You have to pick your battles. Changing the election system is really hard. There are legitimate policy disagreements one can have with the Democrats, but one thing you cannot say about them is that they are brazenly corrupt and hostile to facts. Donald Trump is both. He is proud of these things. He thinks they're features, not bugs, and about 40% of American voters seem to agree. As long as that remains the case, no…
Certainly Democrats are just as corrupt and hostile to facts as Republicans (the set of denied facts will be different of course). Only a partisan would claim otherwise.
How nice of the governments to help businesses afford to eat instead of people. There is no reason assistance to people has to go through business. The reason governments do that is because leaders own equity in the current hierarchy and definitely don’t want to disturb that by giving the lower classes leverage to demand better terms.
If businesses employed robots you’d have a point. But most today provide people gainful employment. No businesses left means no one to hire you.
Except "gainful employment" has been quietly eroded year after year with things like institutionalizing contract work/gig economy/worship of hustle/eroding worker's rights to organize and bargain with employers...
> My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to. My question is how many people have absolutely no ties to the stock market? I'm pretty far from any definition of rich, but I still have a 401k, so you're not likely to see me rioting because the S&P 500 is in the green.
The idea of the 401k is such an amazing hustle for the wealthy. * Middle-class Americans consistently pump money into the stock market generically (not information trading), raising the value of all your stocks over time. * Now you have a gun to their head to support policies that pump up the value of your stocks even more. * Also, when shit hits the fan, they can't easily cash out, but you can. Both on a mega-scale…
> The idea of the 401k is such an amazing hustle for the wealthy.
You make a very interesting point!
I wonder what a "reverse 401k" program would look like (e.g. box the wealthy into aligning their actions with the interests poor/middle class while only marginally benefiting themselves).
That's because the top has looted the economy, leaving little or nothing for the rest of us. Its not a reflection on the bottom 50% at all.
> That's because the top has looted the economy Can you explain how this happens? How does one "loot" one of the largest economies in the world?
Monetary policy and globalism. We've got an economy built on debt. We went from a production based economy 40 years ago to a consumption based one. We exported skills. We believed that a service-based economy was sustainable in the long run. We went off the gold standard and embraced an inflationary monetary policy that punished savers. Then we built a retirement system (including state pensions) dependent on yields, which causes retirement funds to chase ever riskier asset classes. We made debt so available for so many things, like education, healthcare, real estate, etc, and we made it so artificially "cheap" that it drove up prices. We never really recovered from the 2008 real estate bubble. The Fed's answer was to buy mortgage-backed securities by the trillions, and bailed out the people responsible without punishing anyone. So we kicked the can down the road and now, this downturn is so massive that we will not be able to escape the deep financial consequences and it is going to take years to overcome this. We have nothing left to borrow against and we're in tens of trillions in debt.
> My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to. There is deep rot at the heart of the American system, and something is going to have to give. The economy has been broken for the lower 50% for a long time now. This course is unsustainable. I try not to get explicitly political on here, but Bernie Sanders was, as far as I can see, our last shot at reversing the trend from within the current system.…
I mostly agree with what you're saying, but disagree about Bernie. Many of his biggest policies are still just trying to cover the rot with a coat of paint. Healthcare too expensive? Just have the government cover the bill. College too expensive? Same thing. Workers not paid enough? Raise the minimum wage. All very blunt, simplistic reactions, that ignore the complexities of the real world. Getting rid of the rot req…
> If something is 10x more expensive today than it was a few decades ago, just agreeing to pay the 10x price is not a good solution.
That's not what those proposals were. Single payer healthcare and state-provided education is how you fix those problems.
The only social unrest that has happened so far have been the protests about wanting to lift or ease restrictions on states, and they were widely panned as a bunch of nutjobs. It's easy to look down on people lower on the socioeconomic ladder. They're still human beings. They've been given this raw deal: For the greater good, you will now give up your job for an indefinite period of time, with no prospect of finding…
The folks participating in the protest are not at all lower on the socioeconomic latter, but predominately middle class. Black Americans, who tend to be poorer and less secure, support the lockdown at a higher rate than whites or other racial groups [0] (at least in Florida). Whites have the least support for a lockdown, but most still oppose reopening. Lastly, at least some of the protests were funded by the DeVos f…
Building up socio-economic status is a straw man point here given how widespread the effects of this downturn are. It could be that parts of the middle class that are protesting may have lost their jobs or businesses and the stimulus checks don’t offset that as much as it would for lower income folks.
>My question is how much, if any, social unrest this will lead to. The only social unrest that has happened so far have been the protests about wanting to lift or ease restrictions on states, and they were widely panned as a bunch of nutjobs. I doubt there will be any "unrest" beyond the protests.
Do you count it as "unrest" when people just quietly ignore the restrictions without actively protesting? Because I see a lot of that, and more every day. In some rural counties the local Sheriffs have unilaterally decided not to enforce statewide "shelter in place" orders. I'm not justifying that behavior but it will inevitably increase week by week.
How broad is your definition of unrest? If it’s as broad as ignoring laws while being quiet about it, then speeding could technically be seen as “unrest”. As for quietly disobeying the “shelter in place” orders, I don’t see that as unrest, but as I said earlier, depending on how broad your definition is, it could be.
In practice, none of them would actually have implemented it, except the only one with a history of going against party and lobby. Barack Obama ran far to the left of Barack Obama, but ended up compromising with Republicans for some absurd reason as he held both the house and senate, to the degree where he passed Mitt Romney's proposal while dragging his feet. None of them except for Bernie Sanders was willing to rec…
"none of them would actually have implemented it, except the only one with a history of going against party and lobby" Why would the person with few allies and hostile relations with various power players be the one who could "actually" implement anything? Barack Obama had a senate majority that Bernie would have killed for in his hypothetical first term, but Obama still couldn't get his own party to even consider a…
You're saying that even with a Senate majority, Obama couldn't get his own party to consider public option, while also arguing that through candidates that are "far to the left" of Obama (except Bernie Sanders apparently), we can achieve the kind of structural economic change that people who support Bernie Sanders want. Seems a bit contradictory to me.
Yes in fact the only thing you wouldn't want to hold is dollars; you'd want to hold things that will earn more dollars in the future (an inflation hedge), such as equities. Then you'd only care about FX rates (to the extent you are purchasing internationally), and I don't see any indication the FX futures market is moving against the dollar.
if holding onto dollars right now is bad, could you suggest what would be a good place to put cash?
I don't think they're strictly saying holding dollars is bad right now, just that it could be if inflation became a thing, which is not happening because as said by someone else, almost all other currencies are in the same boat. Plus everything is based on the dollar in the world economy. To answer your question though, if we were in a place where keeping cash was becoming a problem, that's where assets come in like stocks, bonds, real estate.
If you went to a private intl school, I imagine the tuition wasn't cheap. That right there is the difference. When you're paying big bucks, your parents will want to do everything to make sure you don't fall behind. I assume with that kind of education you also went on to complete a university degree of some kind. Contrast that to the public high school system in the US, where resources are lacking, and students may…
> still 5 figures a year minimum Speaking from personal experience, if you did decently well academically in high school, you can get upwards of 16K a year in grants alone (Pell Grant ~6K, State Grant ~5K, University Grant ~5K) if your situation is documented poor based on your parent's and your tax returns. My state school (UT Austin) charges tuition of about $5.5k/semester if you take >= 12 hours of classes a semes…
The problem comes with families who aren't "poor" but aren't rich enough to afford spending an extra $20k/year ($11.k for UT Austin plus $10k for living expenses) for four years, for each kid. If you have three kids it's like buying an extra house, which isn't that affordable for most families.