by Guest Contributor | Nov 5, 2012 | Opinion
What would you call a national leader who knows a simple policy that could be implemented at no additional cost that would end poverty, but who refuses to advocate for or even to support that policy? Willfully ignorant? Ideologically blind? A sociopath?
In a campaign speech in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 24, Paul Ryan, the Republican Party Nominee for Vice-President of the United States of America, criticized the Obama administration’s ideological approach to dealing with poverty, placing it within a half-century of liberal attempts to alleviate poverty, stretching back to at least Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Ryan stated that the war on poverty had been won by poverty. As specific proof of the failure of government intervention against poverty, Ryan stated, “Just last year, total federal and state spending on means-tested programs came in at more than one trillion dollars. How much is that in practical terms? For that amount of money, you could give every poor American a check for $22,000.”
The Republican ticket believes they can reduce taxes by 5 trillion dollars, increase military spending by 2 trillion dollars, keep Social Security and MediCare spending at current rates, and reduce the national debt all by closing tax loopholes and eliminating deductions. So their math should not be automatically assumed to be correct. But to be charitable, I will do so anyway.
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, the poverty rate for a single individual in the 48 contiguous states is $11,170 for 2012, and $23,050 for a family of four. And if sending every poor person a check for $22,000 were administered through the Internal Revenue Service in people’s federal income tax returns, it would be a lot simpler and cheaper than the IRS’s administration of the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the many means-tested programs that would presumably be eliminated to pay for the $22,000 payment. Even if the extreme work disincentive of an all-or-nothing grant were nearly eliminated by reducing it to a mere $12,000 and making it universal but with a 50% take-back rate, it would still be much simpler than the EITC. So Paul Ryan just explained how the United States could literally end poverty by fiat without spending any more money than it already is and with a massive savings in bureaucratic spending. So is this what the Romney-Ryan ticket proposes to do for America?
No. This explanation for how to end poverty was used only to show the ineffectiveness of the current government approaches to poverty. But Ryan did not actually propose ending poverty via this method in his speech. Neither he nor Romney have ever proposed anything like the plan he described to end poverty. In fact, in this speech, the closest thing to an alternative vision Ryan offered for dealing with poverty was to suggest school vouchers. He claimed the way for people to escape poverty is through education, and noted that he and Romney supported educational “choice”. Data from the famous SIME-DIME basic income studies suggest that Ryan has the causal relationship between escaping poverty and improving educational achievement backwards. A basic income was shown to be a highly cost-effective means of increasing grades for children in the families studied.
Is Ryan really so sociopathic? A more charitable, and more likely, explanation is ideological blindness. Ryan may actually be bothered by poverty, but he likely views “income redistribution” as simply wrong. In this, his thinking would be similar to that of Thomas Jefferson, who understood intellectually that slavery was morally wrong, but who also believed it to be morally wrong for the state to take a person’s property. The mutual mistake made by Jefferson and Ryan is the belief that “property” exists as a moral imperative created prior to either mutual agreement or imposition by threat of force.
The convention of property is a very good idea that most often enhances both economic incentives and personal freedom. But a convention is all that it is, and when certain forms of property interfere with economic incentives or personal freedoms, those forms of property need to be eliminated or reformed. The nation of England has traditionally treated titles of nobility as forms of personal property, but when the United States was founded, we eliminated such forms of property from our existence. Nine decades later, we eliminated the form of property known as slavery from our existence. Current forms of government created property such as land titles, patents, and shares in government chartered corporations are probably still on balance good ideas and do not need to be eliminated entirely. But they still benefit the few who utilize them at the expense of the public who created them. Demanding that such forms of property be reformed to require full compensation to those who are displaced is not asking for handouts from the makers. It is asking for payment from the takers. It is demanding justice.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 23, 2012 | Opinion
Karl Hinrichs and Matteo Jessoula (eds), Labour Market Flexibility and Pension Reforms: Flexible Today, Secure Tomorrow? Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, xviii + 262 pp, hbk, 0 230 29006 8, £55
Time was when a lifetime of full-time employment would be followed by retirement on a contributory state pension supplemented, for the fortunate, by an occupational pension, and, for the less fortunate, by a means-tested state supplementary pension. Those who are even more fortunate may have invested in a life insurance policy that lasts into their elderly years. Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped some people wondering does Guaranteed Universal Life expire? Both employment and retirement income were relatively secure. Employment is now less secure, and increasing numbers of people experience part-time employment, short-term contracts, and periods of unemployment, making ‘flexicurity’ an important social policy aim: flexible labour markets accompanied by secure incomes and public services. There are also fears of an uncertain pension future, especially when it comes to investment; saving for a pension can be risky. Just like with everything in life, there is most likely a solution for this issue.
