Reducing Gun Deaths
Professor David Hemenway, the author of “Private Guns, Public Health” joins us to explain how we can reduce gun deaths if we treat the problem more like a public health issue, just like Ralph proved when dealing with the auto industry. Plus, Ralph weighs in on the repeal of the child tax credit, and Francesco DeSantis reports news items that tend to get ignored in the corporate media in our segment “In Case You Haven’t Heard.”
David Hemenway is an economist, Professor of Health Policy at Harvard University, and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. He is a former Nader’s Raider, and he is the author of Private Guns, Public Health, and While We Were Sleeping: Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention.
Just by making it harder for criminals to get those guns, we have fewer criminals using those guns. That’s a fundamental law of economics and of psychology— if you don’t want people to do something, make it harder. If you want them to do it more, make it easier.
David Hemenway
The key about public health is: what we’re trying to do is prevent. Prevent. Prevent. Prevent. And too often, in the United States, what we try to do is blame. And often, blaming, all it does is say “Oh I don’t have to do anything. It’s somebody else’s fault.”
David Hemenway
[Reinstituting the Child Tax Credit] is something so simple, it’s something that helps so many families, it increases consumer demand because most of this money is spent on the necessities of life… and the Republicans are blocking it in Congress and not paying a political price. And that’s the story of the Democratic Party— they don’t make the Republicans, who are as cruel as any Republicans in history, pay a price.
Ralph Nader
In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis
1. A Princeton University study, published at the end of August, traces the effects of unconditional cash transfers on homelessness. Focusing on Vancouver, Canada, researchers gave homeless people $7,500 Canadian. Conforming to the results of previous studies, the subjects used this money to get into housing – yet, what was remarkable about this study is it showed this program actually saved taxpayers money overall by relieving $8,277 per subject by removing them from the shelter system.
2. From Axios: 15 Senators have penned a letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken urging him to stop the planned admission of Israel into the Visa Waiver program. This program allows a country’s citizens to travel within the United States for 90 days without a visa. Built into this program is a provision demanding US citizens in a given country are treated equally – which is not the case for Palestinian Americans living in the West Bank. Israel claims that they are working to achieve compliance with this section of the law; however, this group of Senators argue that “There is no provision in law that provides that a visa waiver country can discriminate against certain groups of U.S. citizens for the first seven months of the program simply because a country claims they will treat all U.S. citizens equally for the last five months."
3. California Democrat Ro Khanna is making his pitch that President Biden should campaign on reelection on an anti-corruption platform, per the Huffington Post. Khanna, who previously chaired the Bernie Sanders campaign in California, has authored a five-point plan, consisting of “banning candidates for federal office from receiving donations from lobbyists or political action committees of any kind, banning members of Congress from trading stocks, limiting Supreme Court appointees to 18-year terms, imposing 12-year term limits on members of Congress, and requiring federal judges and Supreme Court justices to adhere to a new and more robust code of ethics.” Beyond the hard policy though, is a political point – Khanna argues “What we cannot allow to happen is for a former president ― twice impeached and four times indicted ― to position himself as the outsider in the race.”
4. On September 7th, General Motors submitted a proposal to the United Autoworkers in a near last ditch attempt to stave off a strike from the newly re-energized union. In response, UAW president Shawn Fain released the following statement, “After refusing to bargain in good faith for the past six weeks, only after having federal labor board charges filed against them, GM has come to the table with an insulting proposal that doesn’t come close to an equitable agreement for America’s autoworkers. GM either doesn’t care or isn’t listening when we say we need economic justice at GM by 11:59pm on September 14th. The clock is ticking. Stop wasting our members’ time. Tick tock.”
5. On September 10th, Senator Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to the Chair of the Federal Election Commission urging her to crackdown on “telemarketing calls and online scams that prey on [Americans’] goodwill and civic engagement,” noting that a recent charity scam defrauded consumers of over $150 million dollars, while a recent “network of scam…(PACs) took in $140 million.” Many speculate that Senator Blumenthal was spurred to act on this issue following the release of a documentary series on telemarketing scams focusing on the Civic Development Group, which raised vast sums for charities, which only received between 10 and 15% of that money. The Civic Development Group has itself been shut down by the FTC.
6. Labor journalist Michael Sainato reports that last week, the NLRB ruled in favor of the United Mine Workers of America, blocking Warrior Met Coal’s attempt to stage a decertification election at their Brookwood, Alabama facility. UMWA President Cecil E. Roberts is quoted saying the NLRB “based [its] decision on a ruling…that determined Warrior Met Coal...violated the law before the strike began, continue to violate the law today, and intend to keep violating it in the future.” The UMWA strike against Warrior Met is the longest coal strike in Alabama history.
