What is different this time? Maybe:
1 Online shopping market in the range of 5 trillions 2 Electricity and energy price raise 3 Impossibility to lower interest rates 4 Tech market also in the range of multi Trillions 5 Global education and power expansion ...
Meaning that a % of all this money flow goes private pockets destroying medium class, which gets poorer.
It is like a memory leak that keeps sucking resources while growing exponentially until the system crashes. The real question for an economist is how much ram has the system and how much the memory has leaked?
This Legendary site is interesting: https://usdebtclock.org/index.html Especially when combined it´s data with AI.
you can couch it in tech metaphors but there is a clear path forward and it involves eating a certain class of people
You don't have to eat them. You just have to erect significant barriers to hoarding wealth, particularly in off shore devices, and you have to create constant pressure to ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large.
These aren't even hard problems. Until you meet someone in Congress. Then it suddenly seems hopeless.
>and you have to create constant pressure to ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large
I have no idea if this is true (I've asked economists-in-training, they say they'll get back to me), but I've read that the huge increases in tax rates on high income during the war was less to generate revenue (tho more revenue was certainly a need - there was also a growing focus on growing the number of people who paid taxes, which prior had been quite small), but more to ensure profits were not realized and instead kept invested in the economy and the war machine.
A kind of practical "hodl" to keep the wartime economy stock with reinvestment - or really to discourage removing money from industrial investment - to benefit the war-time economy.
Would like links to things to learn more about this line of reasoning.
Isn’t hoarded wealth a no-op? It just reduces the supply of whatever they are hoarding.
Would the people benefit from redistributing the things they are hoarding? Corporate stock that pays little to no dividends, mainly? It’s not like they are hoarding wheat. I don’t really get what people think will happen if we redistribute the stored wealth.
All wealth is, is a claim to direct labor and materials, the magnitude of which is relative to the total amount of wealth competing to direct those at present. If some portion of the wealth is locked away, the labor and materials are still being deployed, just the total pool of wealth competing to direct them is smaller than it would be otherwise. Unlocking wealth does not actually bring more stuff into existence.
Now, it could redirect labor and materials used to built yachts or luxury homes into more practical goods. But my impression is that the labor and materials used for those things are minuscule compared to the overall economy, and most of the wealth of the very wealthy is not actually used for those sorts of things.
>> Isn’t hoarded wealth a no-op? It just reduces the supply of whatever they are hoarding.
It’s not. Wealth creates political power, which the wealthy wield to stack the odds in their own favor at the expense of everyone else.
Is that the topic of discussion? I thought it was something along the lines of “tax the rich so we can do things with the money”. That is the area I’m saying it is a no-op in. Statements without context frequently don’t mean the same as what they mean with context.
this argument ignores basic opportunity costs. taxing that wealth allows the state to redirect labor and materials production and distribution toward high-utility public goods: high-speed rail, dense urban cores, and affordable housing. instead of subsidizing insolvent suburbs, we could be modernizing the logistics network and actually growing the real economy.
worse, you completely miss the political dimension. hoarded wealth buys the lobbying power to prevent these necessary structural changes. you are engaging in the exact kind of apologetics that has led to american infrastructure collapsing while the capital class extracts rent. thinking that resource allocation is a 'no-op' is economically illiterate
But by doing this you are just making everything else more expensive, that’s the point.
Printing money and spending it on those projects would have literally the same effect.
I’m responding to what I infer as the notion that people must have to say what they say about UBI, which is the implicit “we will pay for X and that will be it” not “we will make other goods more expensive in order to have X, and how we are happening to implement that is by taxing the rich”.
Like how about we just eliminate corporate-government corruption? Like there are a lot of shit business people today with a lot of shit politicians in their pockets, and many of them did not legitimately earn what they have, but is it really better to prevent the accumulation of capital over a certain amount? Then the powerful in your society are <checks notes> people who won a popularity contest.
I can’t tell if the commenter you replied to is being deliberately obtuse, or if they were literally born yesterday
No, I believe your understanding of the economic mechanisms involved is just too shallow to reason accurately in this area.
