Alternative Visions – Krugman and Neoliberal Economist Attacks on Sanders’ Programs – 03.25.16

Dr. Jack Rasmus explains how his version of a Financial Transaction Tax on stocks, bonds, derivatives, and currencies could raise far more than sufficient revenues to pay for a single payer-national health care program and still leave hundreds of billions to expand social security Medicare and other programs.  In the second half of the show, Rasmus shows how a single payer system would save $1.2 trillion a year out of the current health care cost of $3 trillion today. Based on a tax study done in Europe in 2013, Rasmus shows a US financial tax of 5% on stocks & bond trades, a 1% tax on derivatives sold in the US, and 1% on non-government US currency sales raises $3.89 trillion a year, or about twice the revenues needed for a comparative single payer system.  Rasmus then reviews and debunks the debates by neoliberal economists like Paul Krugman, and Clinton’s ‘gang of four’ economists, who have been attacking Sanders’ proposals for a financial tax and single payer health care. In the first half of the show, reviewing recent events in the global economy Rasmus addresses the fallout from the European Central Bank’s recent decision to expand its quantitative easing and negative interest rate programs and why they will fail; the growing default risk in the US energy junk bond markets; the preliminary agreements by Russia, Saudi Arabia and others to freeze oil prices; China’s continuing desperate moves to deal with the massive bad corporate debt problem; French retreats on introducing labor market reforms in response to mass demonstrations: the doubling in average prescription drug prices in the US: and why millennials (age 25-34) in the US now earn take home pay today in 2016 less than they did in 1984.