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Kevin Bridges: A Whole Different Story
…where’s the lie?
From a macroeconomics standpoint, Bridges is completely accurate.
The problem with most Tories (and many Republicans in the US) is that they either have big business interests at heart or have bought the lie that government is like a business. Government is not a business! Microeconomic principles, even ones that apply to entire industries, don’t apply to governments!
Here’s the fundamental macroecomic model of an economy:
(image from tutor2u)
Notice that the system is circular. The model shows that the economy inherently needs to be balanced. If some households are making hundreds of times the income of other households, they will put the vast majority of that money into savings and investment.
This is bad for the economy.
Some savings and investment is necessary. But too much means the little green arrows are siphoning off vast portions of the peach demand arrow (”purchases of goods and services”). This means that companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pie. Even if you heavily fund those companies, many will collapse due to lack of demand for their products, unless they become monopolies and the sole practical source of their product. Monopolies are technically illegal in the US, but we have them anyway because of this problem (and a lack of enforcement).
The other way you can damage the demand arrow is by shifting the proportions of the purple income arrow. Most people make money from wages, so if you significantly decrease those relative to dividends, interest, profits, and rent, you’ll harm the majority of households. In turn, this again decreases the peach arrow because many households only need a set amount of a given product in a year. The fewer households that can afford the products, the lower overall demand, because the remaining households won’t buy up the difference.
Households with average levels of income spend far more money than they save, of necessity, and they do so at a relatively steady rate. This is good for the economy.
Households with incredibly high levels of income - millionaires, etc. - save far more than they spend. They tend to make their money off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents - not wages. Therefore, to improve the economy, including increasing tax revenues for the government, two basic steps are urged by almost all macroeconomists:
1. Increase wages, especially at the lowest end. This expands the tax base and drives up demand for basic goods and services, stabilizing the industries necessary to a decent quality of life: agriculture and food production, clothing, housing, education, transportation, etc.
2. Use progressive taxes, in which those who make the most money, particularly off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents, pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. This allows that money to be spent directly on goods and services or to be redistributed to poor households, who will in turn spend it on goods and services. In both cases, money that would have gone into savings and investment instead goes into demand. This makes businesses more successful and a large number of households more prosperous. Society as a whole benefits from decreased crime, lower health problems, and improved public goods like education, roads, emergency response, infrastructure, etc.
Macroeconomics is the opposite of an individual business. Individual businesses study how to take the most pie for themselves and keep it. Macroeconomists - and governments - study how to make the pie bigger and distribute it in such a way that society as a whole benefits from the growth.
Conservatives: doing economics wrong for the past several decades by deliberately pretending that knowing how to run a business is anything like knowing how to run a government. Being fiscally cautious and being uneducated do not have to go hand in hand. (I’m both, for example.) But the rhetoric for slashing budgets has been laden with errors and ideology since at least the 1930s, and I’m tired of it.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE MORONS
AT THE BACKIN OUR GOVERNMENTSRemember this the next time someone says “I’ve never gotten a job from a poor person.”
Reblogged from:thatonenerdyhandsomeguy
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SERIOUSLY
I am going to print this out and plaster it everywhere I go
my heart just broke
Not gonna lie; I’m on the verge of tears right now.
Because this is what I see every night when I come into work. I work at a Jewish-run elder care non-profit. Even in the memory care unit, we’re seeing a rise in the residents’ anxiety levels, to the point where they’ve had to stop turning on the TV news stations (and these residents still love the news). Multiple residents are direct survivors of the Shoah; some barely escaped, and almost all of them lost family members in death camps. One resident was one of the children saved by the Kindertransport. Many other residents tell me stories of when they were kids, how their neighborhoods were destroyed and relocated and of the siblings and parents they no longer have. One newer resident was finally starting to settle in when Charlottesville happened. Even though we immediately changed the channel, she was shaken. She was inconsolable for hours. When I left for the night, she was still crying and refused to leave her room. Even now, weeks after the direct event, she still is wary to come to programs, fearing that if she is away from her room too long that her possessions and place will be stolen from her like they were in 1938. Even with dementia, even with Alzheimers, these residents remember what happened. They cannot forget their lost loved ones. They cannot forget the things stolen from them. They cannot forget, period.
Because this fight against Neo-Nazis isn’t just a theoretical thing. These groups know that people are forgetting about Shoah; they take great strength knowing that people from that generation are dying. When they regard WWII as a “dark cloud” hanging over the heads of this generation, it is not with a solemn regard, with they knowledge that we must not forget lest we repeat our mistakes. These White supremacists, these White Neo-Nazis, see Shoah remembrance as something they will gladly eradicate. When people gladly throw out the Nazi salute, chant the 14 words, or march under the banner of “hail victory,” they are two things and two things only – Nazi apologists and Nazi supporters.
Shoah survivors are not gone. They are still here. We need to stop ignoring that this normalization of Nazis marching in the street harms real people. It’s not just ideas. It’s not just “free speech”.
We cannot forget. We cannot forget. We cannot forget.Remembering is not enough.
Sorrow is not enough.
They are in our midst again
We need to know how to stop them:- https://socialistworker.org/2017/07/03/what-strategies-will-stop-the-far-rightReblogged from:officialglowinthedarkflashlight
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Reblogged from:
bob-belcher
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the team: thanks, but we don’t want this plot hook
Matt: That’s fine, guess you don’t want to track done the Hawker
the team: the what now
Reblogged from:pammie-yammie
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You’re family. Family shows up.
Reblogged from:winchesterchola
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meirl
Reblogged from:savedbythenotepad
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THIS HOLY TRINITY OF BADASS WOMEN NEEDS MORE APPRECIATION
Reblogged from:spideyjlaw
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I am so excited for the new season of Heroes and Halfwits!!
I’m loving the characters and the world so far and this rag tag group can only fall into to so much trouble which i am SO here for!Reblogged from:millacm
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Guys who think periods are nbd are my favorite guys.
Also:
I wanna add as well that he didn’t write ‘women’, he wrote ‘people who menstruate’. Dude is cool on every conceivable level.
Reblogged from:zoyzauce
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While wearing a wedding dress you lept over a couch, sprinted down an alley, and jumped off a car to subdue the crap out a perp like you were Wonder Woman. Was pretty cool, wasn’t it?
Reblogged from:edsbrak