The chapters in this book are the result of a European Commission funded research project on the prospects for income security in old age in a Europe increasingly characterised by insecure employment and therefore flexible employment patterns. The problem that policy-makers and the book’s authors face is that many state and occupational pension schemes are posited on the now outdated notion of the ‘standard employment relationship’ – lifelong, stable full-time employment. Such schemes, whether state, occupational, or private, are funded by employee and employer contributions. Less stable employment patterns mean fewer and lower contributions and thus less income security in old age.
Each of the book’s chapters studies the current pension structure, labour market position, and recent reforms, in a particular country. There are chapters on Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK. The editors conclude that these countries fall into three groups and that each group exhibits a particular pattern of recent reforms. Countries that previously relied for retirement income on state contributory pensions have raised contribution rates and/or subsidized the insurance fund out of general taxation, and have now introduced private and occupational pension schemes, which could be worth looking into when finding the right time to step away from your business. In countries with already more than one of the three ‘pillars’ of pension provision – state, occupational, and private – the emphasis has tilted towards private and occupational schemes, and now towards compulsory enrolment in funded portable defined contribution schemes which blur the boundary between private and occupational pensions. Eastern European countries are seeing both the development of contributory public schemes and a transition into privately funded pensions.
On the basis of the research results presented in the individual chapters the editors conclude that in segmented labour markets (for instance, in Germany, where ‘insiders’ still experience considerable employment security, and ‘outsiders’ highly insecure employment) pension provision ‘dis-integrates’: that is, it is worse at poverty prevention and income maintenance for those experiencing more fragmented labour market participation than for those in more secure employment; that in countries with more homogenous labour markets (as in the UK, where employment insecurity is more equally shared across the labour market) there are integrating elements in the pension system; and that where the labour market is highly homogenous, as in Denmark, the pension system is highly integrated. Central to the integrating characteristics of Denmark’s and the Netherlands’ systems are their ‘generous basic pensions based on residence … These schemes are crucial in preventing poverty in old age, especially for workers with interrupted carers or on an atypical contract, as well as women, who mainly work part-time’ (p.244). What isn’t entirely clear is what’s causing what: Does a more or less homogenous labour market result in a particular pattern of reforms, or is there some third factor causing both the labour market type and the reform pattern?
In the UK we might soon be moving in a more universalist direction. If we want to prevent poverty in old age then the evidence of this book suggests that it is in this direction that we should move, because it is in this direction that flexicurity can be achieved. The more general lesson to be drawn from the book is that poverty prevention and income maintenance in old age will be best served across Europe by universal state pensions accompanied by compulsory enrolment in portable funded defined contribution schemes to which both employer and employee contribute.
This is a well researched, well edited, and clearly written book, and anyone with anything to do with pensions policy should be reading it.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 22, 2012 | Opinion
It is always interesting to read detailed arguments for a Citizen’s Income, but might I invite your readers to consider a broader reform programme which would entail a long-term foundation for the Citizen’s Income we all want to see? A reform programme which would reconcile socialism and capitalism? Of course a claim such as this cannot be fully argued in the space of a letter, but the principles can be simply stated.
The most important element in a new framework for the economy would be the evaluation of the social costs and benefits of each kind of enterprise and, through a system of levies and grants, their introduction into market prices. Other demands on industry and commerce, most notably taxation of profits, would cease. Taxation would be confined to individual participants in the economy, but in their capacity as citizens or residents paying for the benefits society brings them. The Citizen’s Income should not be paid for out of a levy on economic enterprise.
Society, for its part, should recognise its capital value as an instrument which makes enterprise possible. And it should translate this value into a practical tool by the creation of a sovereign wealth fund which would invest in stocks and shares at home and abroad in parallel with other funds. Income from the fund would be dedicated to the citizens, thus providing a funding base for a true citizen’s income, though the fund could also be used for collective initiatives. The model would be Alaska’s Permanent Fund. I leave on one side the priority support needed by those who cannot be expected to support themselves in the economy, that is: children, who are too young to work; the very elderly, who are past working; and people who suffer chronic sickness or disability.
