Math is Hard

As we now know without a shadow of a doubt the Right in America persists because of and insists on a series of lies and distortions to attempt to destroy the nation because of their unholy loyalty to plutocrats.

In an apparent attempt re-enforce this image, Lloyd Blankenfeind forwarded this wholly absurd claim:

You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn’t devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career.

 Leaving aside the more or less unchanged nature of post retirement life expectancy, who on earth works for 25 years? I mean the average teenager has some kind of job by the time they are 16 and nearly everyone retires between the ages of 62 and 65. If I add 25 to 16 I get 41. Some small time crook who has gamed Wall Street or reaped the rewards of helping other game Wall Street might retire at 41 but you know people become crooks because they are too lazy for honest work.

As near as I can figure the vast majority of Americans work for 49 years or so in a variety of jobs after which they retire and then soon die.

Blankfein is supposed to be some kind of a genius at maths and investment and yet it would seem he can neither add nor does he understand the statistics of life expectancy. No wonder he and his fellow managerial geniuses ruined the economy; they are, in fact, dumb as dirt and twice as filthy.

Money Beats Democracy

Der Spiegel has another article on the mess in Hungary this time highlighting official opposition to the strangling of substantive democracy.  Except that the article begins and really emphasizes how much the Hungarians' decision to curtail its central bank's independence matter "markets"matter to "markets," the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank. One wonders what would have happened if Orban continued on his merry authoritarian and anti-democratic way and left the neoliberal banking policies already in place alone. Would the "markets" have increased the cost of borrowing? Would the IMF/WB or the EU have tsk tsked? History, which is to say my reading of how all the relevant agents acted in the near past, suggests not.

One Sentence or So On Debt And Monetization

Having mulled Graeber's overarching argument over, I think it can be summed up as money made this mess and only getting rid of money can get us out of it. It's this latter point that  leads to his concluding unscientific postscript in which he wonders what shape the new world order will take and from what direction will the shapers come.

And There You Have It

via

Retreat?

So Bank of America is, it seems, not going to charge poor people 5 dollars a month for a service that costs the bank next to nothing. The NYT describes this as a retreat in the face of  concerted opposition. It sounds to me like a bunch of nothing. The retreat comes when BoA does something, I don't know, good like proposing capping the swipe fee at cost plus 2% and lowers its CEO's and all execs' "compensation" by 50% while increasing tellers' by 50% and, while we're at it, lobbying for a living wage and debt jubilee.