Incentivizing an Ethical Economics — Simon Szreter, Hilary Cooper and Ben Szreter

A conservative case for welfare economics based on incentives and initiative. Worth a read. It's applicable to a job guarantee.

Naked Capitalism
Incentivizing an Ethical Economics

Simon Szreter, professor of history and public policy at Cambridge University, fellow of St John’s College and co-founder and editor of www.historyandpolicy.org; Hilary Cooper, an economic consultant, researcher, former government economist and senior policymaker; and Ben Szreter, chief executive of a community-based charity. Together they are joint winners of the IPPR Economics Prize. 

Originally published at openDemocracy

See also at NC

Syriza, R.I.P.
Yves Smith

Committee to F@#$%*! The Middle Class Suggests .... You Guessed It .... Increasing FICA Taxes, To "Balance Fiat"

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

I don't know how these evil or deranged idiots keep a straight face anymore. Pete Peterson may be paying them a bundle for their collusion.

For those who don't yet know, "Fix the Debt" is a euphemism for "Neuter the Fiat"

We must neuter fiat, to balance fiat?  Do any of these dimwits ever stop and ask themselves what "fiat" means?

from: Campaign to Fix the Debt <info@fixthedebt.org>
For Immediate Release
July 22, 2015 

Fix the Debt Reacts to the Social Security Trustees Report 

The Social Security and Medicare Trustees released their annual reports today showing that despite modest improvements in their projections, both programs are in financial jeopardy. The Trustees project the Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance program to exhaust its reserves by 2035, the Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund to be depleted by 2030, and the Social Security Disability Insurance to become insolvent by late 2016. On a combined basis, the Trustees project the Social Security program to run out of reserve funds by 2034, which is a year later than previous projections but less than two decades from today. At that point, all beneficiaries would face an immediate 21 percent benefit cut, which would grow over time to a 27 percent cut. 

“How many times do the Trustees need to warn us about this before we take their concerns seriously?” said former Sen. Judd Gregg, co-chair of the Campaign to Fix the Debt. “2034 is not that far away – it means today’s 60-year-olds will be 79, and today’s 48-year-olds are just reaching the normal retirement age. And the cost of waiting will only make the fixes harder. We don’t need to shore up this program just for our children; we need to do it for ourselves as well.” 

According to the Social Security Trustees, the combined programs face a shortfall of 2.68 percent of payroll – meaning the 12.4 percent payroll tax would need to be increased by just over one-fifth or benefits cut immediately for all current and future beneficiaries by about one-sixth to make the program solvent for 75 years. By the 75th year, the Trustees project the combined shortfall will grow to 4.7 percent of payroll. 

“The message the Trustees delivered today should resonate all over the country and especially in the presidential campaign,” said Fix the Debt Co-Chair and former Gov. Ed Rendell. “The disability program is only a year from insolvency and the other programs aren’t far behind. If we don’t fix these programs soon, it’s the most vulnerable who will pay the price. We need a sense of urgency in Washington to fix these programs so they are sound and secure now and in the future.”

For more information, contact Press Secretary Jack Deutsch at deutsch@fixthedebt.org.

For more information about the [Committee to F@#$%*! The Middle Class], please visit www.fixthedebt.org.

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So "both programs are in financial jeopardy." Right. Anyone ever felt that national fiat was in jeopardy? That means that every other national policy, heck, even the will of the people, is in financial jeopardy. What, exactly, does it mean to say that our public will is in financial jeopardy? It seems that the Farce can have a strong effect on small minds. That's all I sense.

This is right out of a perverted version of an old fairy tale used to manipulate the gullible. In the original version, Chicken-Shit-Little tried to convince all the neighbors that they were running out of fiat [Public Initiative]. Why? Various versions have been cleaned up for nursery rhymes, but they all involve some aspect of a crook crying wolf, to see how many dimwits step forward to be voluntarily fleeced.

A foolish population and their Public Initiative are soon parted.

Our SEC & NSA seem more worried about Nigerian scammers, when far greater sums are extracted from honest citizens by our own Committee to Neuter the Fiat, aka, Control Frauds, aka Committee to F@#$%*! The Middle Class.

Why?  Ask the people you voted for, from county commissioners to POTUS, and EVERYONE in between.

