Beto O’Rourke Questions ‘Principles’ of Constitution: ‘Does This Still Work?’

In the interview report below you see the whole Left/Right  opposition.  Brainless Beto wants "sweeping change" while conservatives are very leery of that -- with good historical precedent -- and see sweeping change as dangerously arrogant.  Conservatives don't see change as a virtue or goal at all.  They value stability, not change, though cautious and well-justified changes are not seen as incompatible with stability.  So we can see why any agreement between the two sides is always going to be a big mountain to climb

Former Congressman and potential 2020 Democratic nominee Beto O’Rourke questioned the “principles” of the U.S. Constitution on Wednesday, arguing that its usefulness is the “question of the moment.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, O’Rourke was asked if he believes the U.S. is capable of “dramatically [changing] its approach to a whole host of issues” or whether he holds a “dismal suspicion that the country is now incapable of implementing sweeping change.”

“I’m hesitant to answer it because I really feel like it deserves its due, and I don’t want to give you a — actually, just selfishly, I don’t want a sound bite of it reported, but, yeah, I think that’s the question of the moment: Does this still work?” O’Rourke replied.

“Can an empire like ours with a military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships … and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?”

During the interview, O’Rourke also made an argument that the “border is already fully secured and that further investment would take it even further ‘past the point of diminishing returns'” by forcing illegal migrants into dangerous territories.

“You will ensure death,” he said of Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border. “You and I, as Americans, have caused the deaths of others through these walls.”

The 46-year-old, who lost his Senate race against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) last November, is currently weighing up whether to run for the 2020 presidential nomination.

SOURCE 

*********************************

Modern Monetary Theory: Who’ll be brave enough to try it?

This theory is something of a relief.  It does explain why inflation remained under control during Obama's money printing binge.  It applies because unemployment was high at the outset of the Obama era.  It does NOT apply to the Trump economy, however, as unemployment is very low now.  The theory requires Trump to raise taxes, which he will not do.  So we should expect the emergence of significant inflation in a Trump second term -- or maybe before


In the past decade, the world has suffered two global crises: the financial disaster of 2008 and the eurozone sovereign debt crisis two years later. Policymakers responded with bailouts, cheap funding schemes, zero interest rates and quantitative easing. In one sense, the past ten years was a period of intense economic experimentation. In another, nothing has changed.

Following previous crises, macroeconomic ideas were replaced. After the Second World War, Keynesian, under which governments spend to create demand and protect jobs, was ascendant. After the inflation-induced recessions in the 1970s, the big idea was monetarism, using interest rates and the money supply to keep prices under control.

And now, after two existential crises? Nothing. The fundamental macroeconomic ideas have not changed. Labour and the Tories do battle on the scale of the deficit, like two old fools arguing who should pay for the last round long after the bar has closed. Beyond that, John McDonnell’s socialist revolution is pilfered from crumbling communist textbooks. It’s all a bit disappointing.

A new idea is slowly gaining momentum, though, particularly in the United States, where the charismatic Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been championing it. The idea is modern monetary theory and, as with many new ideas, it is not actually that new. Its origins date back to 1993 and it even featured in the 2016 US election. Bernie Sanders’ economic adviser was Stephanie Kelton, a prominent advocate of MMT.

At first glance, the theory seems barmy. As long as a government borrows in its own currency, it need never default because it can always print the money it needs. Described that way, MMT sounds like that other MMT, the magic money tree, or Jeremy Corbyn’s “People’s QE” - the kind of thing Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe tried with devastating inflationary consequences. But that’s because we’re looking through the wrong end of the telescope.

Warren Mosler, a former banker and hedge fund manager, went back to basics when he was developing the idea. The challenges governments face are growth, unemployment and inflation. To achieve those goals today, central banks use rates to regulate the economy while governments manage the public finances.

Mr Mosler and Ms Kelton look at the world differently. Running a budget deficit is not a sign of overspending, they say. Inflation is. Viewed though that lens, deficits look fine so long as inflation is under control. If inflation is low, unemployment high and the private sector is not picking up the slack, the government’s role is to create productive work through tax cuts or spending. The new jobs will create enough demand to drive up prices.

But who finances the deficits? That’s where money-printing comes in. It is here that convention is flipped on its head. Under MMT, tax and spending decisions are taken to regulate the economy, ignoring the impact on the public finances. If inflation picks up, rates don’t budge (Mr Mosler would have them set at zero). Instead, taxes rise to suck demand out of the system. In doing so, the budget may move into surplus. The central bank’s role is simply to finance the deficit.

Surely markets will hate this and punish governments with higher borrowing costs? Proponents reply that the government does not need to borrow from the market. When the state cuts income taxes, it creates more domestic savings. Those savings are exactly equal to the state’s additional borrowing. As a nation, one hand owes the other. The central bank only need mark the debt on the government’s ledger.

