Short Quiz

[johnkarls]

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1. Who was Saul Alinsky?

2. What did the young Barack Obama and the young Hillary Rodham (who later married Bill Clinton) have in common?

3. Have the mature Barack Obama and the mature Hillary Clinton misread Saul Alinsky?

4. What is a cruzeiro?

5. What is an indexed cruzeiro?

6. Did the dual monetary system of the indexed cruzeiro vs. the nominal cruzeiro enable Brazil to achieve full employment without any concern for inflation?

7. Did Brazil build its economy with free trade?

8. What was the tax on dividends paid by a Brazilian subsidiary to its foreign parent corporation? Ditto for interest and royalties, two other avenues for a foreign parent corporation to pull funds out of a subsidiary?

9. What is a “Bowley Box Diagram”?

10. Is Bowley’s economic theory correct?

11. Is full employment a prerequisite for Bowley’s economic theory to be correct?

12. Is “free trade” antithetical to Bowley’s economic theory rather than, as commonly thought, the logical conclusion of Bowley’s theory?

13. From the viewpoint of full employment, isn’t it better economic policy to control both your currency and your foreign exchange à la Brazil during its “boot-strap growth” period and à la so many other countries today such as China, rather than engage in “free trade”?

14. Isn’t it also essential to provide an education (much less a decent education) for America’s “permanent underclass”? In other words, for inner-city children? In other words, to do something about the 30% of the American population that the U.S. government for more than 50 years has described as illiterate as defined by the ability to read the warning label on a can of rat poison?

15. In the 2-3 decades following World War II, one of the burning political issues in the U.S. was how much “foreign aid” to give to other countries. Aside from the “Marshall Plan” for Europe, how much “foreign aid” did we typically give in any year?

16. Is “out-sourcing American jobs” really a modern-day form of “foreign aid” (however, unintended)?

17. Does “out-sourcing American jobs” comprise political malpractice unless (A) the ENTIRE American population has been educated, (B) only jobs that do NOT require the up-graded skills of the American work force are exported, and (C) the jobs that are retained are configured to utilize fully the skill sets of American workers, all of whom have seen their educations maximized?