The Entire Discipline Of Economics Has Become So Misused That It's Current Use Harms More Than It Helps

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

Definition of "economics": what aristocrats call "creative accounting."

So what does Economic Policy mean? That we have a policy on accounting, aka "economics?"

Isn't that akin to having a policy on records keeping, and art, and photography, and reporting? Yes, it's true Maude. Aristocrats have a policy on all those things, and that core policy is called propaganda - instilling the claim that THEY matter more than YOU, or WE collectively do.

Definition of aristocrats: sociopaths, projecting their value metrics on to us.

Can we fault every idiot for promoting an idiot-centric policy? No. We knew they were idiots before we agreed - possibly out of boredom - to experience the movie.

Can we fault ourselves, for trying to ignore idiots, and even kicking them upstairs where we naively imagine that they can do no harm? YES!!!

If you try to ignore aggregate policy, you soon find yourself being ruled by people dumber or at least more ignorant than you are, promoting idiotically illogical policies - just because we let them.

Do idiotic-policies make sense, for an evolving aggregate? Not for very long, if ever, or even transiently. Idiotic policies are, by definition, the policies of parasitism, just because the perspectives are so narrow, and typically unchanging. 

Evolving reality dictates that there are always things - many things - that we have to start doing differently. Trying to resist that change makes you, by definition, a parasite, draining your aggregate of the Public Initiative needed to keep exploring emerging options, via adaptive change. Has everyone agreed that parasites play no useful purpose, in culling the least progressive? No, comically enough.* Yet it's equally true that the aggregate selection process cannot be left to the parasites, aka aristocrats, aka economics experts, aka sociopaths. Progress is too important to be left for our self-parasites alone to judge.

That's why trying to use tracking numbers to create, evolve, lead or invent .... is just so brain dead that it's embarrassing. Invented, numeric tracking or feedback metrics are for assessing execution, NOT for selecting milestone goals or aggregate Desired Outcomes. So please cease, forever, the habit of confusing Desired Outcomes with infinite, alternate path progressions. **

Consider this article as an example:

What Uncle Sam really owes

These authors - and commentators - seem to mean well, yet by the faux logic expressed in their article, Quarks owe infinite Planck units to Hadrons, or to something. How will they ever pay that Universal debt? (Doh!)

They've become part of the problem! What does their line of reasoning imply? That the universe is insolvent?

Has S&P lowered the financial rating of homo sapiens yet? :(

Some days it hurts my head just reading the oxymoronic things economists say. It's like reading archaic views about how many pinheads can dance on your view of reality.

Warren Mosler eventually came to his conclusion that "The entire finance industry is more trouble than it's worth."

I'll now add that "The entire discipline of economics has become so misused that it's current use harms more than it helps."

Yet here's a MiddleClassKiller line from the UncleSamOwes article.

"since the founding of the country, the U.S. government has never had a negative net worth"

Net worth? Net worth to whom? It's not at all clear how to "value" the issuer & user of a set of denominating numbers, or who to delegate the "valuation" process to. Certainly not using those invented numerals themselves! And certainly not by those fixated on uselessly hoarding public fiat!

Surely you jest?

No? Oh, my Denominator!!! Then please do the following thought experiment, and reconsider once you're sober.

If YOU decide to issue yourself enough "Initiative Denominating" ratings (purely in order to accurately track and "organize" your personal initiative, mind you) ..... have YOU instantly exceeded YOUR net worth to yourself ... simply by CREATING your tracking numerals, out of thin air?

After all, in double-entry accounting, every CREATED metric (supposedly) has to be balanced by an equal & opposite debit from the SOURCE of that metric. 

[Pause ... to let that sink in.]

So, ask yourself. What is the source of personal and private initiative? Please don't tell me that you think that it's always and only a lust for transaction-denominating numerals - by "intelligent, perfectly competing, agents" .... competing for use of their own feedback reporting numerals.

The basic silliness here is that double-entry accounting is an invented bookkeeping method ... that overlooks the original, ongoing and constant act of creation we call reality, life, evolution, markets and economies ... which all constitute the cost & return on coordination. 

How silly is it for an accounting system to overlook creation of what it's trying to accurately track? Well, it's embarrassingly dumb, down to it's very axioms. Possibly fatally dumb. Nay, suicidally dumb.

Could we possibly compound such an error? Only by using such stupidity to craft Desired Outcomes, assess milestone goals and craft policy. No aggregate is that stupid though, right?

