SebastianBlue
President, International Julian Alvarez Fan Club
- Joined
- 25 Jul 2009
- Messages
- 56,111
This whilst Republicans and their surrogates are advocating for the Fed’s push to increase unemployment and slow wage growth. Even though real wage growth has again gone negative, largely due to inflation, after an excruciatingly brief period of real wage growth during the pandemic, not seen since the early 80s when—by the by—Reagan was elected and began eviscerating unions and government labour regulation.
I am an economist, I understand the feared wage-price spiral and the way in which it can sustain inflation, but we aren’t actually in danger of such a thing, at least not in the way being portrayed by the Fed, corporate leaders, media shills for the former two, and Republicans bought and paid for by industry special interest groups.
Most wages could easily increase to stay in line with or even slightly out pace inflation (that being the ideal scenario, rather than stagnate or decline for the past 40 years, as they have). But that would require a reduction in profits, which corporations refuse to allow. Not eliminate profits, merely reduce them.
The current economic policies of “we have to take our medicine” to get inflation under control, referring to needing to increase unemployment, cool labour and real estate markets more generally, resulting in degrading real wage and wealth growth (outside of the top 10%) well below the rate of inflation is designed for one purpose: protect revenue and EPS for shareholders at nearly all other costs.
And they are using the fight for more reasonable wages and unionisation given economic conditions and trends to sabre-rattle about replacing everyone with AI and robotic automation. Which, given they also oppose universal income, will do wonders for the economy.
As I said in a previous post, republicans believe in modern “free market capitalism”, where profits are privatised and losses are socialised.
That is to say, when things are good, the rich get richer; when things are bad the rich stay rich partly via government intervention to insulate them from their incompetence and extremely risky behaviour, as the poor become substantially poorer (shouldering most of the consequences of economic downturns).
And this is not a glitch — this is the way the system is designed. Those afore mentioned media shills and Fed decision makers repeatedly saying “we need to take our medicine” are never the ones to take the medicine being administered by their wealthy handlers.
The medicine is forced down the throats of the poor.
The poor always shoulder the cost of the avarice of the rich. And the wealth divide will continue to grow to new record levels and the American economy will continue to be based on maintaining a class of poor people (mostly outside of the country, but also within it) to exploit.
Yeah, democrats and republicans are exactly the same.
Some interesting graphs to illustrate how much republicans have fucked most Americans (and the economy) in the last century.
* The share of income going to the top 10% increased substantially in 2021 and 2022, which is not depicted on the above chart
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