How to fund a universal basic income without increasing taxes or inflation on October 9, 2017In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world’s best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 years. All human jobs were expected to be automated in 120 years, […]
How to fund a universal basic income without increasing taxes or inflation on October 9, 2017In May 2017, a team of researchers at the University of Oxford published the results of a survey of the world’s best artificial intelligence experts, who predicted that there was a 50 percent chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks within 45 years. All human jobs were expected to be automated in 120 years, […]
Mr president, be careful what you wish for: higher interest rates will kill the recovery on June 19, 2017Responding to earlier presidential pressure, the Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates this week for the third time since November, from a fed funds target of 1% to 1.25%. But as noted in The Guardian in a March 2017 article titled “Trump Is Set to Win the Battle on Interest Rates, but US […]
Well look at everything: more thoughts on Trumps $1 trillion infrastructure plan on December 12, 2016The Trump agenda, it seems, is not set in stone. The president-elect has a range of advisors with as many ideas. Steven Mnuchin, his nominee for Treasury Secretary, said in November that “we’ll take a look at everything,”even the possibility of extending the maturity of the federal debt with 50-year or 100-year bonds to take […]
Japan’s Helicopter Money play: road to hyperinflation or cure for debt deflation? on August 1, 2016When then-Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave his famous helicopter money speech to the Japanese in 2002, he was talking about something quite different from the quantitative easing they actually got and other central banks later mimicked. Quoting Milton Friedman, he said the government could reverse a deflation simply by printing money and dropping it from […]
Monsanto, Bayer and the Push for Corporate Cannabis on July 10, 2016California’s “Adult Use of Marijuana Act” (AUMA) is a voter initiative characterized as legalizing marijuana use. But critics warn that it will actually make access more difficult and expensive, squeeze home growers and small farmers out of the market, heighten criminal sanctions for violations, and open the door to patented, genetically modified (GMO) versions that […]
Print the Money: Trumps reckless proposal echoes Franklin and Lincoln on May 23, 2016Reckless, alarming, disastrous, swashbuckling, playing with fire, crazy talk, lost in a forest of nonsense: these are a few of the labels applied by media commentators to Donald Trump’s latest proposal for dealing with the federal debt. On Monday, May 9th, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate said on CNN, “You print the money.” The remark […]