A few weeks ago, the commission that President Joe Biden set up to examine court reform published draft documents expressing skepticism about adding justices to the court, suggesting that doing so “could further weaken national and international norms against tampering with independent judiciaries.”
But as a new report authored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. makes clear, the nation’s highest court is already being tampered with — thanks to dark money and corporate meddling.
Find out about those manipulations and much more in today’s Midday Poster below, exclusive for subscribers.
Under Today's Clicks (3 Nov 2021), thanks for linking to "HEALTH CARE POLICY COULD TACKLE INFLATION: A new Employ America blog post".
It was dense going for a non-economics-trained reader like me. But to me — again, strictly as an economics layman — this post and a closely related one stumble into the classic TETV (Trained Economist Tunnel Vision) trap: pretending the real world is inhabited essentially by Rational Economic Units, aka "humans".
The authors' policy prescriptions seem, uh, rational enough. But they assume with seeming naivete that (for instance) CEOs and Wall Street overlords will invest in the economy and their own companies instead of raking off billions in stock buybacks.
Studies reveal that buybacks — illegal until November 1982 as fraudulent market manipulation — outpace actual investment.
Endemic political and economic corruption, aka pervasive kleptocracy, doesn't seem to exist in the Trained Economist Tunnel Vision world. Pay no attention to those predatory billionaire hedge fund managers behind the curtain! Kleptocratic impacts on inflation? Sorry, not part of the model!
With the best of intentions, these very smart economists will keep proposing technically brilliant disinflationary policies while ignoring inflationary klepto realities like privatized Medicare, massive Medicare fraud (via "upcoding"), and private equity buying up the available housing stock.
But as long as we have elegant disinflationary models to guide us, what could possibly go wrong?
I say all this with trepidation, since economics is not my field of study. If I've messed up, someone please say so. Thank you!