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- cross-posted to:
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Me when capitalism
Capitalism works if we factory reset it every 10 years or so.
Oh yes, that’s true
That 10 years coincides with US debt and bankruptcy law. “Like a free Uno reverse card”, a quote that needs be in grade school textbooks.
Capitalism works when it’s allowed to work, and part of that is strong social safety nets… For the people, not the companies.
If we’d let banks and businesses fail in 2008 it, it would have been devastating at the time, but we wouldn’t be in this hot mess today. Because the government is so friendly to failed businesses, models that play fast and loose can make huge profits, squirrel away that cash, fail, and then get bailed out by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, slower and more stable institutions get outcompeted in the short term, and don’t get bailed out when they withstand the failing economy events.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
Oh, and we need actual monopoly laws. No way in hell Amazon isn’t a monopoly.
It’s the same crises, in various stages of escalation. The rich are squeezing more and more of the lower and middle class all over the world, and there is almost nothing left to squeeze.
The next few years will bring a massive collapse in government services (the USA is starting) for ordinary people, because that is one of the last things that the rich can still squeeze out.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
This will mean war, and they will send you all into it.
Unless we stop it now. Tax the rich.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
It’s already starting to happen. Half of consumer spending in the US is done by just the top 10% of earners. For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
You’ve gone and mixed up correlation and causation here.
The top 10% arent spendinging 50% of the money because they are the glorious saviors of the economy, protecting and nurturing it while us poor people thoughtlessly hoard and save all our wealth. It’s actually quite the opposite.
I’m not saying it’s a good thing. It’s a symptom of the concentration of wealth.
But if you’re a politician and want a quick, popular, short-term solution you get quicker effects giving the big spenders more money. It would be better to lift everyone, but that takes a lot more work.
Which is what’s been happening for decades, and has gotten us into this mess. We’ve been kicking a lot of cans and we’re running out of road.
Except that isn’t true at all. The COVID stimulus checks were a huge boon to the economy and cost about 800 billion dollars, meanwhile just the first round of trump tax cuts are projected to cost the US 1.5trillion. Dollar for dollar, providing spending power to the lower income earners generates more economic stimulus. Talk to someone making less that 200k a year, and there is a laundry list of items they need or want to purchase. Ask a billionaire what they are waiting for the money to buy, and it’s nothing. When you have an unlimited check book, why would you wait?
The whole reason why the top 10% spend 50% of the economy, is because they have 99% of the disposable income. The idea that the poorer 90% of us are hoarding money more than the freaking multi-million/billionaires is laughably out of touch.
Exactly. The only real problem with the covid stimulus was that they were implemented quickly, and that they occurred simultaneously with covid-related supply chain disruptions. That’s why so much inflation happened. You could make that level of stimulus permanent without any inflationary effect as long as you slowly ramped up the stimulus over a decade or so. You wouldn’t want to implement a $20k/year UBI overnight. That would cause huge inflation. But if you slowly ramped it up, that would give time for the production system to slowly expand to meet the need.
this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
This is probably true for industries like fashion, but I disagree with this point applying in general. There is only so much food, gasoline, and paper products an individual is willing to buy, no matter how rich.
The restaurant industry, for example, would collapse as we know it if most non-wealthy people suddenly don’t have any extra income to spend on prepared food. They need velocity in orders just to remain open at all. I doubt most places could remain open off of a few rich people buying a lot.
This isn’t to say that they won’t stop extracting more from the lower earners. Many of them would be fine killing off industry if it makes themselves richer. I personally think all of it’s a short-sighted cash grab that’s gonna keep poisoning the economy until something changes.
Except they could still do that level of spending while not perched atop a massive hoard, and the rest could do cumulatively more spending via their sheer numbers if said hoard were distributed more evenly.
2002: We lost the house 2008: got evicted from apartment 2020: dad died from covid 2025: let’s see how it goes this time
That’s fucking rough dude, I hope the world throws you a bone this time and just leaves you alone for once.
I understand now.
How can a partially muscled skeleton scream
If you’ve done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with a partially skeletal scream?
He partially has lungs and a vocal chord ?
Though it reminds me of a conversation you can over hear in one of the Baldurs Gate games between to skeletons, who talk themselves into how they shouldn’t function, and then promptly fall to the floor in a pile.
That was Divine Divinity. Larian Yes, not Baldur’s Gate.
Like this
AAAAAAHHHHHH!!! I’M A BONEY BOI WITH SOME BUT NOT ALL OF MY MUSCLES!!!
It starts to make sense when you realize that each of those events is basically a fire sale for billionaire investors.
Just look at income inequality before/after each of those events.
This is the truth.
The economic crisis’s have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it’s just that they’re not accidental, they’re not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined… they’re engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say “I just gotta save up enough so I can…”
And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of “young, energetic pioneers.” (who they can pay less.)
The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone’s pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don’t own.
Seeing shit like this play out just makes it harder to keep going. At this point it’s a matter of when I do it, not if. What point is there if it’s only getting worse? I’ve seen my best years by now
Your choice, of course.
But there’s something to be said for living as well as well can in spite of the bullshit. Especially if there’s folks that rely on us.
The most punk thing for me to to as a person of queer is to keep living, but God is it hard to find the spirit.
I get that.
I take some comfort that - I know I won’t outlive every asshole, but I think I can outlive a bunch of them.
(This bunch in particular. A bunch of them are ancient.)
