What I am getting at here is that no number or term in economics means exactly what you think it does. I find I often have to compare several numbers (and definitions) to get a feel for what is going on.

Both Geithner’s PPIP and TALF are directed at securitized instruments. In Congressional testimony Geithner has expressed support for even the most egregious form of security, the naked CDS.

Wages do indeed go flat a little before Reagan took office. There was a Volcker induced recession at the time and this was expectable. Under normal circumstances, at the recession’s end, wages should have picked up but Reagan’s Presidency with its hallmark “trickle down economics” began the great transfer of wealth out of the middle class to those who were already wealthy. There were some other factors (anti-unionism, etc.) but this marks the construction of what has become known as the paper economy, the shift away from a worker based to investor based model, a model which so spectacularly melted down 8 1/2 months ago.

Under Clinton, fueled by Greenspan’s easy credit policies, some 23 million jobs were created in 8 years. As classical economics would tell you, competition for labor will bid up the price for labor and hence wages. Unfortunately, the Clinton boom ended in the dot com bust and soon after the disaster that was Bush took over the reins of power.

Both healthcare and banking had decades to get their acts together as private run concerns. Given the financial meltdown and the failure to deliver affordable universal healthcare, private enterprise has blown it big time. What most Americans and even businesses need banks for is very limited. Much of it could be done by government or by sharply constrained private entities. For healthcare though, I see no private system or privately insured system which can deliver affordable healthcare to all Americans in an equitable way. The profit motive of Big Pharma, insurance companies, and HMOs is in fundamental conflict with the core mission of healthcare. There is just no escaping that in a private system.

Still, it is worth it. You have to think about specific examples. I usually explain it with the first draft of Article 2 of the Uniform Commercial Code, which was drafted by a group of academics who knew the common law, and lawyers representing a wide spectrum of businesses. All businesses are both buyers and sellers. If they tried to unbalance the sales provisions towards either buyer or seller, they would stand to lose as much as they would win. The drafters included academics who knew about contracts of adhesion and other consumer abuses, and put in provisions to deal with those as well. Everyone knew that as individuals they faced those problems, so it made sense to add minimal protections.

Of course, the same can be said about some of the rest of the UCC, but Article 9 isn’t one of them.

health care & energy costs rose and then Reagan & co busted unions and deregulated financial markets…we were off to the races.

There are intellectually sound criticisms of Rawls, but for me he is persuasive and explanatory. I don’t think we can create a complete philosophical system from thin air, but we can do better than the free market people who provide only an abstraction from the system as it evolved.

People who have such dreams really really dread getting bogged down in ordinary jobs they know aren’t going to give them the American Dream. They know their jobs are crap. Look at the t.v. show Friends and how those characters relate to their work — it’s just something they have to do. Look at other ‘office’ humor and entertainment. It all portrays work as crap with crap bosses and no pay or promotions. That is the dead end you don’t want. Given that any kind of hopeful dream seems worth a shot.

The union movement gave people HOPE and OPPORTUNITY, but Republicans knew those people would vote Democratic, so they had to kill that animal.

Now it’s just the utter disaster of Republican management, er governance which shows people a Republican government is just like crap businesses led by crap managers. It’s a scam you can’t survive.

We have to really fix the economy or the last 30 years of Republican economics will just continue to destroy us.