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.