Another shining example that ‘trickle down’ doesn’t work with economies.
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I move that we replace the phrase “making money” with “obtaining money”. When you think about it, it’s striking how much better a description that is.
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How about, “making up money”?
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No person, group, or ideology can make this economic system as it is currently structured eliminate unemployment or poverty. On the other hand, changing ‘only’ the monetary system could positively accomplish those goals while also eliminating the need to use taxes to fund government.
An alternative monetary system that would achieve all that and more good things is available for consideration at www.ajustsolution.com. It follows from mutual respect (in effecting choices) as the ethic of justice, but it can be considered as a strictly economic proposal.
Put the same graph in front of a Conservative and Labour supporter, and you will get two different narratives. The Conservative will say “Look at the robust growth in wages we’ve seen, well done us!”, the Labour rep will say “Look, those Conservatives have stalled your wages”. The problem with all of this is:
1 - they are summary measures, and don’t take into account people’s actual experience, like @bobtato pointed out.
2 - they aren’t great measures to begin with, since a country is much more than its economy. It doesn’t say anything about how well government is helping society reach its goals.
3 - The numbers are estimates, not actual values, so perhaps they should be presented with error bars? Numbers like GDP, wage growth and employment can also be manipulated to some extent (China is known to do this, so why not other countries?).
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But when selling off public assets, slashing services, and giving tax breaks to the super rich fails to materialise the promised economic miracle
Neoconomics produces economic benefits for the average man the same way buying a case of Budweiser turns his life into a beer commercial.
“the party of sober economic management” has been a lie since I started paying attention. Reagan, Thatcher, Mulrooney all left deficits behind. They always do. Deficits are bad when somebody else is in power.
The only real policy is funnelling money upward. Everything else is just marketing and collateral damage.
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Well if you legalise corruption and you market is a lobbying, PAC donations, out-of-court settlements and similar sort of thing, than sure your crony capitalism score will go down. Just cos the law book says its kosher doesn’t make it right. Especially, if laws are made by the same class that profits from the setup.
At moments it seems like western countries don’t really have a multi party political system. Rather its a single party system multiple times over. (Let’s hope Sanders and Corbyn can make some meaningful impact)
Ye Olde Late Stage Capitalisme?
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I think that your system would work better with a Universal Basic Income - that everyone gets the $500/week, and that any employment pays money on top of that.
I think it also creates a bunch of perverse incentives (but then, what system doesn’t?) - you could pay a business a cut of your salary to say that you’re employed: it’s free money for them, and free money for you. A business can avoid having their profits taken back into the system by funneling them into subsidiaries - Google, Inc. would have made $2,000,000,000 on ads, but they have to pay Alphabet, Inc. for their Internet service, etc. etc.
I like the idea in principle, but I think a UBI is just much easier to test, much easier to implement, and has a better impact.
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Charts don’t matter. What matters is ideology! If that’s correct, reality and human experience can go screw!
I’m still waiting for changes in the language we use to describe this illness:
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Seems to me that the only place it works is the loo.
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I think the problem is that we keep thinking of economics as a noun instead of a verb. It’s not the study of money, it’s the means by which we distribute resources.
When you frame it that way, the moral responsibility becomes obvious, where thinking of it merely as the study of a natural system allows one to detach from the inherent injustice of any given model.
Not to nitpick, but Hecate is Greek. Druids pray to Tailte or Lugh for the harvest.
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This is the most annoying thing.
everything is blamed on (conservative-light) new labours economic mismanagement when in fact the conservatives both before and after were far worse, they spent the entire time of new labour’s rule screaming at them for not deregulating the finance sector fast or hard enough.
Amazingly, this is spun by the rightwing media as being new labour is bad for the economy and the conservatives good, rather than the truth of new labour being bad for the economy and the conservatives far worse.
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And don’t forget all the extra pain being heaped on by the totally self-inflicted wound of the EU debate. Huge investment decisions, business plans and personal plans by citizens of the UK and other member states who happen to live here, are being delayed, if not wrecked, just so Dave can look tough to his party.
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But what if you miss the bowl? Then what?
No prob, the pee-ons always lap it up.
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Oh, come on now… we all know it’s only the poors who hoard stuff, because the discovery channel told us so… and the occasional weirdo like Howard Hughes - but then they are “eccentric” and we make movies about them and talk about how they were actually geniuses. But come on! Soros and Gates aren’t hoarders, they are job creators! /s
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Possibly because wealth hoarding is not descriptive of how this class of individuals uses accumulated capital? In part, this index is used to quantify “rent seeking” behavior .
To test the claim that rent-seekers are on the rampage, we have created a crony-capitalist index. Our approach builds on work by Ruchir Sharma of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Aditi Gandhi and Michael Walton of New Delhi’s Centre for Policy Research, and others. We use data from Forbes to calculate the total wealth of those of the world’s billionaires who are active mainly in rent-heavy industries, and compare that total to world GDP to get a sense of its scale. We show results for 23 countries—the five largest developed ones, the ten largest developing ones for which reliable data are available, and a selection of eight smaller ones where cronyism is thought to be a big problem. The higher the ratio, the more likely the economy suffers from a severe case of crony-capitalism.
Seems to me that he ended up getting 16…