The key here is to think of the state as a monopolist, not a household. A government that borrows in its own currency has a monopoly on the money supply so cannot run out and go bust. Foreign investors might lose money on their dollar assets, but the debt can always be paid. The model does not work for countries without their own currency, such as eurozone members. As they do not control their currency, they must live within their means and ultimately balance their books. They are not monetary monopolists, just households for the purposes of budget management.

Although MMT has been jumped on by deficit-spending left-wingers, the theory is not intrinsically fiscally irresponsible. Mr Mosler claims to have developed the idea after a steam room session with arch-hawk Donald Rumsfeld, the former US defence secretary. JW Mason, an economist at the City University of New York, reckons it would lead to smaller budget deficits over the long term, provided politicians are bold enough to combat inflation with higher taxes.

Ultimately, the theory reframes and simplifies our conception of the economy, drawing the focus on to the core priorities of employment and inflation. The deficit would no longer be an obstacle. There would be no tension between fiscal and monetary policy, just a single lever. Responsibility for economic management would fall to politicians, ending the outsourcing to technocrats that has provided legislators cover for so long. And there would no place for an independent central bank.

In a way, MMT is nothing new. Japan’s national debt is 2.4 times the size of its economy, three times UK levels, but most is owed to Japanese pension funds and its money-printing central bank. In Britain, the 527 billion pounds of debt raised by the state between 2009 and 2012 was largely matched by the Bank of England’s 375 billion pounds of QE. Today, Donald Trump is blowing up the US deficit and driving up inflation in what looks like a practical demonstration of MMT.

There, in a nutshell, is the problem. The theory states that President Trump should be raising taxes, not cutting them. But would politicians ever have the courage to raise taxes if domestic inflation is climbing, despite high unemployment? The whole reason central banks were given independence was because politicians cannot be trusted to make unpopular decisions.

What MMT does prove, however , is that we will not run out of new ideas as long as we can describe the world in different ways. That, at least, is encouraging.

SOURCE 

**********************************

Humans: The Domesticated Primates

Capital punishment is the key to civilization

As we became more peaceable, our bodies evolved along the lines of other tamed animals

A few years ago, I stayed in Kenya with the conservationists Karl and Kathy Ammann, who kept a rescued chimpanzee named Mzee in their home. Even as a young adult, Mzee was generally well-behaved and trustworthy. Yet he could be impulsive. At one point, over breakfast, Mzee and I reached for the jug of orange juice at the same time. He grabbed my hand as I held the jug, and he squeezed. Ouch. “You first!” I squeaked. I was still rubbing my fingers back to life once he had finished his drink.

“We differ from our ancient ancestors in ways similar to how dogs differ from wolves.

The truth is that even when chimpanzees know the rules perfectly well, they don’t always restrain their aggression. In the wild, their lives are full of violence. A day spent with wild chimpanzees gives you a good chance of seeing chases and hitting; every month, you are likely to see bloody wounds. Compared with even an unusually violent group of humans, chimpanzees are aggressive several hundred to a thousand times more often over the course of a year.

The greater peaceability of human societies comes from our nature. We can look each other in the eye. We don’t lose our tempers easily. We normally control our aggressive urges. In primates, one of the most potent stimuli for aggression is the presence of a strange individual. By contrast, Jerome Kagan, a pioneer in developmental psychology, reports that in his hundreds of observations of 2-year-olds meeting unfamiliar children, he has never seen one strike out at the other. That willingness to interact peacefully with others, even strangers, is inborn.

What accounts for this human difference? The answer lies in the evolutionary pressures that selected against aggression, particularly in men. The cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm has found that, in hunter-gatherer societies, a man who threatens others by having too violent a temper is treated in a consistent way.

If the bully can’t be contained by the cajoling effects of ridicule or ostracism, the other men reach a consensus, make a plan and execute him. Over the eons, the long-term practice of killing unrepentant aggressors must have favored genes for more peaceful behavior.

No other mammal has the brainpower to organize capital punishment. When language became sufficiently sophisticated, our ancestors’ ability to conspire led not only to a more peaceful species but also to a new kind of hierarchy. No longer would human groups be ruled by the physical force of an individual. The emergence of capital punishment meant that henceforth, anyone aspiring to be an alpha couldn't get away with just being a fighter. He had to be a politician, too.

The result of generations of such selective pressure is that human beings are best understood as an animal species that has been domesticated—like dogs, horses or chickens. Recent archaeological evidence suggests that humans became increasingly docile and less reactively aggressive around the time of becoming Homo sapiens, a process that started about 300,000 years ago.

Critical clues come from comparisons with domesticated animals. In his 1868 book “The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication,” Charles Darwin reported that there are various surprising biological markers of the domestication process.

