Lester sounds like he's making the same arguements made by that org. Lead or Leave, I think it was, that started all those greedy geezer articles flowing. Turned out Lead or Leave was two guys with a lot of funding and news coverage, basically.
Plus, just tonight the hostess was telling me that her property taxes went down to practically nothing when she turned 65, cause she became exempt from the school tax.
So what's the deal?
At 07:41 PM 2/2/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Sid Shniad wrote:
>
>> The Globe and Mail February
2, 1999
>>
>> SCHROEDER CALLS FOR CONTROLS ON CAPITAL FLOW
>>
>> German Chancellor blames international speculators for
devastating lives,
>> economies; MIT economist condemns social inequities
>>
>> Alan Freeman, European Bureau
>> Davos, Switzerland
>>
>> German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder warned yesterday that financial
>> market speculation is leading to worldwide economic in stability and
>> driving fragile economies to the edge of ruin.
>> "It is not just a question of naked statistics, but of the fate
of man
>> thousands of people who have been deprived of their livelihood and whose
>> hopes have been thoroughly dashed," he told the annual meeting of the World
>> Economic Forum.
>> Mr. Schroeder joined a growing chorus of politicians, and even some
>> financiers, who are calling for efforts to regulate the rapid flows of so
>> called hot money that have been blamed for triggering financial crises like
>> the one that hit Brazil las month.
>> "If even [financier] George Soro —and he's a man who ought to
know, having
>> earned himself billions of dollars through such speculation — urges us to
>> introduc regulatory factors to ensure justice then it is high time for us
>> to get down to some serious negotiatin on an international financial
>> architecture."
>> Mr. Schroeder's warning to this talk fest of the world's leading
business
>> and political leaders underlined an undercurrent of concern that has
>> permeated the conference — that despite its clear victory, the free market
>> is coming up short in several areas.
>> Much of the concern has been focused on the financial crises the
have
>> successively battered Mexico, Thailand, South Korea, Indonesia and Brazil
>> in recent years, forcing the intervention of the International Monetary
>> Fund and its imposition of stark austerity measures that have hit the poor
>> with particular harshness.
>> Other members of the Group of Seven leading industrial nations
induding
>> Canada, have called for a concerted effort to control the excesses of
>> financial speculation. Bu the proposals are still vague, and the United
>> States remains skeptical.
>> U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin has scoffed at suggestions
for early
>> warning systems that would pressure countries showing signs of getting into
>> financial trouble.
>> Mr. Rubin, who worked as a Wall Street executive before joining
>> government, said he doubted that such a system could be invented. He said
>> that if the warning light did come on, it would simply trigger the very
>> financial panic that such a system was designed to avoid.
>> But concerns over the inequities of the globalized world economy
weren't
>> limited to the emerging economies. Lester Thurow, an economist at the
>> Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expressed concem about the
>> increasing inequities in the U.S. economy.
>> Sixty per cent of the U.S. population has taken a 20 per cent
cut in real
>> wages in the past 20 years, while the number of billionaires has risen from
>> 13 to more than 250 in the past decade, he told a seminar here yesterday.
>> He said that while families used to be able to live on the
earnings of a
>> single breadwinner, they are now forced to depend on two working spouses to
>> maintain the same standard of living, putting a huge burden on women.
>> Mr. Thurow said one factor driving growing social inequities is the
>> increasing demand by seniors for diminishing government funds, which
>> translates into higher spending on medical care and less on education. "The
>> elderly vote and the young don't vote," he said.
>> In many U.S. communities, school budgets have been defeated
because of
>> opposition from elderly voters with no stake in education, Mr. Thurow said.
>> That creates more inequities because wealthier parents have been able to
>> send their children to private schools.
>> Mr. Thurow expressed concern at the growing cost of higher
education,
>> particularly in the U.S., because of the phasing out of government
>> assistance programs that allowed students from modest backgrounds, like
>> himself, to get a good education.
>> "When I went to graduate school, if you were smart, you could
get out of
>> the door with a PhD and without any debt," he said, adding that a similar
>> graduate today will leave university with a debt of $100,000 (U.S.). As a
>> result, he said, some students are being forced to abandon their studies
>> and go to work.
>> He said he had recently analyzed the earnings he had taken home
from
>> student jobs 30 years ago and compared them with the summer wages of his
>> two sons, who are both in their 20s, and discovered that in real terms, his
>> sons were earning considerably less.
>> Yet because all these declines in wages and living standards
have been
>> gradual, nobody seems to have noticed and there has been no political
>> fallout.
>> He said it reminded him of the story told about putting a frog
in a basin
>> and slowly raising the temperature of the water: "The frog boils to death
>> because he never knows when to jump out."
>>
>
>