GOING NOWHERE like it has been and will continue to if we don't get the correct diagnosis of what is really humanity's problem here.
23 comments:
As far as I know, Bill Gates is not an economist. I would place him in the "useful stooge" category.
Right Bob,
I would place Gates in a cohort that is "in play" for us...
Others are "true believers" beyond our reach, these there is no hope for.
rsp,
The problem of scarcity in terms of resources is rarely mentioned, due to the obsession with money.
Wasting resources and human hours is no small matter that can be brushed aside. While there is no shortage of fiat, real constraints matter. In the overall budget of real things, fiscal space granted by MMT is tiny. The biggest reason people oppose MMT is because of the cavalier attitude that when you have fiscal space, that productivity will solve itself. The politician will always take more for their cronies and special interests. They don't care if you go hungry as long as you pose no existential threat. If MMT presented an even modestly coherent approach to how it would prevent bureaucrats from taking, it would probably become politically palatable to support a JG. In the meantime, it appears to be a boondoggle because as soon as you give a politician a dime, they don't spend it on anything needed by the population, they give it to their cronies and on buying votes from the few at the expense of the many. They are more concerned with avoiding the appearance of bad government than delivering good governance. They don't have your hunger or ambition. I've been reading about the Chinese economy and most recently this book called Turning Point by Popov a Russian economist. I think Ralph obliquely referred to Popov the other day in a comment. The Chinese have acted with a plan and somewhat competently to allocate their resources while the Russians ran government like the Americans with no over arching plan and instead half baked strategies to solve each problem as they arose, which in turn created 10 more problems. Advocates of giving fiscal space and job guarantees to politicians need to become familiar with what has gone wrong when others have done it. What is the point of even advocating MMT if you are going to waste that fiscal space you gain by giving up trying to improve the quality and quantity of what is produced? When you stubbornly refuse to make trade offs as in the video, you are advocating wasting real resources. Everything has a price, there is no free lunch, even when you need to create money to keep the economy humming along. Basic rules of resource allocation don't fade in importance, instead they become paramount. I understand how the Chinese long term plans, benchmarks, and constant analysis of progress kept them on track. I'm not clear how politically the United States Constitution or Political parties have any way of obtaining a consensus on setting social goals that ensure resources taken by government using fiat are used for the purpose of making the public better off. Under the current system, we make people poorer, the rich richer. Those values won't change when you give the government more to spend, more human hours with which to toil. It will be worse. How do you ensure that politicians adjust the level of fiscal spending to react to the needs of the private sector. How do you keep JG jobs from becoming a South Chicago boondoggle where people work 40 hours of traversing bureaucratic programs to eke out a squalid existence with the 'help' of social workers and organizers? It is no accident that Obama is a neolib after working in South Chicago, he saw first hand how bad government can be. I've been looking at the old ELR papers by Wray and they seem incomplete, pollyannish and not nearly up to the task at hand. It needs work.
Yes but Ryan what if what many people actually want to do is work in the task of taking care of our oldler people?
This "crowds out" all the great benefits to humanity of a Twitter or something?
The people getting denied 'education' could be learning how to perform Healthcare efficiently...
Gates wants zombie 'programmers' educated to create the next Facebook and then screw our seniors? So we can create info systems for the idle teeny boppers to "text each other" about nothing and inject "ads" for a fee?
This is our future?
Please.
Gates has more in common with Bob R here imo and Bob's disdain for the 'adult diaper changing industry' which is code for euthanasia...
Id rather have robust Senior care than 'Twitter' any day...
rsp,
"South Chicago boondoggle"
What about professional sports that receive a subsidy? For playing a game?
NYC just built the New Yankee Stadium for $1B so we can just sit there and drink $9 beers and hot dogs and watch young people play a game at the highest level of the sport.... ???
Is this not a 'boondoggle' at core? I dont see a 'high purpose' for this pastime... yet we spend $B on it...
One person's 'boondoggle' is often another person's favorite pastime...
and yes things can be mis-managed (look at "Obamacare" e.g.)
Millions of people are currently idle, they all cant work in Bill Gates software industry...
We need a much larger vision... rsp,
Social media is probably a bad example as the early funding has it's origins in government coffers. In the early 2000's there was large amounts of money being channeled from Washington to San Fran. In ten minutes you can google and read the early research reports from around turn of the century coming out from DARPA RAND and others, see the ideas blossoming from the big govt research agencies followed by chunks of money to develop the ideas into reality. Connect the dots along with early board members that were part of CFR and what not... this stuff isn't exactly top secret, I don't think. Even Google's basic technology and ideas were funded by early govt money.
