Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

im a graeber fan

I highlighted like 20% of it when I read it. Very quotable. Here’s my highlights sorry it’s long you should just read the article.


“We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth. These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending. This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.”

“As a result, heterodox economists continue to be treated as just a step or two away from crackpots, despite the fact that they often have a much better record of predicting real-world economic events. What’s more, the basic psychological assumptions on which mainstream (neoclassical) economics is based—though they have long since been disproved by actual psychologists—have colonized the rest of the academy, and have had a profound impact on popular understandings of the world.

Nowhere is this divide between public debate and economic reality more dramatic than in Britain, which is perhaps why it appears to be the first country where something is beginning to crack.”

““There is no magic money tree,” as Theresa May put it during the snap election of 2017—virtually the only memorable line from one of the most lackluster campaigns in British history. The phrase has been repeated endlessly in the media, whenever someone asks why the UK is the only country in Western Europe that charges university tuition, or whether it is really necessary to have quite so many people sleeping on the streets.

The truly extraordinary thing about May’s phrase is that it isn’t true. There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way.”

“Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong. The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate—to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create.”

“One sign that something historically new has indeed appeared is if scholars begin reading the past in a new light. Accordingly, one of the most significant books to come out of the UK in recent years would have to be Robert Skidelsky’s Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics. Ostensibly an attempt to answer the question of why mainstream economics rendered itself so useless in the years immediately before and after the crisis of 2008, it is really an attempt to retell the history of the economic discipline through a consideration of the two things—money and government—that most economists least like to talk about.”

“The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU—in any case, a social arrangement? This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years. What we call “money” is always a mixture of both, and, as I myself noted in Debt (2011), the center of gravity between the two tends to shift back and forth over time. In the Middle Ages everyday transactions across Eurasia were typically conducted by means of credit, and money was assumed to be an abstraction. It was the rise of global European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the corresponding flood of gold and silver looted from the Americas, that really shifted perceptions. Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies—which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced.”

“To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.”

“Ever since Hume, economists have distinguished between the short-run and the long-run effects of economic change, including the effects of policy interventions. The distinction has served to protect the theory of equilibrium, by enabling it to be stated in a form which took some account of reality. In economics, the short-run now typically stands for the period during which a market (or an economy of markets) temporarily deviates from its long-term equilibrium position under the impact of some “shock,” like a pendulum temporarily dislodged from a position of rest. This way of thinking suggests that governments should leave it to markets to discover their natural equilibrium positions. Government interventions to “correct” deviations will only add extra layers of delusion to the original one.

There is a logical flaw to any such theory: there’s no possible way to disprove it. The premise that markets will always right themselves in the end can only be tested if one has a commonly agreed definition of when the “end” is; but for economists, that definition turns out to be “however long it takes to reach a point where I can say the economy has returned to equilibrium.” (In the same way, statements like “the barbarians always win in the end” or “truth always prevails” cannot be proved wrong, since in practice they just mean “whenever barbarians win, or truth prevails, I shall declare the story over.”)”

“The one major exception to this pattern was the mid-twentieth century, what has come to be remembered as the Keynesian age. It was a period in which those running capitalist democracies, spooked by the Russian Revolution and the prospect of the mass rebellion of their own working classes, allowed unprecedented levels of redistribution—which, in turn, led to the most generalized material prosperity in human history. The story of the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s, and the neoclassical counterrevolution of the 1970s, has been told innumerable times, but Skidelsky gives the reader a fresh sense of the underlying conflict.”

“Surely there’s nothing wrong with creating simplified models. Arguably, this is how any science of human affairs has to proceed. But an empirical science then goes on to test those models against what people actually do, and adjust them accordingly. This is precisely what economists did not do. Instead, they discovered that, if one encased those models in mathematical formulae completely impenetrable to the noninitiate, it would be possible to create a universe in which those premises could never be refuted. (“All actors are engaged in the maximization of utility. What is utility? Whatever it is that an actor appears to be maximizing.”) The mathematical equations allowed economists to plausibly claim theirs was the only branch of social theory that had advanced to anything like a predictive science (even if most of their successful predictions were of the behavior of people who had themselves been trained in economic theory).