How do YOU denominate your personal initiative? By loaning tracking numerals to yourself? And then declaring a debt to yourself? Or do you set and achieve Desired Outcomes, and just use accounting when & as needed, to help in exploring emerging options?

So how does an aggregate of people denominate their Public Initiative? Not ONLY by issuing tracking numerals to themselves, and then panicking at the thought of being permanently on the hook to themselves for the burden of creating more transaction-denominating numerals.

Can we go back to real, and how it's created? Please?


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* [Will conservatives even realize that they are eventually the butt of their own, excessive joke?]

    [2000 years later (and at least 3.5 BILLION years after the 1st social molecules), and we're still fitfully rediscovering system dynamics ... and marveling as though it were something novel? Don't weep for your electorate, USA, they may be past saving.]


** [Aristocrats & Economists are the one attempted exception proving the Law of Selective Aggregate-Self-Employment: "Those that know how will always have a job, and those who know why will eventually be their boss - unless we suicidally cede why to how." Good luck trying.]

Who Ya Gonna Listen To? A Sop, Or Your Own Common Sense?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)

"Contrary to widely held beliefs, the world has not yet begun to delever and the 

global debt-to-GDP is still growing ... "

Can you make heads or tails of this?
How can all humanity be in net debt?
To whom? Themselves?

What's the personal analogy of this?

"I'm too indebted to myself. I've run out of fiat! I can't muster the personal initiative to take another breath."

Or, my left hand owes my right hand too much - so both insist on austerity, and won't feed the mouth. Now my left ventricle owes my right ventricle. They're gonna cut each other off from the body-wide SWIFT circulatory system. You know what that means.

Same for nations? How? The fools are near fully separated from their fiat? By whom? Parasites bent on self-assisted suicide?

Capitalism is defined as the unrelenting race to produce our own parasites? So they can kill themselves AND us? Why? Is anyone asking what capitalists want to do with all the distributed fiat which they seek to sequester and hoard?

Not just any old sop, but Aesop himself nailed this over 2000 years ago. The proverbial belly had the last laugh, since the warring parts all died.

What part of Duh! don't future voters learn in Kindergarten anymore?

Are ALL Forms Of Fiat Considered A Taxable Offense?

Commentary by Roger Erickson

Individual? Distributed? Private? Public? Can we afford enough tax collectors to fund ourselves? :(

Who knew that initiative was so taxing!? [Try not to laugh. These are serious questions to some Austrian-E OCD folks.]

Germany is to impose a 25pc capital gains tax on Bitcoin transactions following a ruling that the virtual currency is a form of money.

"Germany is to impose a 25pc capital gains tax on Bitcoin transactions following a ruling that the virtual currency is a form of money."

At least this explains the NSA's paranoia about recording our every thought. The real plan is to allow the IRS to detect and tax all forms of individual or public initiative, no matter HOW they're expressed! Why not just distribute tin foil hats to all citizens, with strings attached?

There's a hole in this thinking.* Who will tax the IRS and NSA? Their taxing intiatives may go untaxed! Can't have that, since we're already running out of initiative .. er .. fiat .. er .. currency. Think that's taxable? Thought it might go untaxed? Tax again, buddy.


Hat tip to @ImplodOMeter

* There's actually a virtual remedy to this virtual dilemma. Just apply virtual taxes to virtual currency, and let citizens pay with virtual initiative! Badda boom!

   This is Angela's variant of an old Russian joke? "You pretend to fund me, and I'll pretend to pay some of the funds back as taxes."

   Hey. I got us an idea. Let's just tax NeoCons and Control Frauds? They can appear to hide fraud from us, and we'll keep on pretending not to see it!

Moral Fiber bypassed by Google Fiber

Forget Moral Fiber. The scalable underpinnings of that in a large, growing population depend upon a new level of fiber, such as Google Fiber.

In all honesty, why the heck can't we just extend our national initiative to bring this level of fiber to every US household ... ourselves? Why depend on individual companies to voluntarily provide the bare minimum?

This would likely be better done in reverse. Google, please help bring some moral fiber to Congress, so they'd bring Google-level fiber to all US citizens, pronto?

Okay, it's true that it's our own fault. Google, just help bring some more fiber to the US electorate, so they'd send Congresspeople with moral fiber to Congress.