I've felt bad for The Onion for many years. This is, unintentionally, fucking hilarious.
I always thought that "truth is stranger than fiction" thing was so rarely true that I never understood why I heard it so often.
Then came Trump.
How selfish can you assholes be?! Don’t you realize your suffering is load-bearing?! Without it, the whole system that allows Jeff Bezos to live like King Solomon will collapse!
Load-bearing suffering is the best description of how economists treat the low and middle class (ha) existence that one ever heard.
Isn't wopo owned by that fuckwit? So it makes sense for them to run a story that tries to influence people to agree with the guillotine target class.
Is there a link to the actual text of the article or are we just sufficiently enraged by headlines now?
The Washington Post page is paywalled. Here's the same article on MSN.
The argument seems poorly constructed and hard to pull out from the article. But it boils down to, "Business won't do it unless they have to. Lowering prices means demand has dropped and they need to boost demand. They will also cut jobs since they gave pay raises recenlty. Cutting jobs could result in a recession."
I'm still a bit iffy if that's the actual argument, but that's my read right now.
The pain of rebalancing things to a more sustainable state is gonna happen anyway, and the longer it's put off the worse it's gonna be - so let's just get it over with already!
I don't think anything will rebalance, unless it will be forced, like the french did with the revolution, or the communist countries (independent of the outcomes, I think we all can agree that a process of change was triggered)
I'll take my chances with everyone having more money. The economy dies when no one can buy anything.
"Pay workers twice the cost of living and the economy will thrive" - ~~Adam Smith~~ some fucking commienist
No problem, as long as my salary is increased more than the groceries...
How about we temporarily help you until you stop complaining, and then repeal it later?
Great! Then I'll vote to keep you and the leopards in office.
yes, yes, we all know that capitalism relies fundamentally on a money supply that expands forever and ever, and that nothing about the whole grift keeps working if prices are falling or even just stable for extended periods. We need to issue loans today that are payable in future dollars which we are certain will be worth less than today's dollars or the whole shebang is basically out the window. "A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow" must be true the vast majority of the time for debt, credit, home loans, the national debt, municipal bonds, treasury bonds, the stock market, the overnight repo market, and central banks, just to name a few, to function whatsoever.
Guessing here: deflation is worse for us than inflation for economic reasons. However, in this capitalistic hellscape of a prison server we now live on, I’m pretty sure the inflation we do have is completely imaginary pricing to steal more capital from the working class before we destroy each other (hopefully billionaires first, but come on, that’s a joke too).
Their economic reasons are superstitious nonsense. It's always been about siphoning wealth from the working class. The purpose of a system is what it does.
It's not nonsense, we've seen deflation destroy economies plenty of times.
The issue is that what economists are saying is don't ask/expect lower prices, demand higher wages. Higher wages produce basically the same result without breaking the economic system.
Maybe you want the economic system to break, but for most people that would be bad and lead to a lot of death and suffering.
What we've got now is even more broken! Forever inflation is not a good idea.
I mean, if you go back 100 years in the US, there has always been some inflation (as that's how our economic model works). The cost of living crisis isn't caused by inflation, but larger macro economic policies.
Source: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/historical-inflation-rates/
forever inflation
The problem isn't some inflation or deflation. It's having constantly positive inflation, the levers for which are pulled by insiders. At best they're trying to prevent all forest fires, and the dry brush keeps accumulating until we get a fire too big to put out. At worst they're just picking whichever interest rates they've been bribed to pick.
Corporate profits keep going up, CEO pay keeps going up, inequality keeps going up, but real income has not kept up at all. We aren't the beneficiaries of inflationary monetary policy. It's functional wealth extraction, not incompetent management.
This isn't what Keynes wanted at all. He expected the inflation money would go towards public works and we'd have a 15-hour work week, not funding bond holders and a gradually increasing work week. We adopted half of his rationale as a post hoc rationalization for the Nixon Shock.
Of course it is bad for the economy. The economy here means the pockets of the mega rich.
So I have a moral quandary here. Is a group of billionaires called a mistake or a buffet?
incredible. this society needs to END.
Deflation is actually pretty awful for everyone, it creates a negative feedback loop that results in widespread job losses. The Great Depression was largely driven by a deflationary spiral.
Robots/automatisation will also bring job losses in the future. And losing a job is not a bad thing, when you do still have the ability to live without it.
I think the real issue at hand is that people can't afford food without a job, and some have a hard time affording food even with a job.
This. It would hurt the average person, the average billionaire wouldn't be affected too much. What's necessary is a steady increase in the lowest wages.
Billionaires were literally created by inflation. It's why you invest with them.
Indeed. What world is this if that half a dozen multi-millionaires that control 90% of the western economy can no longer have increased profits year over year??!
What's the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire?
Three zeros, I guess.
Wages increased along inflation? Bull shit 😅
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