The size of the fund ultimately required to make it worthwhile should not be underestimated. As to practicalities, nations such as China already have sovereign wealth funds. The way forward will become clearer once the principles and implications are widely understood. Even if one doesn’t want to go the whole way in redesigning the framework of the economy, the creation of a sovereign wealth fund surely provides a way forward by translating the value of society into a practical reality for the benefit of all its members without imposing a levy on the economy. At the same time, the fund would help to reduce the serious inequality in the ownership of our capital.
The way to pursue the objectives of a basic income needs to be looked at in the light of a reconciliation of socialism and capitalism, which has been the great unsolved problem of the last 100 years. The advent of globalisation has pointed up a way to do this.
The starting point is the recognition that it is no longer satisfactory to treat the economy as if it were simply society at work, the way in which its members make their living. Globalisation has made it as clear as can be that society needs to clarify and redefine the framework within which it allows the economy to operate.
Here are the principal elements of a new framework:
- Capitalism must be required to operate in its most competitive forms, subject only to the laws of the land and effective constraints on monopoly ( whilst recognising that some monopolies are an indispensable adjunct of privately owned initiatives ).
- Market prices of products and services must reflect social as well as private costs and benefits. These costs would include such things as the use of public communications systems, the consequences of pollution and effects on health of products sold.
- The most instructive example of this is the labour market. Employers provide the indispensable benefit to society of gainful work by its members. On the other hand they receive the benefit from society of a readily available labour force. Recognising their joint interest society and industry and commerce should jointly meet the cost of maintaining the supply of readily available labour. A great advantage of this approach is that employers of all kinds would immediately apply their minds to the invention and support of all kinds of scheme for reducing and even eliminating unemployment.
- Alongside this would be a requirement that all those participating in the economy must insure themselves against the risk of unemployment – through ill health or redundancy for example – under a system of mandatory minimum cover and optional higher levels. Society would no longer pay benefit to unemployed people capable of working.
- Profits as such would no longer be subject to tax, for which there would no longer be any justification. Taxation would be confined to individuals as citizens or visitors.
- Society would, of course, continue to play its own direct part in the economy through social enterprises such as health services, and education and, increasingly it seems, local and national collective initiatives.
We turn now to the changes in society itself which will secure the objectives of socialism alongside its wholehearted commitment to capitalism as the best way of maximising the national product. Society’s financial support for its members should be concentrated in the first place on those who cannot be expected to support themselves in the economy, that is: children, who are too young to work; the very elderly, who are past it; and those who are chronically sick or disabled. The funds for this support should be provided by the collective ownership of productive capital. The amount of capital required to generate the necessary income should not be underestimated. But support will gather as taxpayers realise that the demands on them will fall as the capital increases.
Beneficiaries would receive their income as of right but expenditure would be administered in a three-way partnership with a family carer, if any, and the state, normally represented by a dedicated social worker. The capital funds would be managed by professional investment managers alongside their commercial analogues.
Once we have provided for those who cannot operate in the economy income from the sovereign funds can be used to introduce a basic income for all. It is entirely right that this, rather than the income of working taxpayers, should be the source of the basic income.
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 15, 2012 | Opinion
The debt crisis persists. Bankruptcy is more common now than ever before, with bankruptcy attorneys in Harrisburg PA, and attorneys all over the world, dealing with increasing numbers of clients searching for advice on their debts and money worries. In the US, the Eurozone, and the UK, politicians are implementing dire austerity packages in order to reduce government deficits. Greece and Italy may be in the worst position, but the phenomenon deeply affects the majority of developed economies.
The new circumstances have led to the increase in the need for a debt collection agency for most banks. On the other hand, debt can quickly become overwhelming for companies who rely on business finance to stay afloat. If you’d like to learn more about ensuring your cashflow management system is as robust as possible in order to keep your business at its best, take a look at these debtor management tips.
Faulty thinking
How has this come about? The popular answer trotted out as the daily news mantra that governments have been reckless, bankers have been greedy, and consumers have been overspending, is too simplistic. The problem has deeper roots and causes, and will continue unabated unless these are better understood and addressed by policy.
