Michael Hudson: "Well, you’ve just made the point that neoliberalism wants to make itself invisible. It’s like the devil. If there a devil, the devil wants to say he doesn’t exist. Neoliberalism says inequality doesn’t exist, exploitation doesn’t exist, and everything is quite fair."
Michael Hudson
Is It Over Yet?
Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson
Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson
7 comments:
Here we go again.
Several corporate news outlets are claiming that Social Security is in danger of “going broke.”
They’ve been saying this since Social Security began 88 years ago. They will be saying it forever.
The U.S. government can send endless hundreds of billions to Israel and Ukraine, and it created $2.2 trillion out of thin air for the CARES Act of 2020, but Social Security is “bankrupt.” And “climate change” threatens the earth. And “white supremacy” threatens “democracy.” Blah, blah, blah.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (a private handful of liars in Washington DC) claims that Social Security faces a 23 percent across-the-board benefit cut in 2033. For an average newly retired couple, this means $17,400 less. These idiotic numbers are 100% fictitious and fabricated.
Evidently the purpose of this garbage is to keep the peasants hating each other, rather than uniting against their owners. Younger people complain that “boomers” are stealing “all the money” from the (non-existent) Social Security “trust fund.”
Is America saving too much ?
Would be more of a worry.
The demand leakages must be HUGE at this point ?
The real question is are government deficits big enough to fill in the gap. Are banks lending enough to fill in the gap?
From 2012
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/demand-leakages-the-800lb_b_1646916
I suppose the number of unemployed and underemployed will tell us.
What the circus on the hill doesn't understand is cutting the deficit won't help. The bigger the demand leakages grow a 4% deficit might not even fill the gap. They'll want to cut the deficit to below 3% of GDP.
They'll do the usual nonsense while slashing the deficit, give tax cuts to businesses instead of consumers and expect exports to fill the gap. The gold bug ghost lives rent free in their heads.
I doubt you can use historical deficits as a guide IF the demand leakages continue to grow they way they have been.
It's always an unspent income story.
Trumps $ trillion dollar deficit that grabbed headlines at the time is now just a mere foot note in history.
The more people save - the more demand for more money to spend things on. The government keeps feeding the beast.
It's one of the reasons the right like bank lending so much and want to drown the fiscal in the bath tub. That causes a whole set of different problems. Why they like tax cuts so much but always give them to the wrong class of people.
Social Security can be fixed by removing the cap. Of course, that would cut into The Ruler's pocket money.
When they discontinued checkable deposits which is what households use to spend from.
I'm pretty sure it got thrown into this " other liquid assets"
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MDLM#0
If only there was a way to figure out when this drops like it has since the start of 2022. How much of it has gone into real GDP and how much of it has gone into Time deposits pensions, savings portfolios etc etc.
"They’ve been saying this since Social Security began 88 years ago."
But they may be getting closer than ever, politically, to doing something about it. And that's a worry.
SS is a regressive policy…
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