This allowed Homo economicus to invade the rest of the academy, so that by the 1950s and 1960s almost every scholarly discipline in the business of preparing young people for positions of power (political science, international relations, etc.) had adopted some variant of “rational choice theory” culled, ultimately, from microeconomics. By the 1980s and 1990s, it had reached a point where even the heads of art foundations or charitable organizations would not be considered fully qualified if they were not at least broadly familiar with a “science” of human affairs that started from the assumption that humans were fundamentally selfish and greedy.”

“There is a paradox here. On the one hand, the theory says that there is no point in trying to profit from speculation, because shares are always correctly priced and their movements cannot be predicted. But on the other hand, if investors did not try to profit, the market would not be efficient because there would be no self-correcting mechanism….

Secondly, if shares are always correctly priced, bubbles and crises cannot be generated by the market….

This attitude leached into policy: “government officials, starting with [Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan, were unwilling to burst the bubble precisely because they were unwilling to even judge that it was a bubble.” The EMH made the identification of bubbles impossible because it ruled them out a priori.”

“Economic theory as it exists increasingly resembles a shed full of broken tools. This is not to say there are no useful insights here, but fundamentally the existing discipline is designed to solve another century’s problems. The problem of how to determine the optimal distribution of work and resources to create high levels of economic growth is simply not the same problem we are now facing: i.e., how to deal with increasing technological productivity, decreasing real demand for labor, and the effective management of care work, without also destroying the Earth.”

“Intellectually, this won’t be easy. Politically, it will be even more difficult. Breaking through neoclassical economics’ lock on major institutions, and its near-theological hold over the media—not to mention all the subtle ways it has come to define our conceptions of human motivations and the horizons of human possibility—is a daunting prospect. Presumably, some kind of shock would be required. What might it take? Another 2008-style collapse? Some radical political shift in a major world government? A global youth rebellion? However it will come about, books like this—and quite possibly this book—will play a crucial part.”

i like graeber but have struggled with his books' tendency to relentlessly drive every point 30 feet into the ground

I have only read the bullshit jobs article, none of his books. Are you talking about his books or more generally?

bullshit jobs is otm but you don't need more than the article

debt is great and insightful but also repetitive and never-ending imo

like i know you're an anthropologist but we don't really need examples from cultures on every single continent

polemics are like that. with more examples, the structure of the argument is strengthened, even if multiplying examples contributes nothing further to one's understanding of the premise.

Graeber is an intellectual fraud IMO.

do tell

Article above is a perfect example. He is just trotting out a bunch of well-worn cliches about economics (which have some truth to them) as though they are insights, and meanwhile he is relying on strawmen to do so. Last time I checked, the central bank of the world's only superpower has been run by people who are the opposite of inflation hawks for over a decade now, so it sounds totally ridiculous to claim that you will somehow be pilloried for being "heterodox" on that point. Of course a few paragraphs later he seems to be criticizing Alan Greenspan for fueling "bubbles," but how exactly did Greenspan do that, supposedly? By keeping rates low, the exact thing he just told us was wrongly criticized by economic orthodoxy a few paragraphs earlier. So what point is he trying to get across?

That's not to say some of his broad brush points aren't correct. Yes, neoclassical economics has proven insufficient to solve many of the problems of our times. But Graeber doesn't seem to have a great grasp on why that is or what should be different, and he has a Gladwell-like penchant for spinning yarns and tossing out ideas that sound appealing but fall apart under scrutiny.

Here's a not very meaty thread where I laid out some of my issues with him a while ago:
Debt: The First 500 Posts (a thread for discussing David Graeber)

FWIW, I was once thumbing through Debt in a bookstore when a woman approached me and asked me why I was interested in the book. I told her about how I had heard an interview with him describing how everyone thought the origin of money was x but it was actually y, and she said "Well that's kind of been long and widely known in anthropology, it's standard, so I find it weird that he's becoming so prominent based on that." Obviously there was some professional resentment underlying the exchange, but after that, I started to notice that pattern in a lot of his work, where he sets up some supposed sacred cow or myth so it can be knocked down, when in fact the myth in question is nowhere near as widely believed as he claims.

