Obama is going to propose a freeze on discretionary spending to help rein in the budget. His proposals will affect roughly 3% of the budget. They’ll have no effect on non-discretionary spending, which includes programs like welfare, social security, veteran benefits, and payment of interest on the national debt. All of those have to be paid all the time, every time, according to federal law.

So what are the chances those spending cuts will be made in an election year? Slim to none. Times are hard and Congressmen want discretionary spending in their districts, even if it’s useless “pork barrel” spending on highways that go nowhere or condiment research projects (I’ve seen the guy that gets paid $70,000 a year to measure ketchup speed. Nice work if you can get it…). Congressmen may want to talk about cutting someone else’s program, but only to their constituents. In reality, they’re more likely to secure votes for their programs by promising to vote for everyone else’s program. That’s what we call logrolling.

It’s also what we call political economy. When a politician wants to get re-elected, he behaves in a way that’s often inconsistent with the way we want a politician to behave: in ourbest interests. Given that the way out of this current economic mess is to either experience pain now or to postpone the pain and feel a whole lot more later on, I bet we’ll see a lot of postponing and a lot of incumbents getting re-elected.

That’s a lot of concepts there… amazing how things happen to help the AP Government student understand the coursework…

Marxist economists haven’t died and become part of the fossil record. They’ve adapted and continue to raise critical questions of both Keynesian and Classical economic viewpoints. I recently saw one such viewpoint on LinkTV and felt moved to comment on it.

The lecture in question is called “Capitalism Hits the Fan.” In it, Economics professor Richard Wolff examines what he considers the roots of the current economic mess. He points at how regulations designed to rein in businesses quickly became rules for those businesses to circumvent, get exceptions to, and then eventually abolish. This is true. The Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi observed as much over 2000 years ago: if rats can learn to avoid traps in the kitchen, how much more so can scoundrels learn to avoid the snares set by the law?

When those regulations went away, corporate profits soared while wages stayed flat. For the last 30 years, wages stayed the same for workers across America as their productivity soared. That explains why the profits also soared. Corporations took those huge profits and then used them to underwrite consumer credit cards. Massive credit spending made up for the lack of wage increases.

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Required viewing for all Americans. That’s what I’m calling this. You need to watch it, especially if you’re in my class.

Basically, our financial literacy as Americans is dictated by what the banking industry writes, and if we don’t read up on it, we’re financial illiterates and we’ll be taken for a ride. They’ve got the senate in their pocket – and I love how all the senators protest that they’re not influenced by lobbyist money, but they never, ever vote for meaningful reform. They can vote for reform, but it’s really a few concessions they are willing to make as they scramble to rework the system.

The unregulated free market is a nice way of describing a criminal free-for-all. The banks set the traps and we fall into them, one by one. Yes, regulations stifle growth and innovation, but they also keep people from being bled white by the cheats that flock towards unregulated free markets. I’m sick and tired of cheerleaders for the rich and powerful trying to keep the system as it is. We are in a trap, and the only way out is to change the system so these things can’t deprive us of our liberty.

Simply saying “nobody forced them to get into debt” is garbage. Trickery was in play, and the banks are the perpetrators of that trickery. We, the people, need protection.

Because most states have to run a balanced budget, we’re seeing a very large drop in state government spending, which almost matches dollar for dollar what the federal government is increasing its spending by. The net result: little total change at all. While we did have a preliminary uptick of 3.5% in GDP growth last quarter, that’s the preliminary number. Analysts are now expecting it to be revised downward to about 1%. Since federal spending accounted for over 2% of that growth number, one can see how it vanished so quickly.

The USA is getting ripped off with health care. I spend $3600 a year on health insurance that only covers myself and my three children, have a $700 family deductible, pay 80% of office visit costs, get huge deductibles on certain procedures or treatment options, and I can STILL wind up going medically bankrupt if my insurance company decides to find a way to dance around coverage of a dread disease, heaven forbid I should get one. I spend about $5000 a year on health costs in a normal year and I’m not getting treatment for everything I need treatment for.

The solution to our health care problem really does lie outside our borders.

Frontline recently ran a documentary on health care around the world. If I spent the same $5000 per year on taxes to support health care, I could get my entire family covered, pay no deductibles, and have zero chance of being turned away for a dread disease, let alone going bankrupt for having one.

And before the Republicans jump up and scream blue murder over socialism, I want them to shut up for a second and realize that one of the rightest of the right-wingers, a guy that makes Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck look like a bunch of Commie preverts, the very OTTO VON BISMARCK himself, created the idea of a government-run health care system.

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