7. The Intercept reports Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican of Tennessee has introduced a new amendment to the NDAA which would bar the Pentagon from providing assistance to Pakistan amid the “ongoing crackdown by the military establishment and its civilian allies.” Pakistan has been experiencing political turmoil since the ouster of popular president Imran Khan on dubious legal grounds. Pakistan is a major recipient of US military assistance and the Biden administration has resisted attempts to reign in the ruling regime since Khan was deposed.
8. A new piece in Insider covers the clash of conservative and liberal populist Senators JD Vance of Ohio and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. The two have been collaborating on rail safety legislation following the East Palestine derailment, and we have covered the degeneration of this legislation on the show before. Now, Vance is turning his attention to banning mask mandates, which Fetterman calls “silly performance art” which is taking time and attention away from the stalled rail safety bill.
9. Finally, a cover story in the Nation chronicles the “Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower.” The author was assigned to the McKinsey teams advising ICE and the Rikers Island prison, and he lays out how he tried and failed to resist the brutal and insidious nature of these institutions from inside the firm. The story is worth reading in its entirety to see behind the curtain of a firm which tries to wrap itself in platitudes like “Change the world. Improve lives.”
Reducing Gun Deaths
Regarding the point in Francesco’s segment about the Canadian homeless study:
“...yet, what was remarkable about this study is it showed this program actually saved taxpayers money overall by relieving $8,277 per subject by removing them from the shelter system.”
This is not exactly what the research states, but I reckon that summary is based on this sentence from the journal article (p. 9):
“In the utilitarian condition, participants read another summary of Study 1 results showing that cash recipients reduced their reliance on the shelter system and saved more money than the cash transfer itself, producing net savings for society.”
In my view, what the authors are saying exactly is ill-defined. If we’re talking about municipal and state/provincial-run shelters, and many homeless shelters in the US are run by private charity, then perhaps there is some level of truth to what was said in Francesco’s segment and in the journal article as these are all currency-using entities.
Of course, we must remember that the authors of this study are not economists. The authors come from departments of psychology, medicine, statistics, and so forth. From the view of those professions, I think the research has merit in helping squash the neoliberal conservative and neoliberal centrist viewpoints. The conservative viewpoint is that poor people are poor because they cannot handle money and, thus, they aren’t worthy of social support. The neoliberal centrist position is that the poor need counseling in how to handle money and, with that, they’d be self-supporting. This is nothing new really, but research shows this to not be correct and now there is more evidence for that view.
Beyond that, I wouldn’t take the economic policy recommendations in the study seriously. Again, the recommendations were not made by economists or made from an economically enlightened point of view as the authors are working on commonly held neoliberal assumptions. Money transfers or a universal basic income in circumstances where rent is controlled by private interests will only lead to inflated housing costs and will eventually put even further burden on the poor as the private rent-controlling interests will increase their rates to account for the increased income.
The correct solution is a combination of policies including affordable public housing funded by the currency-issuing national government (the operation of the public housing can be done provincially under national guidelines, but the funding must come from the national government), comprehensive public healthcare funded by the currency-issuing national government, full employment policies by the national government, and a job guarantee program funded by the currency-issuing national government. Full employment with a job guarantee will act as an inflation buffer as explained by Randy Wray et al. and, of course, the benefits of affordable public housing ought to be obvious. None of these nationally-funded programs will cost taxpayers anything since the national budget is not funded by taxes.
Neoliberalism is so ingrained in society that I’m not surprised that the authors of the study are working from neoliberal assumptions. They are not economists so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t intend to make neoliberal assumptions. That said, those listening to and producing the Ralph Nader Radio Hour really ought to know better by now than to parrot neoliberalism. In that regard, Mr. Nader is correct in admonishing the Democratic Party for not challenging the Republican Party on social program cuts. That said, those of us demanding better from both parties must be economically informed enough to know what to demand or else we’re guaranteed to get some flavor of neoliberal policy.
I just want to make this quick point that if Milton Friedman was alive today, he'd smile and laugh with glee each time the Ralph Nader Radio Hour states something about 'taxpayer money' as it relates to the US federal budget. Will the esteemed members of the Ralph Nader Radio Hour stop trying to please Milton Friedman and his corporate acolytes?
Thanks folks.