So, I think you are on the right track, government is working towards cutting social security programs while investing in social media, like twitter, as a defense weapon.
It's a wacky example though as the 10s of million of dollars spent to promote social media research aren't related to the hundreds of billions in social security and medicare cuts proposed.
Well then what do you think Gates is talking about with his lament that "we are losing out on education"?
ie Education on what? I assume he is talking about IT... which a lot of that is outsourced by his own industry to Asia now...
Why cant he say: "We have outsourced a lot of industry to Asia so now we need to focus our educational efforts on things we will be doing domestically like Senior care which we will need as our 'boomers' generation ages... "
Or something like that.... why cant he say that?
Instead he want us to be educated in what? At the expense of our seniors in real terms...
rsp,
When people are old or weak, we need a low cost way to get resources to them that doesn't create perverse incentives. Medicare does create some perverse incentives when there are no copays, coinsurance and out of pockets. Social security is brilliant. The transfer taxes in social security and medicare are essential and I don't think medical care and education are linked in the way Gates does directly but they are in the sense that a majority of the resources the government will allocate to any one citizen now goes to medicare. If the government could get people to more efficiently use medical resources, the savings are enormous, even 10-20% would decrease the amount of real resources directed toward medical care and could be directed with far greater effect elsewhere. You could pay for the entire JG and make college education loans free, with a few percent of medicare expenditures. So why not try to increase the quality of medicare to that of other nations? We spend more, get less health care and care of lower quality than every other trading adversary, by far and away.
Look at the US here. It shouldn't be controversial to use government to raise the living standards of the nation. Waste shouldn't be championed and guarded jealously. At the end of the day, no amount of fiat fixes waste, and Bob wins that argument every single time while the MMT folks wave their hand in the air and change the argument to we have enough money to do both. Which is true, for now, but that doesn't excuse us from fixing waste and waste really is injustice and inequality.
"we need a low cost way to get resources to them"
????? No we dont...
Transfer taxes have been the lowest cost, effective way to directly transfer resources to people without having tons of intermediaries. What do you prefer? making people save to buy Wall Street equities or bonds or Treasury Bonds? Real estate and then living off dividends Please... that doesn't work except for the very rich. Even the state/local system of collecting property/sales taxes and then provisioning education has been corrupted. The transfer taxes have been a smashing success.
Ryan,
The medicare costs are a fiction of cost accounting....
We have a bunch of people that are uninsured receiving care and then the providers mark up the medicare charges as the govt has the "money" and they pay....
so if providers need revenues they order up a bunch of tests to generate revenues to make up for services they cannot receive payments on or inadequate reimbursement.... they make up for revenue shortfalls by increasing the quantity of procedures to those who have coverage (ie medicare covered people..)..
rsp,
This is too late.
The Banks like Bank Americay are ruled by and for Republicans.
Obama should have Bill-Black'ed the banks 4 years ago
but Obama was soft.
And this is affecting his ratings and affecting his strategy since the Tea party is winning with their rebellion.
The Tea Party is a subset of cowboys who can distance themselves from Republicans when they do their special operations so the Republicans can stay "clean" and then merge back with the Republicans when it is "safe and sound" if their strategy worked.
It might be working, this approach.
It is not a genuine independent political party, it is a subcommittee so that Republicans can vote twice and differently on the same issue so they can say they voted "yes" to constituents #1 and that they voted "no" to constituents
"Misallocation of healthcare funds. He pins some of the blame on excessive end-of-life care"
So the problem is people having the temerity to cling on to life for as long they can, and nothing to do with insurance industry taking a huge share of those funds, for work that doesn't need doing? I find it amusing that people who like to waffle on endlessly about efficiency, cost effectiveness and hatred for bureaucracy, don't seem to see the insurance industry as the biggest waste of human resources you're ever likely to find, I guess private bureaucracy, private inefficiency and directing money away from care into idle hands is fine when they're getting a big cut from it.
Conspiracy is not needed, merely shared interest. The power elite are simply a faction in that they seek to further their goals at the expense of other citizens and so their interests typically converge; in a hierarchical society the influence these vermin wield sets the tone for everyone else. The only conspiracy is the one into which we are all born which brainwashed us to implicitly accept authority, whomever that authority happens to be.
Gates is showing the signs of wear and tear associated with running a monopoly all these years.
1. Get the money out of politics.
2. Close the revolving door.
3. Tax away economics rent.
Problem solved.
that doesn't excuse us from fixing waste and waste really is injustice and inequality.
Don't forget fraud and abuse.
" He pins some of the blame on excessive end-of-life care, asking whether extending life by three months is worth laying off three teachers."
Are these teachers also nurses? Is that why they have to be laid off?
