I’m sure Sen. Elizabeth Warren has a plan for that! If only we didn’t have to wait to 2021 to have a competent administration to begin a real turn around on these vitally important issues.
Starting to get the feeling humankind is a bunch of jumped-up monkey motherfuckers.
And the Republican answer will be the same that Andrew Mellon said in 1930, “Wealth will go back to its’ natural owners”.
While the Pulpit Pimps will tell the MAGATs that they have nothing to worry about because they done got Jesus!
Actually, it is far worse.
The two ways to fight a recession are (1) the Fed cutting interest rates and (2) increased federal spending. Since the rates are so low, there is not a lot to cut there, and with the high deficits in a “booming” economy any massive spending program would send the printing presses working 24/7/365.
“What a fine mess you got us into!”
If/when unemployment insurance is federalized, it also needs to be rejiggered so that it’s not a disincentive to employers hiring people. All the taxes and fees that are based on headcount (rather than, say, hours worked or total payroll or amount paid for services by people) basically tell employers to work their current employees harder maximize hours, maximize contractors, rather than put another name on the payroll.
On the contrary, Republicans are completely prepared to judge everyone’s choices, cut wages, slash benefits, drug test everyone who says they want to work, force birth upon every woman who isn’t a virgin, bitch about how impossible it is to hire good workers anymore, and fill the gap with the same illegal immigrants they say they’re trying to kick out. Republicans are completely prepared to worry about budget deficits again, just as soon as their names aren’t on the checks.
But…
But what about Saint Ron’s warning about the Most Terrifying words in the English Language? ‘I am from the government and I am here to help’
This economist dude clearly DID NOT get the memo.
I want to commend TPM for having a voice from Labor, sadly overlooked by news outlets, contribute to the dialog. Perhaps Science next?
The flaw in the piece is the assumption that one can avoid a recession in the present case by doing X, Y, or Z. That is simply not possible during the late phase of an asset bubble that was artificially stimulated by tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations, who used the money not to pay down debt or add productive capacity to the real economy, but to use it for leverage to assume even more debt through mergers and acquisitions, or to engage in asset-pumping but economically useless stock buybacks.
The Trump administration has exacerbated the impending recession by engaging in unprecedented meddling with the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates artificially low (In 2009-2010, when there was an actual recession and heavy unemployment to deal with, Republicans excoriated the Fed’s low interest rate policy – which was the correct policy for the situation. Now, with full employment, the GOP wants to keep the gas pedal to the floor, making any resulting crash that much more severe).
From an economic point of view, better to have the inevitable slowdown sooner rather than later, when even more combustible material will have been built up. From a political point of view, better now than after November 2020. Republicans, Trump foremost among them, always try to time recessions so that they are not on their watch, even though the measures they take will make matters worse.
Republicans always crash the economy. Democrats always fix it and build it.
Democrats must start being very clear about this. They must expressly blame the Republican party and never stop blaming it. The GOP must be synonymous with the bad times, Democrats with the good times. Currently the reverse is true.
It’s hard, because republicans are essentially the party party, and democrats are the ones who help you clean up and given you bad-tasting stuff to fix the hangover.
If unemployment benefits are federalized, it had better include a provision banning any SALT caps, otherwise there will be a strong sentiment in Blue states to say FU to the Red states, you elect garbage politicians, you live with the consequences, don’t ask us to subsidize you.
In a near $100 trillion a year global economy, it is forgivable that maybe we don’t focus on the right things. For example, stock market, which have indexes that go up and down, are a perennial fave of the financial-entertainment branch. The dull reality is that we probably should follow a range of indicators. The gini coefficient roughly measures wealth disparity, infant mortality rate tells something about the health care system, the main lending rates of the central bank or ratings of sovereign bonds tell something about the fiscal policies of a government. Some indicators, such as the unemployment rate, are important because of their political implications and may even be mandated as in the case of the Fed, whose mission includes achieving “optimal” employment, whatever that means.
Recessions shift focus back to measures that should have been tracked all along. The GOP relentlessly cites the government debt-to-GDP ratio, which is typically about a third of the total debt-to-GDP ratio. We hear little about private-sector debt-to-GDP, yet it is more problematic fo central banks in this age where the Fed, ECB and others are trying to shake off the torpor of quantitative easing, which involved buying vast amounts of bonds, even corporate bonds. Yellen, who was a dream dove on policy, nevertheless moved ahead with quantitative tightening to have a least some room to maneuver when the shit hits the fan. Also, although Krugman has said the next recession is likely to resemble the kitchen sink recession of the early 1990s, there is also the more evil possibility of a “cynical” recession similar to the dot-com bust that directed the pain at unsophisticated investors and international investors.
As bad as recession is, IMO it would be nice as you say it would precede 202o and donald & GOP would get the karmic lesson they deserve.
After the Democrats passed the last economic stimulus without a single Republican vote in 2009 I’m not sure how many Dems will be ready to deliver if the Republicans and Dump start trying to dig out from the cusp of a depression again.
I sure haven’t forgotten the political lies and pain the Dems had to go through just to save the country from an economic catastrophe. And the Repub bots never paid any political price for their intransigence. I fear there won’t be enough political will to craft a recovery program when the economy tanks again. And it will. It’s just a matter of when.
This seems to align with Kamala Harris’ critique of the current economic conditions. LIFT Act will sound pretty good to a lot of red county voters if what happened in May is the start of a trend.
A very simple and true statement. Thank you nemo. It pleads for a good message from Democrats. You would think in this digital age it would be simple, but apparently it’s too simple to just say it over and over. Another Occam’s Razor.
Translation: The next deliberately caused cyclical recession will finally break the middle-class completely and enrich the 1% exponential more than the last one did, and it will most likely happen while a Dem is POTUS, Dems control the House and the GOP controls the Senate to block any attempt to save us because they want as much of it blamed on the Dem POTUS as possible.
The usual view of endgame social and economic inequality is a French Revolution, or at least a cathartic event in which the heads of rich people end up on spikes. In fact, it is the middle class with the social rug has been pulled out from under them who are more likely than the rich to suffer consequences. For the bottom 90% things really go south in natural disasters. Really, the top word Democrats should be pushing in this year’s election round is “resilience” and so far I’ve only hear the term used by Inslee and Sanders.
Interestingly, we observe that the social inequality measures (and values) from man-made conflicts compare well with those of academic centers (inequality in citations; found in earlier studies) of different institutions of the world, while those for natural disasters can be even higher.