I wish upon a star that we could be a generation that takes power back for the average worker and uses our strength in numbers as leverage to have a better quality of life by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
But it’s looking like our historic legacy is going to be that of a fool generation that votes against their own interests and refuses to stand up for themselves.
A very embarrassing time to be an American.
we could be a generation that takes power back
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights… we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.
It’s such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We’re facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies and narratives meant to make us be quiet and hide. Even if it doesn’t work on most of us, if it only works on a fraction of a fraction of the people, we still have millions who hate you and want you dead simply because you might think that your tax money should go into making all our lives better equally.
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
This is a message the media owners want us all to accept.
In my experience, very few people want to die or commit violence for some billionaire’s agenda.
Most people just want to live their lives and maybe live to see the assholes in charge have to pretend to care what the rest of us think.
It’s almost like granting a supreme veto to a single, wholly imaginary ideology, and positioning it as a monoculture for how society values activities and production, is problematic.
We apparently did away with it once before through the separation of church and state, maybe it’s time to force the separation of bank and state.
For your own mental well-being, stop reading the news. Unsubscribe and block all news communities.
Not gonna happen. Ignorance is what got us here.
Many of us are ambivalent. We are overwhelmed by the terrible things happening around us. We can stick our heads in the sand, but we can’t help fix things if we don’t know what is happening. I take breaks from Trump/Musk news, but I can’t stay away forever if I want to fight for my family, and maybe my country.
That is what a third of non voting Americans have done and its working out great for all of us. /s
I didn’t say don’t vote. You can look stuff up around election times. But general day to day there is really no point in looking at the news.
By all means everyone should take breaks from the media and not doomscroll constantly. But if you disengage completely you will have given the people making the world like this everything they want. They want you to be apathetic and disengaged. They want you to stay home on every election day. They want you to ignore everything they are doing, because criminals can work better when there’s no one watching what they are doing.
So, for your mental well being please do take regular time off from the 24hr news cycle but also, look into how you can help to turn back the tide. See where you can volunteer if you have the time, join your PTA and keep an eye on your local library (these have been major targets of right wing nut jobs looking to undermine progress), or if you are too busy then just simply repost the positive messaging from those few in our government who are doing all they can to hold the line against this regime. Challenge the thoughts of those you know who are either giving in to apathy or voted for Trump but are even slightly doubting his actions. Every crack can be a door. And, most importantly, VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION.
Forgot 2015
You start noticing this pattern after some decades.
Always accompanied by “we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations”.
The period before is sold as a great economic time, despite that they called it a crisis back then and also ‘needed’ austerity measures to get back to the prosperity of the previous period.
The western standard of living has been destroyed bit by bit since the post WW2 period with this tactic, not for the multinationals, banks, stock folks OC, that’s where the stolen money goes to.
The ones in power telling us in their paid press how great ‘the econonomy’ is doing bcs stock line go up and BS GDP up.
In reality that means more billions in the pockets of a few oligarchs while income equality is growing.“we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations”.
But followed by “you guys need to be expending” and also “we are going to fund a lot more things with public money”
Fuck Keynes.
We should be spending public money though. The public debt has literally never been an actual issue for the US.
To make matters worse, well, for my generation here in Denmark, 1983 is the smallest generation alive. That means we have the least voting power. Between us and larger voter pools, it’s pretty clear who politicians will cater to.
In the US 1984 was the nadir in births. So a similar experience.
“Funny”
Wait, I miss this, did a new recession just drop?
If it hasn’t yet it’s about to. 1-5% daily drops across the stock market for the past month pretty much and now with a 10%+ minimum tariff on all imports means everything is going to get way more expensive. I’ll chew a brick if we’re not in a recession by the end of the year
At that point, is it a recession or should we just call the 2020s: depression part 2 AI boogaloo?
Yeah I’m pretty sure it’ll end up turning into the Great Depression 2.0 with ✨AI Enhancements✨
I heard this with that stupid woooww sound every IG post has in it
That brick might be your only source of essential minerals and nutrients by the end of this year. You’ll need to learn how to go without, and make that single brick last until 2028. Also, you’ll need to work 80hrs a week to afford it.
At this point I’m just ignoring my 401k and hoping time in the market makes up for this fuckery…
Just keep contributing the same amount if you can. Best case scenario you are buying low and it will go up a lot in the future, worst case is money is not worth anything so it doesn’t matter anyway. Unless you are retiring in like, 5 years, then you might be fucked.
Yeah, this is pretty much where I am right now. And no, I’ve still got 2-3 more ‘once in a lifetime recessions’ to live through before I retire, which is why I’m ignoring it. That’s future spooky’s problem.
We never really recovered from COVID.
Not officially, no.
But yes, it’s already here.
We were in the beginning stages of a recession Sept 2019, before COVID hit, and the Trumpster is doing the same shit now, so…
Don’t forget - you were also BORN into a once in a generation economic crisis: The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of approximately a third of the savings and loan associations in the United States between 1986 and 1995. These thrifts were banks that historically specialized in fixed-rate mortgage lending.
It never really felt to me like the tech bubble crash was that big a deal to many people outside of a group of greedy rich assholes. There’s always collateral damage of course, but the only change I really witnessed was a stop to people getting paid 20x the median salary after spending a few weeks with a Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours book.
It’s what you get when pedophiles run the most powerful country: a new generation every 8-10 years.
