Reforming Power of Attorney Law to Protect Alaskan Elders from Financial Exploitation

This article discusses the issues arising under the current power of attorney law in Alaska and the impact the law has on Alaskan elders. The Author surveys and summarizes preventative measures set out in the 2006 Uniform Power of Attorney Act (UPOAA), in addition to non-UPOAA reforms adopted in other jurisdictions or suggested by scholars. The Author analyzes the relevance and practicality of the various provisions as applied to Alaska and highlights the major themes that should be considered when reforming the current statute

Proximity for Sums of Composite Functions

We propose an algorithm for computing the proximity operator of a sum of composite convex functions in Hilbert spaces and investigate its asymptotic behavior. Applications to best approximation and image recovery are described

Where\u27s the Beef? Meat Shortages, Farmer Needs, and Long-term Recovery Policies in a Pandemic Era

COVID-19 not only affected every hospital bed in the nation--if not the world; it also affected nearly every dinner table in America and beyond. Supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic highlighted deep-seated problems with how we get our meat, and how difficult we make it for American farmers to sell to the family next door. Within a few months of the first reported case in the US, hundreds of workers from just two meat-processing plants on American shores became infected with COVID-19, and imports from around the world came to a standstill as factories and shipping companies were forced to shut down. Instantaneously, the US supply of meat seemed to contract, flying off supermarket shelves as Americans began to shelter in place. Meanwhile, nationwide closures of restaurants and school cafeterias posed serious problems for farmers who were forced to cull and dispose of their herds, unable to get them processed at commercial butchers that were either closed or backlogged. In a nation that raises more than 94 million heads of cattle alone, we somehow found ourselves in a meat shortage in 2020, with grocery store shelves looking as “patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc”. This article analyzes the state of American agriculture as it pertains to the meat industry, using the beef sector as a case study. This article also proposes potential solutions that should be considered in any stimulus package seeking to create long-term, impactful growth in rural America, where one in five Americans live

Inclusive Economics and Home Loan Policies for Informal Workers

The United States has been suffering from a housing crisis that existed long before the proliferation of sub-prime loans and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. For decades, millions of gainfully employed workers have been institutionally excluded from homeownership, simply because they work in the informal economy. Because of this, the economic growth of households in this demographic has been stymied by discriminatory banking policies that heavily prioritize short-term profit maximization over borrower reliability, or loan viability. Many of those affected are historically disenfranchised people, who systematically have been excluded from the American dream of “a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” simply for failing to belong to the narrow demographic for whom home loans were originally designed. Approximately 37% of working adults in the United States today undertake some type of informal work, and 16% of working adults are employed on a full-time basis in the informal sector. It is a segment of the working population that funds an imposing amount of sales tax revenue. These are not the people who lost their homes in The Great Recession of 2008. Indeed, approximately 70% of the subprime loans issued in 2006 were to upper and upper-middle income borrowers in wealthy neighborhoods, and not middle-class working households, or middle-class neighborhoods. It is still the case today that, for workers of the informal economy, homeownership is largely unavailable due to institutional barriers, no matter how modest the home or neighborhood, and no matter how reliable the loan applicant is. This article describes the lost macro-economic opportunity in failing to provide home loans to qualified households in the informal economy, then providing a survey of solutions with successful track records. These solutions fall with a framework I refer to as inclusive economics. My analysis focuses on one segment of informal economy: the cultural economy, which largely operates in cash and exemplifies how inclusive economics can create wealth in a sustainable way that includes historically dis-enfranchised households