The initial response has been OK, but now there's a rising tide of criticism from asinine conservatives about how it's horrible to pay people to stay home, which happens to be the most vital job they can do right now, unless they are involved in keeping people alive and delivering essential goods and services. These fools are wailing because government is borrowing to accomplish this vital goal and instead of this being the occasional voice of a shithead crying in the wilderness, it's being orchestrated and amplified by conservative media.

― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, May 9, 2020 6:25 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

agreed. i was just confused by the keynes reference since it's not clear that aggregate demand fiscal stimulus is needed at the moment, rather than income support. also i think pandemic turns a lot of macro logic upside down

I’m reminded of this article I just read in the NYRB, which I thought was great

https://progressiveeconomyforum.com/blog/against-economics/

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Saturday, May 9, 2020 6:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

very bad article

Graeber is an intellectual fraud IMO.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Saturday, May 9, 2020 11:35 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yup

Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government—many would insist, its only really proper economic role—is to guarantee price stability.

this is false

flopson as an economist can you defend the existence of your alleged field of study

Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled.

not true of the current administration, which the left, right and center of the economics establishment have all been shut out of

flopson as an economist can you defend the existence of your alleged field of study

― silby, Sunday, May 10, 2020 3:34 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

my reason for studying: seriously engaging with economics is unavoidable if you care about the answers to the questions that economics asks. when i was young i became obsessed with many of those questions (why are some countries rich and others poor? why did the great depression happen? why does poverty exist in rich countries? etc) and the main path to spending your life seriously thinking about them is to engage with economics, mostly mainstream economics

economics is a very hard topic. it's not hard because of math or technicality, but due to fundamental aspects of economic systems that place limits on how much we can use empirical evidence to reject theories about them. Keynes understood this, so did Max Planck

mainstream economists are mostly true-believers and epistemically humble relative the general population and researchers in other fields. they are humbled by the act of doing economics, which despite being impossible they do tirelessly; here are a selection of the applied economics papers that were written this week https://www.nber.org/new.html

the difference between mainstream and "heterodox" economics are based on minor methodological issues that people outside the field shouldn't concern themselves with imho. however, briefly (i) heterodox is smaller and therefore produces much less research--the amount of work that is in the NBER weekly is roughly proportional to the total annual product of research by european post-keynesians, (ii) it is more fractured relative to the unity of mainstream economics and therefore effectively even smaller, and (iii) standard for empirical work are much lower; about 2 decades behind, (iv) lower formal requirement for theories in heterodox. while i think (i), (ii) and (iii) are pretty uniformly bad, (iv) is actually good in a way because it might allow for creativity in generation of speculative pre-formalized ideas. this creates useful cross-pollination, where mainstream economists can formalize and incorporate heterodox ideas. heterodox economists paradoxically both complain that mainstream economists completely ignore them, and also steal their ideas :)

despite their marketing, the main parts of heterodox econ that have currently caught hold with a significant swathe of the business press--post-keynesian economics and modern monetary theory--do not differ in a substantive way in understanding of the economy. everything in MMT is also expressed by canonical mainstream economics models. the main difference is (i) a preference for using monetary policy to fund fiscal policy and use taxation to control inflation (called "functional finance"), and (ii) interest in the institutional details of accounting and monetary systems which mainstream economics largely abstracts from. there are mainstream monetary economists who have interesting discussions with MMT people and post-keynesians, and if you read these discussions you will find them agreeing with each other a lot

there is a perception that MMT is "left", probably because of its current political alliances. but it was started by a billionaire financier who wanted to reduce his taxes, and its proponents have explicitly stated that they are politically opportunistic and that functional finance can be used by the left to expand programs and the right to cut taxes etc