For instance, every kind of domesticated nonhuman mammal includes some adults with floppy ears, which are very rare in adult wild animals. Making matters more mysterious, there was no obvious reason why docility should be linked to floppy ears. It was just something that happened.

Another example is white spots on foreheads, which are common in horses, cows, dogs and cats but not in wild animals. It was the same story for white feet, curly tails and more than a dozen other characteristics.

The list of traits associated with the “domestication syndrome” is useful, because it provides telling clues to the human past. Critically, the domestication syndrome includes changes to bones. Fossil bones allow archaeologists to recognize when species such as dogs, goats and pigs became domesticated.

As the archaeologist Helen Leach argued in an influential 2003 article, they can do the same for humans. Dr. Leach listed four characteristics of the bones of domesticated animals:

They mainly have smaller bodies than their wild ancestors; their faces tend to be shorter and don’t project as far forward; the differences between males and females are less highly developed; and they tend to have smaller brain cavities (and thus brains). As it turns out, all of these changes appear in human fossils. Even our brain size fits the pattern: While the human brain grew steadily over the last two million years, that trajectory took a sudden turn about 30,000 years ago, when brains started to become smaller.

The differences between modern humans and our earlier ancestors have a clear pattern: They look like the differences between a dog and a wolf.

Half a million years ago, our ancestors were heavier-bodied, with relatively bigger males, more masculine faces and bigger teeth. To extrapolate from domesticated animals, these characteristics indicate that our ancestors were less docile than we are today. Pre-sapiens humans would have had a greater propensity for reactive aggression, losing their tempers more easily, quick to threaten and fight one another.

A fascinating puzzle is why these physical changes go along with the changes in emotion and behavior that we call domestication. Why should humans and animals grow flatter faces as they become less aggressive?

One way of answering that question is to think about nipples. Nipples provide no benefit to males, yet mammals have maintained them since the origin of suckling around 200 million years ago. That is because, in the growing embryo, the sequence of development responsible for female nipples, which are adaptive, also leads to male nipples, which aren’t.

In the same way, the traits associated with domestication—like flatter faces and smaller brains—may not be evolutionarily adaptive in themselves. Rather, they are side effects that go along with what really matters about domestication: the reduction of aggression that, in animals, we call tameness. The forces that led us to become more peaceful with one another, over the course of thousands of generations, have apparently left their mark on our bodies as well as our minds.

SOURCE

****************************************

Obama's Immigration Action Means Tax Refunds For Illegals, Says IRS

A great absudity.  Hopefully Trump will find time to look into it

President Obama’s aggressive executive action on immigration is still being litigated in the courts. In the meantime, tax refunds for the affected illegal immigrants have become controversial too. The IRS has reconfirmed that illegal immigrants can file and claim refunds for the last three years. Sound too bizarre to be true? Some say it isn’t possible, but not the IRS.

It's called the Earned Income Tax Credit, the same refundable tax credit responsible for billions in fraudulent refunds. IRS Commissioner Koskinen explained the seemingly bizarre result to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Illegal immigrants covered by the President’s amnesty deal can claim back tax credits for work they performed illegally, even if they never filed a tax return during those years.

This written response clarified the IRS chief's earlier statements, confirming that illegals can get back taxes. Earlier this year, Mr. Koskinen said that to claim a refund, an illegal immigrant would need to have filed past tax returns. Now, the IRS chief says they can claim it even if they never filed tax returns in the past. According to the IRS, illegal immigrants granted amnesty and Social Security numbers can claim up to three years of back tax credits.

The IRS says a 2000 Chief Counsel Advice (CCA) on this issue is correct. With the amnesty, illegal immigrants could receive tens of thousands of dollars in tax refunds. Under President Obama’s executive action, an illegal immigrant can: (1) get a Social Security number; (2) claim the Earned Income Tax Credit for the three open tax years; and (3) IRS sends three years of tax refunds. No matter that you never paid taxes, never filed a return, worked off the books, etc.

The IRS says this is the way the Earned Income Tax Credit works. IRS Commissioner Koskinen says the IRS is following a 15-year-old opinion that “a taxpayer may claim the Earned Income Tax Credit for a taxable year using a Social Security number acquired in a later taxable year.” Calling the three year tax refund perk a mockery of the law, Senator Grassley noted that illegals would be able to claim billions of dollars in tax benefits.

Meantime, U.S. Rep. Patrick McHenry introduced a bill to keep undocumented workers from receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit. “My bill is a direct result of the (IRS) announcement,” said McHenry, a Republican who represents the 10th District, which includes Gaston County. “It’s very simple. If you’re not here legally, you should not be able to access the Earned Income Credit. It’s for the American taxpayers who are trying to make ends meet.”

SOURCE 

********************************

For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

**************************