From a macroeconomics standpoint, Bridges is completely accurate.
The problem with most Tories (and many Republicans in the US) is that they either have big business interests at heart or have bought the lie that government is like a business. Government is not a business! Microeconomic principles, even ones that apply to entire industries, don’t apply to governments!
Here’s the fundamental macroecomic model of an economy:
(image from tutor2u)
Notice that the system is circular. The model shows that the economy inherently needs to be balanced. If some households are making hundreds of times the income of other households, they will put the vast majority of that money into savings and investment.
This is bad for the economy.
Some savings and investment is necessary. But too much means the little green arrows are siphoning off vast portions of the peach demand arrow (”purchases of goods and services”). This means that companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pie. Even if you heavily fund those companies, many will collapse due to lack of demand for their products, unless they become monopolies and the sole practical source of their product. Monopolies are technically illegal in the US, but we have them anyway because of this problem (and a lack of enforcement).
The other way you can damage the demand arrow is by shifting the proportions of the purple income arrow. Most people make money from wages, so if you significantly decrease those relative to dividends, interest, profits, and rent, you’ll harm the majority of households. In turn, this again decreases the peach arrow because many households only need a set amount of a given product in a year. The fewer households that can afford the products, the lower overall demand, because the remaining households won’t buy up the difference.
Households with average levels of income spend far more money than they save, of necessity, and they do so at a relatively steady rate. This is good for the economy.
Households with incredibly high levels of income – millionaires, etc. – save far more than they spend. They tend to make their money off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents – not wages. Therefore, to improve the economy, including increasing tax revenues for the government, two basic steps are urged by almost all macroeconomists:
1. Increase wages, especially at the lowest end. This expands the tax base and drives up demand for basic goods and services, stabilizing the industries necessary to a decent quality of life: agriculture and food production, clothing, housing, education, transportation, etc.
2. Use progressive taxes, in which those who make the most money, particularly off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents, pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. This allows that money to be spent directly on goods and services or to be redistributed to poor households, who will in turn spend it on goods and services. In both cases, money that would have gone into savings and investment instead goes into demand. This makes businesses more successful and a large number of households more prosperous. Society as a whole benefits from decreased crime, lower health problems, and improved public goods like education, roads, emergency response, infrastructure, etc.
Macroeconomics is the opposite of an individual business. Individual businesses study how to take the most pie for themselves and keep it. Macroeconomists – and governments – study how to make the pie bigger and distribute it in such a way that society as a whole benefits from the growth.
Conservatives: doing economics wrong for the past several decades by deliberately pretending that knowing how to run a business is anything like knowing how to run a government. Being fiscally cautious and being uneducated do not have to go hand in hand. (I’m both, for example.) But the rhetoric for slashing budgets has been laden with errors and ideology since at least the 1930s, and I’m tired of it.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE MORONS AT THE BACK IN OUR GOVERNMENTS
Or as Paul Wellstone used to say, “We all do better when we all do better.”
Ta dah.
Thank you.
I wish the part about aunts on facebook wasn’t true.
Citizens in Puerto Rico laid shoes at the San Juan capitol to represent lost loved ones not counted in the official government death toll. The number is estimated to be 4,645, the official US government number is 64.
Context: Sam B called Ivanka a cunt on her TV show.
What I really, really resent about this entire fiasco is that this sudden outrage over apologies is actually hella racist. Ever since Roseanne was cancelled and ABC apologized to Valerie Jarrett for her being called a monkey, the literal *official* White House stance was “well, why can’t the president get apologies for all the insults lodged against him. This is a double standard”
The disgusting danger of all this is that it reduces what Roseanne said about Valerie to a mere schoolyard insult. No. The reason behind the outrage was that equating black people to monkeys is a specific reference and call back to a real time in our nations not-too-distant-past where it was a popular belief that black people descended from monkeys there for they were sub-human and slavery, Jim Crow, oppression, anti-blackness is not only acceptable but NECESSARY.
Yes, White House, we draw a hard line at calling black people monkeys.
