Commentary by Roger Erickson
Very informative summary charts from Steve Hansen, GEI.
"Fixing" the economy by killing the Middle Class.
That'll fix it! (We really should add a policy section to that site. The fix is clearly in, and it's comical in it's own, sick way. Victims aren't appreciating the punchline, even though they're getting it.)
5 comments:
It's puzzling that "trickled down" is even considered as a plausible outcome re corporate profits. It's a mathematical non-starter from the get-go. A logical fallacy.
If corporate profits are steadily accumulating to higher and higher totals over time then the net flow is away from households towards corporate business. Period.
There is no possibility of "trickle down" unless in the aggregate corporate profits are declining.
This is more like a solvent process, whereby investment serves to extract funds from the target population...it is acting as a solvent.
Of course now there is little chance of increased investment doing anything...so they have moved on to a cold-press process...just squeeze the last bit of money out of us through legislation.
Nice analogies you got there.
I think that the rationale runs through "job creation." The folks at the top are the "job creators." If we are nice to them they will create a lot of jobs for us and pay us for working for them, and then we can get rich too but only if we save like them. I guess they think we haven't seen the chart on the growing disparity between profit share and labor share, of wealth and income disparity. They must think we are stupid or something.
Seems like everyone has to share in the stupid ... in order for nominally intelligent people to produce such an insane system.
Seriously, most geniuses are walking around so fixated on their own navels that we have an epidemic of headaches? You'd have to laugh at the tragedy of genius uncoordinated.
When you dig into the numbers, the problem isn't employment as a whole. Unemployment for high school workers is 12% while college graduates have a 2.9% unemployment rate. When you include the non-participating workers the problem is even more acute. Truck drivers have degrees. Clerks have accounting certifications and degrees. Customer service agents have degrees. Society would be more efficient if these professions did not waste years and $$$ on education. Most studies I have seen even show those without degrees make better employees in customer service and many of the jobs where they interact with customers directly. We are in a giant educational race to the bottom.
We spend more on education per capita and ask kids to leverage themselves to earn less with it. The government provides giant subsidies to the education-industrial complex. The unions and teachers turn out to vote and contribute like no other category of citizens and push politicians to keep the bias against uneducated people. It is another side to our crony capitalist system that causes government to act in the worst interest of the public as a whole to deliver pork to one industry. And oh boy, do educators believe their rhetoric about themselves lifting people out of poverty. Individually true, but a giant lie for society as a whole. Worse educators present education as a solution for inadequate aggregate demand -- no matter how many bachelors degrees public universities churn out, they will never fix the problem.
"Society would be more efficient if these professions did not waste years and $$$ on education."
That's a unproductively negative view. We don't NEED a more efficient society. Efficiency = doing obsolete stuff faster.
We need a culture that is more RESILIENT. Right now, a resilient electorate would be setting goals worthy of it's distributed talents. The future is so bright we can't see it ... so we're ignoring it?
We need more imagination, which is presumably missing from our education system. With a bit more imagination, we could have the audacity to invent bigger goals.
Letting 1% of people hoard all static assets? And constrain our dynamic assets as well? What kind of desired outcome is that? What are they going to do with our fiat? Sit on it?
Any culture that just sits in the evolutionary road is just gonna get run over.
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