- 27 Jan 2021 04:17
#15153137
Trump ran up budget deficits in his first three years to levels seen in our history only during major wars and financial crises — thanks to tax cuts, military spending and little fiscal discipline. America’s richest 10 percent, who own more than 80 percent of U.S. stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains. Meanwhile, mediocre productivity in the real economy has limited opportunity, choice and income gains for the poor and middle class alike. Prolonged and increasingly generous bailouts, where governments are willing to buy even corporate junk bonds to prevent foreclosures distort the efficient allocation of capital needed to raise productivity.The past few years should have been an era of huge creative destruction.
As governments keep stepping in to eliminate recessions, downturns no longer play their role of purging the economy of inefficient companies, and recoveries have grown weaker and weaker, with lower productivity growth. So it takes more and more stimulus each time to prop up growth. How about more inclusive capitalism for everyone and less knee-jerk socialism for rich people.
The Republicans have hit on a winning political strategy. Ignore policy, and instead focus on emotional issues that can be encapsulated in a sound bite, or, preferably a 4 letter acronym. While they're distracted, rob them blind. Eventually, enslave them. Ronald Reagan's curse remains with us to this day, but with this twist: Republicans may have, pre-Reagan, thought that government had some merit, but after the B-movie lot actor won the presidency, they gave up on government entirely except as a means to raid the public treasury for tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. Republicans play the fear and race cards, smoothly diverting modest whites from understanding that the tax cuts and deregulations benefit one class only, and it's not them.
As governments keep stepping in to eliminate recessions, downturns no longer play their role of purging the economy of inefficient companies, and recoveries have grown weaker and weaker, with lower productivity growth. So it takes more and more stimulus each time to prop up growth. How about more inclusive capitalism for everyone and less knee-jerk socialism for rich people.
The Republicans have hit on a winning political strategy. Ignore policy, and instead focus on emotional issues that can be encapsulated in a sound bite, or, preferably a 4 letter acronym. While they're distracted, rob them blind. Eventually, enslave them. Ronald Reagan's curse remains with us to this day, but with this twist: Republicans may have, pre-Reagan, thought that government had some merit, but after the B-movie lot actor won the presidency, they gave up on government entirely except as a means to raid the public treasury for tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. Republicans play the fear and race cards, smoothly diverting modest whites from understanding that the tax cuts and deregulations benefit one class only, and it's not them.
"Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine." Virginia Woolf 1897