J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

[flintlock]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

I have studied military science for most of my life. In my opinion, huge amounts could be cut from military budgets without affecting actual national security very much. However, the ability to throw our weight around and dominate the world would suffer. And the ability to invade a nation while convincing them its for their own good would be much more difficult. Instead of these micro wars with low casualties, we'd have fewer, but more violent ones. Take your pick.

In my opinion, the excess we cut would mostly be in the loss of our "Global corporate muscle" abilities. Let them hire their own military if thats what they want. In the past you could argue that what helped a US corporation ultimately helped the US people. Now, with the global nature of the world economy, that doesn't always hold up.

Any serious study of this issue should include watching this




And especially what this guy has to say:

[Jay]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

Don't forget, defense spending is mostly a jobs program.

The US does not have to cut its military spending.

Here's a solution: take all of that fat 401(k)/403(b) money and put it into T-Bills.
Amend title 26 of the United States Code (chapter 1, subchapter D, part 1, subpart A) to only allow for Qualified Cash of Deferred Arrangement in cases where employers and employees invest in treasury securities.

Here's another solution: Enforce a stricter version of the Omnibus Foreign Trade and Competitiveness Act.

Here's another solution: Bump the top marginal tax rate up to the median of it's value over the last century (50%).

Here's the easiest solution: Eliminate the FICA Wage Base and tac a FICA percentage tax on to all declared capital gains.

Then let people retire at 62, bring the young into the work force, and call it a day. This is not hard. It is a revenue problem, not a liability problem.

So to keep spending on military imperialism and the global death trade, you want to steal retirement monies, start a trade war, and increase taxes on wage earners. Then, to boot, let everyone retire on those earners backs three years earlier. I can't say I agree with any of that.

[metalman]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

So to keep spending on military imperialism and the global death trade, you want to steal retirement monies, start a trade war, and increase taxes on wage earners. Then, to boot, let everyone retire on those earners backs three years earlier. I can't say I agree with any of that.

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...erview-Janszen

no comment...

[dcarrigg]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

So to keep spending on military imperialism and the global death trade, you want to steal retirement monies, start a trade war, and increase taxes on wage earners. Then, to boot, let everyone retire on those earners backs three years earlier. I can't say I agree with any of that.

I just want to clarify what I meant. If you still don't agree with it, that's okay - these are all just potential solutions.

1) The DoD employs a lot of people, both directly and through defense contractors. Because of security clearances, this stuff is not outsourced. If you go and slash it overnight, you are directly adding to the unemployment. Winding it down should be done in a careful, thoughtful manner.

2) I was not advocating for stealing anyone's retirement. All I was saying was that the law could be changed to limit 401(k) type contributions to treasuries so that moving forward people's retirement would be held in treasuries instead of mutual funds. Allow people to move over current retirement accounts into treasuries if they want to. Everyone still gets their retirement.

3) Limit lopsided trade agreements that lead to large trade deficits.

4) Tax people more on all income earned after the first $250,000 (or whatever the high benchmark would be - $1,000,000's fine too - or better yet, index it by region).

5) Make people making over $108k per year pay the same 6.2% into social security for each dollar earned that everyone else has to pay. Right now, once you go past $108k, each dollar is taxed 6.2% less than every dollar before it on FICA.

6) What's better, paying out the cash in unemployment on the wage earner's backs, or paying it out in retirement 3 years earlier? Either way, it's going to be paid out. You decide.

[dcarrigg]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...erview-Janszen

no comment...

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...951#post183951

[metalman]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthr...951#post183951

thx. good one. must be tough to live under the shadow of a giant.

[dcarrigg]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

must be tough to live under the shadow of a giant.

I'll take the bait. What's up?

[metalman]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

I'll take the bait. What's up?

John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth Galbraith

Full name	John Kenneth Galbraith

John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith (properly pronounced /ɡælˈbreɪθ/ gal-BRAYTH, but commonly pronounced /ˈɡælbreɪθ/GAL-brayth), (October 15, 1908 – April 29, 2006) was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century political liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s and he filled the role of public intellectual from the 50's to the 1970s on matters of economics.

Galbraith was a prolific author who produced four dozen books and over a thousand articles on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). He taught at Harvard University for many years. Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; he served as United States Ambassador to India under Kennedy. Due to his prodigious literary output he was arguably the best known economist in the world during his lifetime^[1] and was one of a select few people to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice, in 1946 and 2000, for services to economics.

Although he was a president of the American Economic Association, Galbraith was considered an iconoclast by many economists. This is because he rejected the technical analyses and mathematical models of neoclassical economics as being divorced from reality. Rather, following Thorstein Veblen, he believed that economic activity could not be distilled into inviolable laws, but rather was a complex product of the cultural and political milieu in which it occurs. In particular, he believed that important factors such as advertising, the separation between corporate ownership and management, oligopoly, and the influence of government and military spending had been largely neglected by most economists because they are not amenable to axiomatic descriptions. In this sense, he worked as much in political economy as in classical economics.

Galbraith received 50 Honorary Degrees from institutions around the world:

• Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (LL.D) in 1958^[18]
• University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario (LL.D) in 1961^[19]
• University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario in 1965
• University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan (LL.D) on May 20, 1965^[20]
• Boston College in Boston, Massachusetts (LL.D) in 1967^[21]
• Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York (LL.D) in 1967^[22]
• University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario (LL.D) on 31 May 1968^[23]
• Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts (DHL) in 1968^[24]
• Albion College in Albion, Michigan (D.Litt) in 1968^[25]
• Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois in 1970^[26]
• Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan (LL.D) in Fall 1971^[27]
• York University in Toronto, Ontario (LL.D) Spring 1976^[28]
• Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (LL.D) in 1979^[29]
• Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa (LL.D) in 1983^[30]
• Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts (LL.D) in 1989^[31]
• Warsaw School of Economics in Warsaw, Poland in 1992^[32]
• London School of Economics in London, England (D.Sc) on 28 June 1999^[33]
• Memorial University of Newfoundland in St. John's, Newfoundland (D.Litt) Fall 1999^[34]

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

[dcarrigg]

Re: J. K. Galbraith thinking outside the box

Sorry - I realized to whom you were alluding only moments ago and came back to edit the post. You got there first.