this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
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I'm not ignoring this, I'm saying increasing expenditure in healthcare, education, infrastructure and pensions can have a POSITIVE impact on peoples' lives.
It's not. We sadly live under mostly governments that follow neoliberalism. I want the opposite, I don't want smaller governments spending less, I want bigger more progressive governments eliminating homelessness by making huge amounts of public housing in well planned out cities with great public transit, eliminating unemployment through guaranteed jobs, raising the expenditure in universal healthcare and education to have more professionals... I want actual leftism, not lukewarm centrist socialdemocrats/liberals.
I'm very high on MMT, but why does that mean I'm repeating talking points? I'm personally very interested in economics for the past years. MMT is just a stepping stone imo for people (myself included) to learn about economics. I'd gladly apply much, MUCH more radical leftist measures than those prescripted by MMT. But a productive talk about debt and budgets isn't a thing I'll deny :)
If you think inflation was a consequence of government spending, I'm sorry, but you've been lied to. Inflation did spike, and people's purchase power went down, but none of that is due to public expenditure. I'm personally European so I can tell you about the reasons for inflation:
Spike in energy prices as a consequence of the war in Ukraine
Problems in supply of goods as a consequence of COVID bottlenecks
Companies rising prices more than would be necessary to just maintain profit, in order to get more profits by riding the wave of inflation
Like, these are known, studied, measured effects, it's not even a discussion in serious academia that these are the reason, they can even quantify by how much. Just think about it, inflation happened widespread across the world. If it had been a monetary phenomenon, it would have been confined to specific currencies, the policy in the US (dollars) was very different as that on Canada (Canadian Dollars) or in the UK (Pounds) or in the EU (Euros) or in Japan (yen).