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"Social
Security is a social insurance program - it is not designed
to be the same thing as a 401(k)."
"But
once we concede that people do care about status, it necessarily
follows that the status competition that makes people buy
expensive consumer goods in order to impress other people
constitutes a failure of the market economy - a failure
as real as traffic congestion, or pollution, or any other
activity in which the individual pursuit of self-interest
leads to a collectively bad outcome. Suppose that we could
somehow agree to stop competing over who has the fanciest
car; everyone could then work a bit less, spend more time
with their families, and raise the sum total of human happiness.
Or to put it a bit differently, Americans (or at least the
top few percent of the income distribution) have gotten
into a sort of arms race of conspicuous consumption that,
like most arms races, consumes huge quantities of resources
yet in the end changes little."
Can
we break the machine that is imposing right-wing radicalism
on the United States? The scariest part is that the media
is part of that machine.
Paul
Krugman on TPP:
"I’m
thumbs down. I don’t think the proposal is likely to be
the terrible, worker-destroying pact some progressives assert,
but it doesn’t look like a good thing either for the world
or for the United States, and you have to wonder why the
Obama administration, in particular, would consider devoting
any political capital to getting this through."
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