Reading List: January 2, 2017
Happy New Year all.
At The Intercept, Zaid Jilani discusses how Republican presidents have been harder on Israel than Obama, despite the party’s hand wringing about the mild UN resolution from last week.
The Obama administration’s final moves on the Israeli-Palestinian issue — a symbolic resolution allowing the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israeli settlements and a speech by Secretary of State John Kerry warning that the settlement project could permanently end the two-state solution — has sparked a critical backlash from the country’s supporters.
These reactions range from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling the resolution “shameful” to right-wing members of Congress threatening to defund the United Nations.
But the irony is that Barack Obama was far less harsh on Israel’s government than recent Republican presidents, including conservative icon Ronald Reagan. From U.N. protection to economic and military support, these Republican presidents were far more willing to use American leverage to force a change to Israel’s behavior than Obama was.
Matt Bruenig returns with a Medium post on UBI. The rich already have it, Bruenig says.
The fact is that capitalist societies already dedicate a large portion of their economic outputs to paying out money to people who have not worked for it. The UBI does not invent passive income. It merely doles it out evenly to everyone in society, rather than in very concentrated amounts to the richest people in society.
The idea of capturing the 30% of national income that flows passively to capital every year and handing it out to everyone in society in equal chunks has been around since at least Oskar Lange wrote about it in the early parts of the last century. This is, to me, the best way to do a UBI, both practically and ideologically. Don’t tax labor to give money out to UBI loafers. Instead, snag society’s capital income, which is already paid out to people without regard to whether they work, and pay it out to everyone.