Current talk is entirely monetarist. Economics is reduced to some sort of meta-accountancy. Keynes is derided by people who have never read him. Leading economics media commentators often have no formal economics training or degrees. Economics degrees themselves have often been restyled as ‘economics, finance and business’ degrees. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer tells the nation that it ‘cannot afford’ economic activity, which has to be cut because we simply ‘don’t have the money’. But the real economy is about real resources of people, skills, infrastructure, technology, land. All of these are available.
Standing back for a moment, isn’t it curious that human societies allow the money that they themselves create as an artefact to serve the real economy, then allow it to dictate their real economic behaviour? The tail really is wagging the dog. In the present structure, governments must raise money from the bond markets, who insist on repayment at interest rates which these markets determine according to their own level of confidence. Thus society and its governments are entirely subject to the prescriptions of bond dealers and credit rating agency speculators, who have no remit or capability in social leadership and management. Curious again, that UK political comment which is so troubled about ‘handing sovereignty to Brussels’, and to non-elected technocrats, is entirely supine in handing far greater sovereignty to bond dealers and credit rating agencies. Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch are entirely unelected and lack any democratic accountability, and yet are allowed to sit in easy judgment on our total economies, and to determine their prospects and scope for action. We can thank Michel Barnier, the EC Internal Market Commissioner, for seeking to constrain them. He deserves our support.
Rethinking money
We need a new paradigm in which we understand money and financial agencies as servants rather than as masters of the real economy. Money is virtual, not real. It does not obey the laws of thermodynamics : it can be created or destroyed. Commercial banks do this regularly. They operate lending ratios whereby they lend a multiple of the deposits lodged with them. Market economies ‘print money’ all the time in this way as a regular practice. A sustained total run on the banks would always cause them to collapse. The system is supported only by confidence. The only rule is that the amount of money in circulation has to be matched by real output, if its value is to be maintained. To allow monetary factors to determine policy for the real economy is like trying to drive a car by bending its speedometer needle.
An alternative diagnostic
So what alternative diagnostic of the ongoing debt crisis is available? A thought experiment might help. In an imaginary totally automated economy with no workers, there would be no wages, and therefore no effective monetised demand. Goods and services would therefore have to be allocated by government to consumers by some voucher or shareholder mechanism. As Bob Crow, the RMT union leader put it in his ‘Lunch with the Financial Times’ interview in March last year, ‘if you have robots build cars, how are robots going to buy them?’.
A more erudite version of the same concept comes from Professor Robert Solow, a distinguished emeritus professor at MIT and Nobel Economics Laureate, who points out that with burgeoning production from advanced technologies ‘the wage will absorb only a small fraction of all that output. The rest will be imputed to capital…the extreme case of this is the common scare about universal robots : labour is no longer needed at all. How will we then live? ….The ownership of capital will have to be democratised…(needing) some form of universal dividend…Not much thought has been given to this problem’ (in ‘Revisiting Keynes’ by Pecchi and Piga, MIT Press 2010, p92).
In this scenario, the total voucher spend by the government would represent an unavoidable debt which would never be paid off. We are not there, but we have strong elements of this scenario in our modern technological economies. The delinking of productivity and real wages makes debt inevitable, with people left trying to figure out how to dispute collections in an attempt to continue some sense of normalcy in their lives.
A general diagnostic for technologically advanced economies then emerges that whenever productivity exceeds real wages, and if the difference is not fed through to consumer demand via increased shareholder dividends or social transfer payments, then consumer demand will be insufficient to purchase output GDP. In this situation, which can and does occur, the shortfall in consumer demand can be made up by extended consumer credit and welfare payments, or output GDP can be cut in a recession. The diagnostic bears some resemblance to Marx’s and Keynes’s thinking on the implications for technology, automation and productivity on the economy, but should not be dismissed for this honourable association.
A recent history of the problem
2007 was the root of the present crisis. If we go back to UK economic data then, we find that between 2005 and 2007
- GDP and consumption continued to grow but household disposable income flattened
- in 2007 real household disposable income grew by only 0.1% whilst GDP grew by 3%
- household disposable income reduced as a percentage of consumption from 78.2% to 74.7%
- the gap was met by increased household credit which grew from £17bn to £55bn
This is shown in the following graphs (where ‘household borrowing’ refers to new household borrowing in each year):
The familiar dramatic increase in household credit is less apparent in the scale of the above GDP diagrams but is evident when graphed alone in the following diagram
£55bn new consumer debt in 2007 became essential to fund the purchase of output GDP. Without it GDP would have fallen due to decreased effective demand, and employment, wages and income would then have fallen as a consequence.
