Gas Wars and Woes
June 25th, 2009 by Grandpa OddballCopyright © GetOddNews and Grandpa Oddball June 25, 2009. All rights reserved.
Well, I could go on but you get the idea. The question is, how can we fix things. I gave some suggestions previously (throw the rascals out and the naked economy) but let me add the following:
- Raise the minimum wage, and filibuster the annual pay raise in the Senate until the minimum wage is first raised piecemeal to $8 per hour and then linked annually to the cost of living.
- Break up the giant monopolies such as Exxon-Mobil and Pfizer to bring down the price of oil and prescription drugs. In fact, replace all monopolistic free trade with competitive protectionism and rebuild our industrial base. (see Dr. Batra’s book The Myth of Free Trade: The Pooring of America
) for a practical definition of competitive protectionism).
- Raise the capital gains, dividend and top-bracket income tax rates to the maximum 40 percent level that prevailed under Bill Clinton, who balanced the federal budget.
- Implement a combination of a dual exchange rate and historically validated tariffs. This is probably the most important step we can take to rebuild our industrial base.
- A particularly vexing problem is health and retirement benefits. Under our current free trade policies not only have these benefits have been decimated but we have squandered our nations wealth! Traditional economic solutions to recessions and depressions) no longer apply because the extra stimulus money goes not to solve these problems but is siphoned off to foreign and global corporations providing them with the money to buy even more of our industrial base. The only way to solve this problem is to restructure the tax system and health care system to offload these social costs from corporations in order to make them globally competitive.
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Did you know some of the world’s most efficient corporations are government owned effectively killing the myth that only privately held corporations are efficient and responsive to consumers. All large monopolies, whether private or public, have problems such as the succession problem noted earlier. We can’t let ideology prevent us from developing government owned essential goods and services.
A prime example of the detrimental effects of ideology on the economy is the ENRON fiasco. Here public funds were used to build and efficiently run power plants. Things were running smoothly and efficiently until ideology mandated the sale of public assets to private ownership. The private owners, having a monopoly, then manipulated the power market to gouge the public using assets that were formerly publicly owned (yes, we are that gullible apparently!).
There are a lot of common problems (health, roads, power, water, basic research, etc.) that are amenable to governmental development. We just have to make sure that we provide a competitive environment for all corporations (both public and private).
I can go on but I’m running out of steam. For example, Monopoly or Oligopoly industries such as the domestic automobile industry are the most vulnerable to the predatory effects of free trade especially when that trade is not reciprocal. And I haven’t even touched on environmental or power generation problems. I’ll try to discuss my take on these problems in the future but the sad fact is that fixing the economy is only a stop gap measure on the road to solving these larger problems.
The final question is, How can these reforms be enacted? Not easily!! There are many powerful and entrenched vested interests opposing any reforms. I’m not optimistic.
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Tags: Economics, energy, gas prices
this article with others.
Don’t think I’ll blog about Micheal Jackson. I’m finding more interesting things to me to blog about.
I think I would vote for you. Yes! I would.
Selma
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…