Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/20/mounting-policy-debt.html
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Hmm, today shall I pay the mortgage or blow it on a poorly made, over priced “luxury” handbag leaving my immediate family homeless?
Decisions, decisions…
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He seems to know what the problem is. He now needs to look in the mirror and see and his class of billionaire’s is what is destroying the middel class and working class. He is the problem and I won’t hold my breath thinking he will understand this anytime soon.
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Everyone who understands basic economics has been screaming this for years.
Destroying the middle class, by definition, must backfire on the wealthy, just as 1 + 1 must equal 2.
Because without a very large healthy, earning, and spending chunk of the population supporting them, the money dries up. You can’t get more water by turning off the faucet, and you can’t get richer by destroying all the wealth.
Somehow this concept has evaded all of these financial geniuses.
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Because either they think that the well is inexhaustible, that just this one looting will not destroy things, or that if they don’t, someone else will loot, or that they can push things off until it doesn’t matter any longer to them personally (see climate change), or that it is simply better to be a Feudal king over ignorant poor peasants than merely a millionaire among citizens.
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gripped with terror that the poors are going to start building guillotines
Spoiler alert:
WE ALREADY ARE
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Surveillance makes it cheaper to separate sheep from goats and neutralize the opposition…
Tell that to the kids in Florida.
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So… he’s scared of the imminent future, but he’s not actually willing to do anything about it?
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I would love to believe that his “message” is well received by his peers (especially those involved with denying climate change, etc.) but I’m not going to hold my breath. Warren Buffet has sounded the alarm many times, only to be ignored.
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sssh. They don’t need to know that.
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“We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night…”
I see his concern.
“Get used to it. And be prepared.”
Keep an eye on the stocks of private merc outfits.
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Before the November 2016 dumpster fire, I and many others said that letting DJT get into office is the fault of all million- and billionaires. They either outright supported him, turned a blind eye, and/or failed to use some of their Galactic Credits to torpedo his campaign and take him out. They easily could have. A few of these assholes, even our beloved Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, could have said, “Hey, it would be worth a billion dollars between us to make sure this guys’ campaign tanks in a puddle of Russian piss.” But they failed. Because, even as lovable and cuddly as they make themselves out to be, they are sociopathically rich, unable to see the larger picture. Unable and unwilling to look past their acquisitiveness and see a greater good. The oligarchy stands by, and will continue to stand by even as the concentration camps are being built.
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He’s not sleeping well? Good!
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It’s more that they don’t care. They like the fact they can screw folks over. What they don’t like is that inevitably people will demand their blood in place of baubles.
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Good luck with that. If we do end up automating ~90%+ of (non-entertainment, although that’s probably on the chopping block as well) jobs, and we almost certainly will, then at some point in the foreseeable future traditional monetary exchange will be meaningless.
I don’t agree with Doctorow on everything, but some of his visions of future currency and the pointlessness of traditional monetary systems in a future economy in his fiction were spot on. We’re really going to have to start thinking about what we’re going to do when the literal vast majority of the population can’t work because there’s literally no jobs left for them.
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Or the fact the rich and powerful could you know… let the governments tax them a little bit to make the welfare state viable and give the “poors” a living wage. Capitalism is one hell of a drug.
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And the people who have power under that system will do anything to preserve it.
Well, based on the logical outcomes of the policies endorsed by the super-rich, they’d prefer for the rest of us to just up and die so that we don’t inconvenience them too much.
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Our economy is based on consumerism. Just like whale hunters and Redwood loggers, the wealthy are destroying the goose that laid the golden egg.
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If you will remember most of the predictions were that DJT would lose, Nate Silver gave him roughly a 17% chance of a win (same chance of losing Russian roulette on the first pull). Nate was soundly ridiculed for giving him sick a high chance.
So hey, spend a billion dollars on “making sure” that the sure thing was going to happen, or buy another summer home? Really, could there be an easier choice?
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