Vicious circles
The current system faces two alternative vicious circles, either that
1. increased productivity reduces the wage and household income element of GDP and this demand drop leads to a GDP recession
or 2. the demand gap is filled by increased consumer credit and government debt to fund welfare payments, which becomes un-repayable in the next period.
Neither is sustainable and leads to banks reducing consumer credit, and government cutting the real economy in the mistaken belief that this will eliminate its deficit. This is where we are now, and without a radical rethink, we will be chasing our tails for ever in the doomed attempt to write off deficits from an ever shrinking GDP. Those who call for increased government expenditure under a Plan B to raise GDP (which would have the effect of raising the tax take and reducing welfare payments and hence reducing the deficit) are derided by their critics who ask how it can be possible to incur debt to reduce debt. But the coalition’s Plan A insistence on cutting the economy to reduce the deficit has to explain how GDP can be increased by cutting GDP.
New thinking
An alternative paradigm is needed to frame an alternative policy. There is nothing wrong with the real economy. Its factories, transport and communications infrastructure, skilled labour, restaurants etc. are all fully operational and highly efficient. There is also plenty of real demand for goods and services, especially globally from developing country consumers. It is purely the financial system which is disabling the real economy, and it is the financial sector which therefore urgently needs re-engineering.
It is commonly said that banks lent too much credit in 2007, firstly in the US sub-prime mortgage market, and then widely in the UK economy. But the above analysis shows that £55bn of bank lending was exactly the right amount needed to purchase GDP output, a claim which is substantiated by the lack of inflation in goods and services markets both then and throughout the NICE decade. It is true that asset prices inflated, but this resulted from any credit beyond that £55bn. The £55bn consumer credit matched against GDP output was non-inflationary.
Distributive considerations
Productivity growth in excess of real wage growth, and the gap between consumer income and GDP output that this produces, has distributive consequences. Between social groups, it tends to disfavour the poor, who rely more on the wage element of income, who suffer the loss of low-skilled employment when automation displaces labour, and whose access to credit as a replacement for wages is weak. Welfare payments are their only recourse. Surprisingly, the Institute of Fiscal Studies report ‘Poverty and Inequality in the UK: 2011′ shows that increased welfare payments did overcome income disadvantage. According to the IFS study, child poverty at 20% is now the lowest since 1985, and pensioner poverty is currently lower than at any point in the last 50 years.
The sectoral distribution of GDP is also affected by automation. Manufacturing employment and real wages per unit of output will fall, and much of this employment is transferred to low wage service sectors of the economy, only some of which, like banking, are subject to automation and productivity improvement. From anecdotal evidence, increased low productivity, low-wage service sector employment has absorbed employment reduction in more automated manufacturing sectors, and masked the effect of productivity in reducing aggregate real wages. Population growth is another factor masking the demand deficiency resulting from the delinkage of productivity and real wages.
We could of course take the view that reduced consumption is exactly what we want as part of a new ascetic paradigm to conserve world resources. Competition for natural resources from China and India may well force this choice on us anyway. But if we do pursue this option, income redistribution to those newly unemployed through productivity gains unmatched by new demand will be an essential part of the paradigm. Some form of welfare payment which does not add to government debt would be needed.
A Citizen’s Income – the only route to stop debt being inevitable as productivity grows
If it is accepted that the delinkage of productivity and real wages will make an element of debt financing inevitable, then a possible way forwards is a non-repayable financial instrument, a universal credit. This would have to be non-repayable at both consumer and government level. Proposals for a citizen’s income are longstanding. Such an income would not be repayable by the consumer and could be financed without incurring government debt. This could be done by creating a public sector bank with a government deposit, and a lending ratio set to exactly meet the shortfall between output GDP made possible by increased productivity, and flat or declining real wages. If the £55bn incurred as consumer credit in 2007 had instead been funded in this way then the economy would not face the crisis that it faces today. We have to think outside the box. Calls for a plan B are stuck within the present paradigm. This new paradigm would re-engineer the financial sector and the management of inevitable debt. It would release the real economy from artificial financial constraint, and deliver sound finances built on productivity advances. It would also greatly enhance social cohesion.