as an advocate of large social-democratic welfare states (a preference that was not beat out of me by a neoliberal indoctrination in economic theory, but imho strengthened by it) i think high, broad-based, and progressive taxes are a better way to fund a welfare state and other permanent spending than segniorage and inflation. part of this preference is empirical status quo bias: that's how the existing successful social democracies do it, so why try something else that seems to have resulted in hyperinflation in many other contexts? another reason is transparency and fairness: it's hard to know "who" inflation is taxing, whereas taxes are more straightforward (interestingly, taxes are not perfectly transparent due to what's called "incidence", the tendency for prices to adjust in response to a change in tax rates. e.g.: if you "subsidize" home-buying by giving a credit, home prices will increase. this is one of the reasons economics is impossible). that's *permanent* spending btw, not transitory/temporary spending. transitory spending is much more ambiguous, and people like Olivier Blanchard have argued for "MMT"-type policies for current transitory spending using mainstream arguments

there is no "other economics" ready for us once we abandon mainstream economics. furthermore, most heterodox economics is monetary and financial macroeconomics, which is a small part of economics. so even if we ditched all of mainstream monetary and financial macroeconomics for its heterodox counterpart, we'd still have 75% of economics intact

i should say that my personal path took me out of studying monetary-financial macroeconomics. although it was my intended field of study for most of my undergrad, i now study the labour market, and in my research i try to do work that pushes forward understanding of how pay is determined in modern labour markets. specifically, many economic theories imply that competition between employers plays a key role in determining wages. it's been hard to test those theories until very recently, since most data was stuff like "the average wage in Wisconsin in Q1 in 1978 was 13$" which can't distinguish between competitive and non-competitive theories of the labour market. the data i work with comes from social security records and links every worker to their employer at every point in time, for their entire lives. this provides a much richer set of facts that you can use to test theories. this is a general pattern happening all over economics: richer data is allowing us to (i) test "old" theories assuming things like perfect competition (ii) reject them and replace them with more realistic ones. for example, models of imperfectly competitive labour markets have much more room for policies like labour unions, sectoral minimum wages, etc, to be optimal

more speculatively, and personally, i genuinely believe that economic theory contains within it the potential for emancipatory change of society and could allow us to create a fairer and more efficient world. this belief is mostly due to my exposure to modern micro-economic theory; things like mechanism design (the generalization of the theory of auctions: the policy-marker is a 'game-designer' who structures things like the timing information revelation so that the game played by firms, workers, or whomever has desirable properties. for example, national food banks use auction-style mechanisms to allocate food across municipalities so that food matches local tastes), and market design/matching theory (the theory of non-market allocation mechanisms; applied to matching kidney transplants, and also in certain labour markets, for example matching medical students to hospitals based on two-sided rankings: you want to have med school graduates work at the hospital they prefer, at a hospital where their specialization is useful. centralized matching mechanisms can improve on decentralized approaches).

history is slow, painful, and sometime backwards and frustrating, and we probably won't live to enjoy that world. there's a "sci-fi" aspect to economics where you're contributing to a corpus of knowledge that is part of a long-term project, that might only realize itself far in the future. i find that somewhat inspirational, during those hard times when you doubt everything

addendum for nuance: of course i am an opinionated person and could complain to you at length about all the models, ideologies, norms, etc that i hate in mainstream economics. but i don't think those forces are oppressive within the field, and i think it would be irresponsible of me. also i mostly come here to read about music and usually regret posting about economics lol

Hmm I don’t feel like I deserve the effort that went into that but good post

lol np (and thx), it mostly absorbs some responses i was writing to the greaber essay that got xp'd by your post

Booming post flops. That reminds me why I got interested in economics in the first place. I feel like most of the complaints around economics as a general field are mostly complaints with the swathe of neoliberal/libertarian leaning economics professors that take up most of the undergraduate professoriate across the country.

thx flopson

haha great post flopson!

i admit to being very sympathetic to graeber's view that the metastasization of naively applied economics throughout social science is ... not good in the same way the spread naively applied physics into other bits of natural science has not been good.

