Neoliberal economist Larry Summers got immigration, the Green New Deal, and tax havens right. But he still protects billionaires above all else.
Neoliberal economist fails again.
Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Decade after decade, our economic titans have conditioned us to accept some basic economic principles. They do not say it explicitly, but they execute policy on it.
- They want you to believe that paying a living wage is inflationary.
- Creating a good social safety net will either create lazy people are cost corporations too much and thus reduce productivity.
- Slave labor overseas is good for the United State’s economy.
- We must not tax billionaires to recover the gains they did little to earn.
- Prices increase because of demand and not necessarily because of shortages.
I could go on ad nauseam, but you get the point. Chuck Todd interviewed neoliberal economist Larry Summers, former President Obama’s Director of the National Economic Council. In a previous interview, Summers made it clear that our system should sacrifice 4% of the American workers to stave off benign inflation.
I should first give kudos to some marginal concessions from this economist. He supports the Green New Deal, taxing income corporations trying to shelter offshore, and encourages mitigating our worker shortage with immigration. The kudos end there because every bullet item above is verifiably false at its core.
Summers insists that the Biden administration overstimulated the economy with the American Rescue Plan and other measures necessary to avoid a recession when COVID locked up a large part of our economy. Summers fails to digest that the American worker had fallen far behind before the pandemic. COVID made the decline catastrophic for many. But then, our government, we-the-people, came to the rescue.
The neoliberal economist is also against Biden’s billionaire tax. Once again, these parasites have the protection of those in power or with access thereof. Here is the deal, the reason the wages and wealth of the masses have been declining is the systematic theft by the billionaire class and their agents. After all, the workers have increased productivity and value that billionaires exploited for their increase in wealth. This parasitic theft is not up for debate as the absolute numbers make the wealth migration calculable.
Our economic system has had enough time to prove itself, and to be blunt, it has failed. The facade is falling off as Americans suffer from inflation of choice from those with pricing power. There are no current shortages of sufficient magnitude to justify a 7.8% inflation. Nor did wages rise sufficiently to explain it.
And Summers’ inference that an above-four-percent inflation rate with a corresponding below-four-percent unemployment rate makes a recession in two years likely is, in fact, insanity.
It is time to make drastic changes to remove critical areas of our economy from a parasitic greedy corporate sector (e.g., energy, healthcare, etc.) and put it in the hands of we-the-people. After all, much of the innovation is already paid for by the we-the-people government. Here is an interesting note. Elon Musk got much-hyperventilated coverage for a flight that barely made it into space based on technology that we-the-people developed decades before. We-the-people orbited the earth, went to the moon and back, to Mars and beyond, and more. His private sector gimmick could barely skim the edges of near-earth space. The corporate hype rarely matches reality as they rip us all off.
Larry Summers is a troglodyte schooled in a corrosive and extractive economic system with a semblance of fairness. Of course, that only applies to the ones invited into the game. The rest gets more and mirrors.
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The manipulation that goes on in government is abominable and a disgrace. Lies upon lies. When will it ever stop the greed inherent.
Summers is STILL wrong. He was wrong back when he warned the spending the Biden administration and the Dem Congressional majority were enacting would be inflationary, and he’s STILL wrong, as inflation exploded well BEFORE even the very first spending legislation, the American Rescue Plan Act, was signed into law in March of 2021, as this Bloomberg chart displays:
https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iOlHyDTqF3UU/v2/pidjEfPlU1QWZop3vfGKsrX.ke8XuWirGYh1PKgEw44kE/-1x-1.png
Biden inherited the inflation, which arose as a result of all the tariffs enacted by the previous administration which raised prices all across the national economy, impacting American consumers and American businesses.
NOTE: Count the bars backwards from the right, as the year labels are displayed in the middle of each year.
Love your stuff Egberto, keep up the great work. Wish I had the time to do the same.
The ‘pandemic’ started before Biden took office. The permanent government was overjoyed at getting the chance to do what they have always wanted to do . . . spend more money. In 2018 workers on the bottom got their first real raises this century. Workers on the bottom have fallen farther and farther behind since US money was taken off of the ‘gold’ standard. Politicians, all of them, have always wanted to spend more than was there and decoupling from any standard at all freed them to do what they have always wanted to do. Decoupling makes it easier to obscure that our government has done the same thing that governments throughout time have done, debase the money. You cannot put all of the blame on any of the administrations that have gone along with the ride because every one of them did so.
Government spending more than they have is the overwhelmingly biggest factor in inflation. Government spending is so much bigger than the other things that it is almost as if they did not count. They do, but all of them together is much less than that big one.
Blaming the ‘previous administration’ is what everyone does, and they get away with it because everyone does it. 2018 was the first time that workers on the bottom got a raise and the biggest single reason was we stopped importing people who would work for less. No one wants us to realize that is the reason that the poor are kept poor because so many in power (government & business together) just love the idea of lots of cheap workers.