I’m certainly open to a direct counter argument, but all I’ve seen so far is tap dancing.
ensure that stored wealth is best re-invested in the economy at large
Pretty sure the vast, vast bulk of wealth held by the richest US households is indeed “reinvested in the economy at large”.
Where do you think it is instead?
When you invest you get shares. Shares come with votes. Do you think these people are voting to make your life better or do you think they're voting to arbitrarily raise prices to increase the value of their shares?
Supporting companies that profit off of misery, reduce human meaningfulness, those that innovate the surveillance state; why is it so hard to support policies like giving US school children free breakfast + lunch, medicare for all, public housing, universal childcare, federally mandated paid time off, universal higher education + vocational training, and a public jobs program (all things that have 70-90% voter approval across party lines; the new deal coalition literally had control of both houses of Congress for nearly 60 years unabated)? Programs that would literally unleash hundreds of trillions in monetary + societal benefits, why should the US population care about the wealth of the few compared to what we can do to provide meaningful lives collectively?
The idea that less than 100 people in the country have some sort of mandated right from the devil to dictate the direction of technology in our country should fill every single decent human being with disgust.
We must correct this. The fact that several hyper scale data centers could provide US school children free lunches + breakfast for a year should be the first immediate sign that something is deeply wrong with our country.
oh so your a filthy commie, an evil domestic terrorist. dont you know they're the job creators? you should be grateful for your stable bed and stop being greedy.
imagine the horror of free loaders eating free lunches, living in affordable apartments close to school, and riding high speed rail each weekend to visit nature. will anyone think of our lords? and what about my iphone? obviously phones will cease to exist once we implement these communist pipe dreams. just look at china, they've got all of this and they clearly hate it. no phones, no brand clothes, oh the terror. you should be locked up in an insane asylum immediately
I dunno, I love my iPhone, especially when I use it to take photos of my kids.
Amazon is pretty great, too.
Also schoolchildren in my state have had free school breakfast & lunch since Covid.
Do you see what's going on around you or do you just stare at pictures of cats on your iPhone™
Yes and you should care about the world your children are inheriting. What happens after you die? What happens if they get injured and can no longer work? What happens if they lose their job and can't afford their rent? What happens when it turns out they aren't as capable as you thought and require assistance to simply navigate the world?
This is the problem with people like you, you simply lost your humanity because you care more about trinkets than literally shaping a better world for your children.
incredible self awareness - well done
Big problems are solved by years of investment and good decision making.
Unfortunately, going after causes or correcting symptom in any kind of hurry acts as a massive destabilizer at exactly the moment systemic destabilization provides the motive/momentum for taking action.
Hard course corrections at critical pressure, in a complex system, is a value destroying reset.
Companies can do this. Mass layoffs, capitalization sell off, etc. And then recover over time, because the rest of the economy around them is mores stable and the pain gets diluted. Entire countries doing this doesn't work out so well.
But it would appear, that may be the path we are most likely to take.
> It feels as though all we need is a spark. And yet, many sparks seem to have come and gone. Big market moves, in stocks or yields, that have recovered. Tariff and invasion threats, protests, you name it, they might move the needle but it always seems to move back. So, perhaps we won? Perhaps we built our markets so stable that they are these days impervious
This is a myopic question only considering the values of securities, gold/silver, etc, which are owned in significance by relatively few.
The working class economy has already crashed. People who have to put in hours to get paid are struggling, and consumer spending is dominated by the top 10%.
The media, ever fixated on the economic welfare of the top 1%, spins a story that if the stock market is doing well, the economy is doing well.
Meanwhile there is an quiet bet that authoritarians will protect interests of capital owners over all else (i.e the bailout OpenAI hinted they might need), while suppressing the primary methods the masses have for expressing their discontent: speech, organizing/demonstrating, strikes, and voting.
Is it just me or does this metaphor sound AI generated?
> It is like a memory leak that keeps sucking resources while growing exponentially until the system crashes. The real question for an economist is how much ram has the system and how much the memory has leaked?
"... how much ram has the system" is a typo or an ESL mistake, so not an LLM.