41–50 of 433 posts
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Conversely, it also seems to be how capitalist designs work. I ask: What designs actually help the working class?
War (taking place somewhere else, that you're winning)
Anything other than direct cash transfers to individual humans is likely to have this effect. Institutions are simply always going to be able to navigate and take advantage of complex government programs better than real human beings. UBI or stfu. Time to try some trickle up economics. Also, for the love of god, let's stop prioritizing saving "jobs" that may or may not be necessary for civilization and start prioriti…
Direct cash still has this effect. $1500 to subsidize rent that is $1500 to property owners.
We saw this with the 2009 mortgate crisis - banks got bailed out and evicted homeowners. Had we paid the homeowners, I suspect most would have just brought their mortage current.
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> Land lords still exist in a competitive market and can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion. Well...kind of. It's pretty bad in a lot of places. There aren't enough homes in the places people want to live.
There's a delicate balance of property owners using their power to prevent new construction and densification in an attempt to keep their property values high by preventing competition and going too far where you destroy your local economy because the people who actually do the work can't afford to live there.
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None, because you can't get around markets even if you try to regulate them out of existence. As seen in the article countries with good unemployment benefits also have higher rates of unemployment during normal times. And don't forget every job being outsourced to China/Vietnam/Africa. If you confiscated all of Jeff Bezos' net worth you'd get something like $1000 for each American, once. The way to help the working…
> The way to help the working class is to ensure economic growth happens, because a rising tide lifts all boats. This is just trickle down economics. The same catchphrase as "grow the pie to share it". It simply fuels money to the rich as well, in a larger proportion than to workers. We are actually experiencing the results of 40 years of that ideology and it doesn't look pretty. Growth is also looking like a very un…
I'd point you to China for an example of what "rising tide lifts all boats" actually looks like. And to add to that - it matters a lot what kind of growth is driving GDP increases. If you're just powering growth by increasing immigration (aka working population) that's not increasing per-capita GDP.
> Growth is also looking like a very unsustainable way to support civilization.
Again, depends what kind of growth you're talking about.
> "grow the pie to share it"
Wealth redistribution has never worked in history. In every case where it has occurred there has been a flight of capital leading to underinvestment and poverty, or war.
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Direct cash still has this effect. $1500 to subsidize rent that is $1500 to property owners.
Pay the landlord, and landlord gets the money and tenant gets evicted. Pay the tenant and the rent gets paid and no one gets evicted. We saw this with the 2009 mortgate crisis - banks got bailed out and evicted homeowners. Had we paid the homeowners, I suspect most would have just brought their mortage current.
Said stablecoin token would be hosted on more or more resilient Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs; 'blockchains') with a - indeed more auditable - transaction record specification that supports multiple transaction inputs and outputs and an optional identifier such as an e.g. "coinbase field" to key auxilliary (unfortunately comparably mutable, offsite-backuped by which responsible parties) database records to.
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Land lords still exist in a competitive market and can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion. One way to alleviate this problem is to have a harsher tax on vacant properties to punish using housing as a store of value and creating artificial scarcity in the market, e.g. like how the DeBeers corporation made diamonds artificially scarce and scammed the world for the past century selling a shiny rock.
"can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion." ??? There's no need for 'collusion' - term is 'inflation' - which will 100% happen when we start printing money at that scale. It's unavoidable, almost by definition. Housing costs are already skyrocketing and this is moving into rents already, at least largely in part because of of massive Fed Stimulus. In the short run it might be better to just give some cheques t…
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"UBI or stfu." "for the love of god, let's stop prioritizing saving "jobs" th" Printing money does not create value and we will generally suffer reduced standard living, some worse than others at least over time. In the long run, the real economy creates vast consumer surpluses which are generally not even really accounted for. We are actually quite a bit richer than we were a generation ago. 'Direct Stimulus' might…
When did I say anything about printing money? Don't conflate a policy debate about how we spend the commonwealth with the policy debate about how we collect the commonwealth.
Because that's how UBI will have to come into fruition i.e. under the auspices 'MMT' or some other made up term.
It's 100% politically impossible to raise taxes on the middle and upper 1/3 to to the extent necessary to pay off the bottom 1/4-1/3 of the population to (mostly) do nothing and that's not even starting to consider the instantaneous shock of inflation that will hit the moment it happens.
0% chance of this happening in any country, any nation, any situation - can't happen.
Ergo, the policy has to be hidden into some kind of 'magic money' theory or policy, which will invariably involve a lot of money and credit creation.
We're already seeing the effects of this today.
That's not to say we can't improve a lot of issues with regards to equality including possibly raising taxes and many other things - but it's far more effective to have people work on doing things of value, like attendants in retirement homes, making meals, then it is to give them free surpluses and have them mostly stay at home. UBI is much like Crypto, an interesting idea that does not add up in any meaningful way in our current context.
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Pay the landlord, and landlord gets the money and tenant gets evicted. Pay the tenant and the rent gets paid and no one gets evicted. We saw this with the 2009 mortgate crisis - banks got bailed out and evicted homeowners. Had we paid the homeowners, I suspect most would have just brought their mortage current.
Not if the tenant isn't being required to pay rent. 2 years of government money in the name of COVID assistance and rent help...but nothing that actually meant it went to paying rent. Some tenants simply bought more stuff or saved it while the landlords are still going without rent payments.