Thursday, November 7, 2013

Should Americans Be Required To Save?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Depends on the context. For example.

Should Americans be required to save ... for corporate welfare? *

Right concept? Wrong application of logic?

Or would Albert Camus approve of this absurd question, posed for the right reason?

Corporations know know how to invest your fiat BETTER than you do? Why not let more citizens decide, on their own, which corporations to invest THEIR FIAT in ... privately? If we have income disparity and wealth disparity, don't we have freedom disparity?

* Corporate Welfare











8 comments:

Matt Franko said...

Roger this is a GOOD question I'd like to see more from MMT on this subject...

With the MMT ZIRP recommendation, I'd assume MMT is anti-savings but yet without an adequate public pension system, what do people do for retirement income?

So this one imo has to be further fleshed out....

Provocative question.

I think humans always at least WANT to save... many are not provided the opportunity due to distributional aspects of incomes...

This is a BIG issue imo...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

EE/E bonds. Could also issue consols.

Unknown said...

I wish one of the MMT economists was running a blog like Warren used to do. The many questions people had could be answered reasonably quickly.

Unknown said...

by "running a blog" I mean taking comments and responding to questions. but hey what can you do.

Tom Hickey said...

Time sink.

Roger Erickson said...

Time sink?

What better investment in an "informed electorate" is there, other than answering citizens's questions?

The Rombach Report said...

"Should Americans Be Required To Save?"

No, but Americans should be given the freedom to save. Only a government big and intrusive enough could require Americans to save.

Tom Hickey said...

What better investment in an "informed electorate" is there, other than answering citizens's questions?

Yes, but the MMT professionals, academic and financial all have careers and families. Warren's attention to comments on his blog was a gift while it lasted.

I think everyone should be grateful that so many professionals in so many fields are taking the time to blog now. That's an incredible amount of free information. I don't know whether it's fair to complain that there's so little free consulting to go with it.

What needs to happen is to get some MMT professionals funded so that they engage more with the public. This would ideally involve some kind of institute or foundation, if there are any angels listening.