do you have any thoughts on the book/author graeber is reviewing? is he part of this post-keynsian niche you're talking about?

more speculatively, and personally, i genuinely believe that economic theory contains within it the potential for emancipatory change of society and could allow us to create a fairer and more efficient world. this belief is mostly due to my exposure to modern micro-economic theory; things like mechanism design (the generalization of the theory of auctions: the policy-marker is a 'game-designer' who structures things like the timing information revelation so that the game played by firms, workers, or whomever has desirable properties. for example, national food banks use auction-style mechanisms to allocate food across municipalities so that food matches local tastes)

am i on the right lines here that some (most?) of the empirical progress here in the last few decades is driven by display ad auctions at google etc.? or is that a different problem?

I don't really like this guy's writing, and he needs an editor (the final paragraph is posted twice) but it's hard not to agree with his major point here.

Coronavirus — or more accurately — the lack of response to it will probably finish off what’s left of the American economy. America will end up a country with permanently lower levels of all the following: employment, income, savings, trust, happiness, assets, and so forth. America was already in the process of becoming something very much like a poor country, with the failed politics of one, too — but Coronavirus will accelerate and finalize America’s grim transformation into poverty, paralysis, and collapse.

...

What happens to poorer societies? They’re left in a kind of terrible paradox, which is my fourth transformation: they can’t afford the very things they need to survive most. Why is it that the average American is the only person in the rich world by now who votes against their own healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, and so on? Because they can’t afford it. 80% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck before Coronavirus. Who can afford to pay an extra 5% or 10% in taxes for decent social systems? Nobody, really, except the already rich — who don’t need them. Hence, the famous paradox of the American Idiot: people who vote against their self-interest. It’s not their fault, really: they have no choice. They can’t afford to vote for things like public healthcare.

America was already becoming too poor a society to have functioning public goods, like healthcare or retirement for all. Coronavirus is going to seal that fate. America will be poor now — far too poor to ever really make the transition to having decent public goods. Think of that full half of the American population who’s now not employed. How exactly are they going to afford the higher taxes it takes to have a European or Canadian style social contract? They struggled to before — and after Coronavirus, it’s going to be flatly impossible.

i don’t really... buy that? below a certain income level you don’t need to pay any tax at all. and that level can be changed.

so i just came here to post that

i think it's more like, he thinks the mass immiseration of american workers will lead to a further entrenchment of the "self-preservation" mindset.

however, it is also possible the opposite will happen. the last great depression led to the new deal and the rise of the 20th century middle class. why can't it be done again? young people, especially, seem ready to let go of old paradigms about low taxes, self-sufficiency etc.

this is redundant, but i feel very angry that it's gotten to this point. all of it was preventable.

Disinformation plays a large role as well. Even non-rich folk who can afford the taxes comfortably will vote against them due to being programmed by the right with a zero-sum, us vs them mentality.

"Why should I pay to take care of other people, esp degenerate homeless people?" et al.

Xpost the great American paradox is that we're fundamentally too stupid to take care of ourselves even though we've always had the capability

see that's why we need a change in consciousness. it doesn't need to be "radical," but it does need to be a revolution, as bernie said.

one thing about this description too -- and i am no economist -- but won't it destroy the tech monopolies too? their products depend on the american consumer.

I'm angry about it too to the point where I'm glad I'm already middle aged and don't plan to have kids.

(There's nothing wrong with having kids at any time, even in times of strife, but I just can't do it with my hyperanxious brain. the moment they became an adult, I'd be consumed with fear for how they'd make it)

i mean, there are always doomsday scenarios. that is flippant, but i think it's true. there is no reason the US can't get on a sane path. break up the banks, break up the tech giants, forgive student debt, raise the minimum wage to a living wage even for gig workers, make healthcare and education accessible, invest in green infrastructure—this isn't "free stuff" but a way to put the country on a path where people feel they have some opportunity and a stake in the health of the society.

the US is in a unique position in that it can, if it wants to, move heaven and earth to transform the society. greece, for instance, couldn't due to their limited means.

