this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2024
1348 points (97.5% liked)

United States | News & Politics

1927 readers
626 users here now

Welcome to !usa@midwest.social, where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.

If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.

Rules

Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.

Post anything related to the United States.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 1 points 4 months ago

You still out right ignoring the point how this behavior has consequences on working people's lives and finance

I'm not ignoring this, I'm saying increasing expenditure in healthcare, education, infrastructure and pensions can have a POSITIVE impact on peoples' lives.

Either, money got spend and nothing to show for it. How is this good?

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.

Also, sounds like you are high on modern monetary theory and have not thought this through beyond repeating talking points of the theory, which were circulated on teevee during covid.

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 :)

COVID was an attempt do this trick and inflation spiked and people's QoL went down.

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:

  1. Spike in energy prices as a consequence of the war in Ukraine

  2. Problems in supply of goods as a consequence of COVID bottlenecks

  3. 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).