But what Donald Trump has effectively done is completely erase the necessary racial context behind this entire situation. He’s employed the racist dog whistle of “double standard” and he’s asserting that if this black woman gets an apology for an insult, than him and his despicable better get apologies too. And all these journalists and all white news rooms are reporting on this nonsense missing this crucial piece of context and it’s further burying this sad reality.
Once again the u.$. government proves itself to be deceitful and incapable of reaching any sort of agreement that does not involve military threats. Following the press statement by Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK Choe Son-hui, the current presidency of the u.$. has decided to cancel the June 12 summit.
After spending the past weeks threatening the DPRK with military drills,invasion, and the destruction of the socialist nation and the genocide of Koreans, the u.$. now throws a tantrum and attempts to portray itself as a victim of “anger and open hostility.”; a murderous settler nation that killed over 2 million Koreans and continues to occupy Korea with a colonialist army.
Trump, Bolton, and Pence are living hallmarks of political incompetence, stupidity, and ignorance. They sought from the beginning to disrupt any potential dialogue and offered nothing more than poisoned gifts – this is reckless behaviour only expectable from an infantile administration and a political system built on top of mass graves of indigenous and third world peoples.
No Federal civil rights law shall be interpreted to treat gender identity or transgender status as a protected class, unless such law expressly designates “gender identity” or “transgender status” as a protected class.
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@yall I see ignoring this please dont. I get it its upseting, but this is IMPORTANT information that could SAVE our lives and our rights.
Also this boils down to stripping rights away from intersex and trans ppl from what I understand, meaning that we would no longer be protected under federal law. This is scary. Call your reps and get this shut down as soon as you can. We can beat this together. We need each other right now. Share this, spread this information.
how you can help:
call your local senator and representatives! websites like 5calls tell you your national representatives based on your location and if you use their mobile site, you can call those representatives through their site. they don’t yet have hb2796 on their site, but you can use their system regardless!
here is an example of something you can say: “My name is (your name) and I am a constituent in (your town/city/district). I strongly oppose house bill 2796, which aims to remove gender identity protections from civil rights legislation by forcibly clarifying “gender” or “sex” to indicate only a person’s assigned gender at birth. Transgender people require civil rights protections as a vulnerable part of our population, and it is extremely important to me that they receive those protections. Thank you for your time and attention.”
IF YOU LEAVE A VOICEMAIL: leave your street address to ensure your call is tallied!
when you call, they will not argue with you, and basically just tally how many people contact them on a certain issue. also, if you want to support other issues on the 5calls site, don’t be afraid to make multiple separate calls! call volume matters and if you call more separate times it will be better.
Dammit I hate to use this blog for this but- from one trans guy to yall- this is important!
ok so I don’t usu reblog this stuff here but last year I had a horrible experience with an Airbnb host who threatened to bust my kneecaps, stalk me and murder me right? And not only did I GO TO THE POLICE before cancelling the reservation, but I also provided copies of that documentation to Airbnb customer service (I should mention after hunting down that number in the depths of the stupid internet and being on hold for an hour). Did they give me a refund for the months I’d paid in advance? No – they accused me of lying!
A few weeks later in a fit of desperation, a coworker suggested I tweet to Airbnb. Ok. I have maybe 30 followers on Twitter, and didn’t really use it at the time, but I thought, fuck it. Nothing to lose now. I made a half assed attempt at an overly indignant tweet with plenty of capitalization, and you know what happened?
Within the HOUR. It was taken down. I was DMed by a CSR. And I was given a FULL. REFUND.
$1500 like THAT.
I don’t know what kind of dystopic fucking reality we live in where police reports mean nothing and the PR value from a half assed tweet to 30 followers outweighs the safety of my kneecaps, but. Social media… Lesson learned, I guess.
Rebooting this addition because holy shit???
PR people work in corporate HQs with actual leverage. Customer service tends to be outsourced to poorly treated, underpaid folks with no power and nothing but stress on their plates. It’s BS but yeah, that’s why things can happen that way.
Because when you complain on social media everyone can see it. You ruin their reputation. It can blow up. You can ruin the business. They’re obligated to care. I’ve skipped complaining anywhere else, I just contact the twitter people now.
Water Witches 