A bevy of lawmakers in Congress alarmed by soaring deficits are calling yet again for a constitutional amendment to balance the federal budget — but this time it’s Democrats.
The so-called Blue Dog Coalition of moderate Democrats on Tuesday endorsed an amendment that would require Washington to balance the budget except in case of war or recession....Are they for the return of the gold standard, too?
Market Watch
And now for something different: Democrats call for balanced-budget amendment
Jeffrey Bartash
I've always said this would happen, and it will, someday.
ReplyDeleteHow a modern fiat monetary system actually works should be an addendum to the Constitution and this ritualised screwing around would become a thing of the past. It's high time for this after all the invention of money is now 6000 years old. Plenty of time to figure out how it really works surely!
ReplyDeleteIt's very disappointing, because at our fingertips is a different world, but the establishment doesn't want it. They want austerity for the masses, and maximum profits for themselves.
ReplyDeleteMMMT is the perfect blend of free markets and social provision to take the edge off the ruthless competition. It is this competition that causes economies to underperform, as it leads to low pay for the masses, and reduced purchasing power leads to unemployment. Yes, reduced pay makes things cheaper, but we had better pay in the past and a better standard of living.
MMT can get the underemployed back into work, and this makes society richer.
Micheal Hudson says that in the 50'a and 60's people thought that automation would bring more leisure and a shorter hourly week, but the opposite happened instead.
I used to watch Tomorrow's World, a BBC program which looked at new ideas and future inventions, and they often had programs about how we were going to spend our leisure time in the future. There would be lots of social work, they said, looking after the needy. And the leisure industry would be big.
In the UK the hourly week did get reduced to 34 to 36 a week for office work, and 37 to 38 a week for factory work and engineering, but all that got reversed. In the end overtime became king because you couldn't afford to buy a place to live otherwise.
Lets hope we can eventually overturn neoliberalism
“Michael Hudson says that in the 50'a and 60's people thought that automation would bring more leisure and a shorter hourly week, but the opposite happened instead.”
ReplyDeleteYes I often think about that. The cartoon series The Jetsons (1962-63) imagined a future in which most workers sat in offices with their feet on their desks all day. Everything was automated. People’s “work” consisted of occasionally pushing buttons.
What we got instead was varying degrees of dystopia, depending on where we live, and what socioeconomic class were are in..
“Let’s hope we can eventually overturn neoliberalism.”
We would have to change our collective thought-habits.
Unfortunately the more people’s thought-habits create dystopias, the more people cling to the thought-habits that create and sustain dystopias. For example, the more people are crushed by oligarchs, the more people condemn socialism. People do this to avoid looking at reality. It's like abusing alcohol in order to forget the shame of being an alcoholic.
If nothing changes, I predict that most of mankind will perish in the future, and the few people who survive will be reduced to very primitive conditions.
Democrats call for balanced-budget amendment
ReplyDelete“The so-called Blue Dog Coalition of moderate Democrats on Tuesday endorsed an amendment that would require Washington to balance the budget except in case of war or recession.”
“Moderate” means neoliberal extremist.
“Centrist” means owned by Wall Street
Whenever politicians demand a “balanced budget,” they mean they want to cut social programs that help average people, while they increase the trillions of dollars that flow to the Military Industrial Complex. This theft is called “fiscal responsibility.”
“By contrast, the Progressive Congressional Caucus has almost 100 members and the rest of party skews quite liberal, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.”
Pelosi is a “liberal” in the sense of being a politically correct pusher of identity politics.
Economically, Pelosi is an arch-neoliberal, just like Obama, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and so on.