I figure Gates actually believes this. He, like so many others, are so deep in measuring things in money that they think they are measuring money, not resources.
Whatever the political possibilities of the JG are, it does teach a lesson - in macro labour costs are fixed. People need to eat and have shelter whether they are working or not. At least let the ones work who want to. Then there are plenty of people for end-of-life care and teaching. Or does Gates let his programmers sit in the break room for days, months, years until he finds them something to do or someone quits?
Gates is neo-liberal to the core. He may not use the term and he does seem to believe he is some sort of forward thinking progressive. Be that as it may, everything he advocates, all his so-called charity work is shot through with neo-liberal assumptions. Assumptions such as that the solution to poor health in the third world is some western medical magic bullet or the problem of hunger surely will be solved when such countries start using bioengineered super-seeds to grow food for export to trade for dollars, etc.
I think it's a false dichotomy you set up when you say it comes down to a choice between individual ignorance or the "grand conspiracy." Gates attitudes and beliefs appear to be those of a of a western man of the most elite class. He may not share all the beliefs of the most extreme members of that class but he is most certainly a member who shares many of them. The Anglo-American elite classes have perpetuated the same attitudes for a remarkably long time as you could see for yourself if you looked at a publication such as "the Economist" and looked at an issue from, say, 1912. If you change a few terms for "political correctness" you might find it remarkable how similar the general outlook and even particular goals would be to those found in a current issue. It would be naive to suppose that such an institution along with dozens of others that shape the life of a person born into wealth (like Gates) doesn't constitute a sort of "conspiracy" from the point of view of an outsider.
Ben, David thanks for the comments here...
David,
"doesn't constitute a sort of "conspiracy" from the point of view of an outsider."
You are "sort of" admitting that I am correct here ;)
Look we can always record data and examine it via a Gaussian distribution of some sort... we just cant start to assume that the cohort populating the extreme right end of the distribution is "acting together to get there" or something...
Perhaps it would be correct to say "neo-liberal policies" in order to identify a certain set of policies.. but to start saying "THE neo-liberals ARE planning to...." I believe is misleading ourselves... or "neo-liberals are LYING..." this is also missing the mark...
Perhaps I can create an analogy for the left here: "The Global War on TERROR".... Who is "Terror"???
Tell a soldier "go fight terror"... Who are we talking about? Eventually you have to drill down into it and create an actual target list and more focused tactics...
Many who I consider allied with myself I believe think that people like Gates here actually know that we are NOT "out of money" and that they are purposefully misleading the public in order to pursue some sort of "neo-liberal agenda" and I think they are making a GRAVE mistake in this thinking... they can offer NO EVIDENCE of this yet my friends continue to believe this...
They sometimes would say: Cheney said 'deficits dont matter' but that has been debunked as Cheney said that about the political matters of the deficit...
And they used to point to statements about 'solvency' made by Walker to Mike and Greenspan to Ryan as some sort of "evidence" but that has now been debunked as I have shown how with their false view of the S=I identity, they can certainly still believe that solvency is not an issue while at the same time "we're out of money" via their lack of knowledge about how our monetary system actually functions...
So we have to give up on fighting some ghost of a 'neo-liberal conspiracy' and find more focused things to operate against IF we actually want to be successful in turning this thing around vice just talking about it ... seems to be a big IF to me lately...
this whole thing is some sort of 'cognitive' issue imo and we ought to be approaching it from that perspective...
'Cognizance': "acquaintance, recognition; knowledge, wisdom"
The 'neo-liberals' dont have the 'cognizance' ... ie they are morons....
rsp.
Is the people in charge at the US determined for anything government related to fail nowadays? It wasn't always the case.
Ryan asks why USA can't get even close to other developed nations regarding the healthcare system. Yet every opening discussion on the issue is preceded of how bad the government does this or that.
Well it's actually not that difficult, remove the brainwashing ideology always present in the US that government is bad and evil can't do anything right. Then design the law so things "more or less" work the way they would be supposed to work (not even perfect), you can look after other nations models, we certainly know you have the funding.
But the problem is that elected officials live thought that ideology, so they act in a way that ideology becomes reality. Complete failure as lawmakers. Get rid of these failures and of the lobbyist and you may be able to get somewhere.
It won't be perfect, it probably there will be some corruption , but it will work somewhat in an effective way.
The real problem is not to become with successful policies, the "intelligentsia" has come with multitude of analyses and workable solutions for many problems plaguing society (it's a matter of comparing them and trying them, if don't work, move on to a new solution, etc.). The problem is political, to enact both pragmatical and responsible officials, and reduce the importance of ideological yahoos and their political apparatus in the current status quo. Now, solving that one, that may be difficult.
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