America was already becoming too poor a society to have functioning public goods, like healthcare or retirement for all. Coronavirus is going to seal that fate. America will be poor now — far too poor to ever really make the transition to having decent public goods.

what does this mean - should already poor countries give up on having anything better bc once you're "too poor a society" nothing can ever get better? we already don't have healthcare or retirement for all.

i mean, there are always doomsday scenarios. that is flippant, but i think it's true. there is no reason the US can't get on a sane path. break up the banks, break up the tech giants, forgive student debt, raise the minimum wage to a living wage even for gig workers, make healthcare and education accessible, invest in green infrastructure—this isn't "free stuff" but a way to put the country on a path where people feel they have some opportunity and a stake in the health of the society.

― treeship., Monday, May 11, 2020 9:29 AM bookmarkflaglink

you're not wrong. we won gay marriage and a form of universal health care not even that long ago. we just need to be free of the grip of Republicans and Trump and also Libertarians and also a pandemic that is being subverted for political purposes.

the US will continue to be wealthier than many countries and someday in the future maybe 10 years from now coronavirus will be over and the depression will be over. we already know the US is willing to spend huge amounts of money to get the economy rolling again. making the case otherwise requires a much more sophisticated and evidenced argument than the author includes.

yeah, i don't understand the fact that america was "too poor a society" for basic public services. that was never the reason we lacked free healthcare and college.

yeah. it's this devotion to meritocracy from some voters, asking classist questions like "what money do burger flippers/retail employees DESERVE", which really means "what level of comfort and quality of life do these peons deserve", often uttered not just by the haves, but also have-nots who are working equally menial jobs and making little money (ie, the temporary inconvenienced millionaire syndrome).

we focus on the 0.1% that refuse to work and assume all unemployed people are lazy people, all people on food stamps are eating Ruth's Chris quality meals, and all welfare recipients use drugs AND any recreational drug use means these are subhuman people who deserve no aid.

the mindset has to be eroded, which will be helped by millions of boomers dying, but also if these talking points aren't validated by the President and/or Majority Senators. but we're years away from any of this eroding.

80% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck before Coronavirus. Who can afford to pay an extra 5% or 10% in taxes for decent social systems?

vs

the top 3 richest americans have more wealth than the bottom 50% of the country

it's impossible! there's nothing that can be done to fix it! and whatever you do, do NOT look over there at those three old guys

it's "funny", I was watching New Jack City yesterday and in 1991, it was talking about the deepening gulf between rich and poor and wage inequality, and I just screamed at the screen "OH, IF U ONLY KNEW!"

weirdly the tv answered me back with "SHUT UP BITCH", so I decided I needed sleep

it's not even about direct aid, it's about structuring the economy so people aren't ground into the dirt. that makes them better workers, better consumers, more likely to take risks and be entrepreneurial, and better citizens as they feel like they have a stake in american society.

a large middle class is just better

America will be poor now — far too poor to ever really make the transition to having decent public goods. Think of that full half of the American population who’s now not employed. How exactly are they going to afford the higher taxes it takes to have a European or Canadian style social contract? They struggled to before — and after Coronavirus, it’s going to be flatly impossible.

is this guy a Republican speechwriter? what taxes is he even talking about? Like, "taxes" aren't monolothic. There isn't just "one" type of tax, assessed in one way ... Maybe if he is talking about property taxes, which are often not contingent on the owner's income ... but then not everyone pays property taxes.

yeah. my belief is that there is enough wealth in the economy to invest in a better future.

it's impossible! there's nothing that can be done to fix it! and whatever you do, do NOT look over there at those three old guys

― porlockian solicitor (Karl Malone), Monday, May 11, 2020 7:42 AM (one hour ago)

also DO NOT LOOK AT THE DEFENSE BUDGET; do not think about how much more the US spends on the military and weapons than countries that make sure people have housing and food and healthcare ... nope, don't do it, Bill, just don't! It's the fucking destroyed statue of liberty out there in the forbidden zone