Saturday, June 18, 2016

Fifty

HuffPo: Hillary Clinton Is On A Mission To Rebuild The Democratic Party - A 50-state strategy has been tried before. Her staff think they can do it right this time.
Posted by at

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

two of Hillary’s specific policy proposals: (1) Fed composition, and (2) Alzheimer’s research.

1) Fed composition: if I understand correctly the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates, has 7 Presidential appointees, including the chair, and the 12 regional bank presidents, who are bankers chosen by their peers. (Only 5 of the 12 regional presidents vote at any time, on a rotating basis, but all 12 participate in the meetings.) So the Fed operates a bit overmuch from a banker’s worldview, and too little from a perspective that would take the fortunes of everyday Americans into account.

Hillary wants to make the FOMC fully Presidentially appointed.

2) Alzheimer’s disease. Right now, our nursing homes are operating pretty much at capacity – and they’re filled with dementia patients who were born in the 1920s and 1930s. In 15 years, the first baby boomers will turn 85. If they experience Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia in the same proportion as their predecessors, America’s nursing homes will be overwhelmed beyond belief, because there are so many more Baby Boomers than there are people born between 1930 and 1945. So either we put serious money now into Alzheimer’s research – and that means just a few billion a year, but currently it’s more like in the hundreds of millions, which isn’t nearly enough to pursue all the promising lines of research – or we spend tens or hundreds of billions in 15 years to build and staff new nursing homes for all the Baby Boom dementia patients.

Hillary is the only major political figure I know of who is pushing a major increase in Alzheimer’s research.

2:26 PM
Jim Sande said...

Anonymous, fascinating and thanks for the discourse.

With regards to the Fed. I took two fascinating courses through Coursera on Monetary policy. This was through Columbia University. As my own personal education in economics and such is very weak, I am somewhat partisan you might say regarding the Fed. The Federal Reserve is the bank of last resort to the entire US banking system. The E.C.B. plays the same role for the Eurozone as do the other central banks through the world. The monetary standard throughout the world is the dollar, make no mistake, in fact there are two - dollar systems in place globally. One that functions in the US and the other functions in the rest of the world. The Federal Reserve arose out of this need for a place of last resort. With the collapse in 2008, the Fed eliminated interest rates and made borrowing money as easy as can be in order to stimulate the economy. This in fact happened but the people in the know, the big pocketed corporations and such, the billionaires utilized this cheap money and made gobs more. Ordinary people did okay as well as mortgage rates went very low, credit was cheap 0% interest rates and such, but the standard for getting a mortgage increased a bit. The Federal reserve as far as I learned, does not print money. Everyone thinks that this is how the collapse was financed. It is not. The Fed has a balance sheet - assets and debts. When one side changes so does the other. There is no freely printed money policy in place, that is an urban legend. We want liberals in the Fed. We do not want conservatives in the Fed. When the economy is broken we want cheap money, when inflation is rampant then want to make borrowing hard. This ebb and flow is at the heart of how the Fed changes it's base interbank paper money lending rate, or what I call the base interest rate.

With regards to Alzheimer's. I have had two piers, two excellent friends die from it. At my age, early 60s. It is terrifying and we need all the research we can get and then some. We need to know all we can about medication, diet, lifestyle, everything, and we need to get real serious. I'm happy to read that Clinton seems to understand this great need.

5:30 PM
Glynn Kalara said...

My guess is her and billy's idea of a rebuild will be to first get rid of those pesky Progressives starting with Bernie and company. I think in the general she'll veer hard right to try and pick up the disaffected GOP folks abandoning the Trumptanic.

6:19 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)