by Karl Widerquist | Sep 10, 2012 | Opinion, The Indepentarian
You reach a milestone the first time you or your organization is named the mastermind behind a vast government conspiracy that goes all the way up to the President of the United States. This happened to the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee (USBIG) on July 23, 2012, when an opinion piece by J. D. Longstreet on The Right Side News website declared that the ultimate aim of the Obama administration’s “Socialist/Marxist” conspiracy is to establish exactly the kind of policy described on the USBIG website. The article actually used several long—properly cited—quotes from the USBIG website to describe Obama’s unspoken goal.
As the author of many of the quotes that website took from USBIG, it was a lot of fun to read my words used to describe the hidden agenda of the President of the United States. My sympathies are closer to the Green Party than the Democrats. But if Obama has secretly engineered his entire political career to put my words into actions, well, gee wiz, the least I could do is vote for him. The website states, “Our goal is to provide accurate news and information about threats to our country and Western civilization, and to provide you with the opportunity to counter these threats.” Even with this assurance, unfortunately, I don’t think the Obama administration is a vast conspiracy to do USBIG’s bidding. Obama never calls.
Although this is the first time (I know of) that the USBIG website has caught the attention of conspiracy theorists, it is not the first time that BIG has caught their attention. Longstreet’s conspiracy theory is based on a theory Glenn Beck proposed on Fox news a few years ago. Beck reached way back to a 1966 article, in which Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward discussed the large number of people who were eligible for public assistance but had not applied for it. They argued for (and later became part of) a movement to get eligible people to sign up for welfare benefits, partly in hope that the financial pressure of new applicants would lead to a streamlined federal welfare system hopefully employing a basic income guarantee. Nearly 35 years later Glenn Beck decided that this published paper was the secret objective of an on-going conspiracy to bankrupt the federal government and bring about some kind of socialist revolution.
Longstreet writes, “If I am correct, then we are actually seeing the ‘Cloward-Piven Strategy’ at work. We are observing the foundation, the groundwork — if you will — for establishing a guaranteed annual (minimum) income for American citizens. It is very, very, worrisome. But — it is only the latest move by our socialist leaders to break America so they can re-mold her in the image of their choosing, which is, unarguably a socialist/Marxist state.”
It’s easy to dismiss the Right Side News as the lunatic fringe of the extreme right, which it probably is. But their rhetoric is not that different from what one can hear on Fox News and many other mainstream media outlets on a regular basis. It is symptomatic of how far divorced America’s political discourse is from the political reality. Over the last 30 years or more, the U.S. welfare system has been slowly but consistently dismantled. The minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation. Individuals’ rights to organize unions have been reduced. Taxes on the wealthy have fallen while government favors for the wealthy have increased. Wages have stagnated for 30 years despite healthy economic growth over the period, the benefits of which have been captured almost entirely by the richest few percent of Americans. Yet, somehow a large part of the American populace lives under the belief that we have been moving toward socialism.
It’s fine to label the Obama administration’s policies “socialist” (or to throw any other label on them you want), and it’s fine to believe the Obama administration’s policies are wrong. But if the mild piecemeal policies of the Obama administration are socialist, the United States has been socialist since the Theodore Roosevelt administration and it has been drifting away from socialism since the early 1980s at the latest.
Wild conspiracy theories, like the one by Beck and Longstreet, are part of a brand of fact-denying conservatism that has recently made its way into mainstream U.S. politics. One can now expect to be taken seriously while claiming global warming isn’t happening, the Earth is only 6,000 years old, Obama is a secret Muslim, and so on. Someone paying only casual attention to the mainstream media in the United States could easily think all of these are live, debatable issues. We can hope that such obvious fact-deniers will eventually hang themselves. But we should also be aware that repeating the ridiculous can make it respectable. We have to continually call-out the fact-deniers. The only way to fight falsehoods is with facts.
-Karl Widerquist, begun in New York, NY, completed in South Bend, IN, August 2012
If you’re interested in seeing Longstreet’s editorial on the Right Side News, go to:
https://www.rightsidenews.com/2012072316711/editorial/us-opinion-and-editorial/a-guaranteed-minimum-income-in-the-us.html
