Neil DeGrasse Tyson On Teaching Religion In Science Class

I wish there were a rule that only shit like this could be tweeted on a regular basis.

Ten Reasons Austerity Is A Crock

The Article: 10 Reasons Austerity Is a Crock by Stephanie Kelton in AlterNet.

The Text: Steve Kraske of The Kansas City Star recently interviewed me for a piece about austerity. The story ran in today’s paper. It doesn’t provide much depth (unlike bloggers, journalists have strict space constraints!), so I followed up with a few comments on the Star’s website. I thought I’d share them here, since I’m always trying to improve the way I communicate these ideas with non-economists. So here’s my best effort to make the anti-austerity case in simple terms.

1. When we allow our economy to operate below full employment (as now), we are sacrificing trillions of dollars in lost output and income each year. We can never go back and recover it. It is gone forever. You’ve seen the debt clock? Here’s the lost output clock.

2. Capitalism runs on sales. In survey after survey, we find that the Number One reason businesses are slow to hire and invest in new plant & equipment is a lack of demand for the things they produce. Businesses hire and invest when they’re swamped with customers. See this story in The Wall Street Journal.

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Best News Of The Day: Michele Bachmann Won’t Run For Office Next Year

TLDW: The recent congressional ethics probe sank Molly Brown. Happy Hump Day, all!

Rush Limbaugh, Revealed

Maybe it’s a bit of a leap to say that Limbaugh’s a radio personality simply so that he can wear his klansman gown in peace, but once you take a look at this list of the 20 most racist things he’s said, you might think again.

Thinking Utopian About Income

The Article: Thinking Utopian: How about a universal basic income? by Mike Konczal in The New York Times.

The Text: In light of the recent Oregon Medicaid study, several people have discussed the idea of taking parts of the social insurance system and replacing them with cash benefits. This naturally brings up the debate about whether it should be a policy goal for the United States to adopt a universal basic income (UBI). These poverty-level targeted incomes are universal and unconditional, so everyone would get them regardless of their income, status or work participation. Wonkblog’s Dylan Matthews wrote an overview of universal basic incomes and some proposals for such a system last year.

Though establishing a basic income was once at the forefront of politics, it has since become more of a Utopian, abstract project. But sometimes it is helpful to step back from the day-to-day wonk work and think Utopian.

First, what are some advantages of providing a universal basic income? To those on the left, a UBI would create greater equality by ending poverty and providing a minimum living standard. It would also increase bargaining power for workers, who could demand better working conditions with a safety cushion. As Erik Olin Wright argues in Envisioning Real Utopias, such bargaining power “will generate an incentive structure for employers to seek technical and organizational innovations that eliminate unpleasant work,” which would “have not just a labor-saving bias, but a labor-humanizing bias.”

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