what in the fuck is this timeline
This timeline is bankrupting the treasury to buy an election. Trump & co. might be convinced they can pull it off, but no one gives a shit about $2k if gramps kicks the bucket. I don’t think the general public can be trusted to spend the $2k responsibly. Especially if it were to show up in their bank accounts tomorrow. Can we spend it on emergency hospital construction and nurses/doctors instead? Or medical supplies! Pelosi and the dems agreeing to this probably means that they calculate Trump’s demise anyway. The fact that none of them are pushing for a more medically-oriented response sickens me. I think they threw a little less than $10 billion at that side of things. Somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude too low, imho. But yeah, fucking socialism! I don’t really know what the word means, but omg do I hate socialists
Galbraith is a font of bitchin' quotes. Anyone who read Piketty through to the end got to the part where he said the evidence thus far indicates that people are better off in a market system run by socialists: you need the incentives of being able to make money, but you need the protections of not being able to destroy people in the process. Unfortunately nobody in the United States read Piketty through to the end, or if they did it was hate-reading. We had that. It was called Glass-Steagall. We killed it in '99. That quote was Galbraith talking smack about trickle-down economics. That it is a fecal reference is not accidental.IIRC commercial banking has to be totally separated from insurance, and key executives made smart decisions in not betting the farm on risky financial instruments.
Piketty is a 700 page powerpoint but if you're into data, he brings the receipts. He says some useful stuff and he does it really clearly. The three biggest insights I got out of it were 1) The black market economy is fucking huge - to the tune of 50% of the regular economy - and it's entirely untaxed. The only country in the world that has realized that storming these seas like Blackbeard is ultra-fucking-lucrative is the United States which, under Obama, authorized the Treasury and Secret Service to basically privateer the fuck out of the black market and extract what cash they could. He calculated that it fucking increased the budget of the USA by 20 fucking percent. That, more than anything, is probably why numbered Swiss accounts cease to exist: Treasury basically threatened them with unlimited economic warfare if they didn't bend the knee. 2) America is the first country to create the CEO class, where you have these schlubs that don't come from a wealthy-ass family and don't do anything but push paper around but holy fuck do they make money for pushing paper around and that it may or may not have something to do with rabid amounts of post-war American innovation. A non-landed non-gentry oligarchy is something truly new under the sun. 3) Capitalism reverts to feudalism eventually unless you stand in front of it like a socialist and that every civilization on the earth exists on the spectrum between feudalism and collectivism and capitalism and socialism are just closer to the middle. This book, which was the first of the hundred or so I have since read on history or economics in order to understand the world after the press collectively held up their hands and said "who knew?" about the Great Financial Crisis, had an insight that I have kept with me: Lanchester argued that WWII ended with two economic systems locked in mortal combat across the entire planet and that while most people think that Communism lost, there's ample reason to argue that it simply lost first. He further pointed out that the demise of Communism pretty much allowed Capitalism to run rampant all over the rest of the world, crushing it under heel and that while countries that sheltered their populaces from Capitalism may not have experienced all the rapid growth, they also experienced a lot less fallout when the money stopped flowing. I love Canada. I ain't gonna say a single bad word about it. I've come to love poutine (well, I've come to crave it sometimes, while also feeling a little ashamed) and I've even gotten to the point where I could understand the argument for a Caesar. There was a time when I hit Vancouver every weekend and it wasn't a Sunday morning without watching extremely intent people chase a giant rock around the ice with brooms.
I don't really disagree with any of that, it just fucking sucks. Everything went lose-lose about the time it became clear that we're facing our semi-regular centennial pandemic. Let's explore another angle. OK, so you and your fam pool everyone’s $2k's into a pot. Let's say there are three generations, gran and gramps, mom and pop, and their two kids. $12k. If either gran or gramps requires hospitalization for a few days, you're fucked. Your $12k is like 10% of the hospital bill. Obviously, there is still a major problem with guaranteeing that the people who need treatment will receive it and then not be in the red by at least several tens of thousands of USD. Who is picking up the difference? I don't think the doctors and nurses will wanna work pro bono, and I really, really don't think ol' gramps is gonna pay off his $100k debt within his lifetime. Are mom and pop saddled with the debt? What're the interest rates? Can the two kids also inherit the debt after mom and pop die of despair? Spending the better part of $850 billion to give everyone $2k is stupid when we suddenly find several hundreds of billions that could be used to seed a universal healthcare system in this moment of necessity. Or maybe not? In 2018, the annual revenue of the U.S. healthcare sector was about $715 billion. We'd break the bank in one year without some massive restructuring and raising taxes quite a bit. I think I'm for it. But I'm not optimistic. As if it needed to be directly stated.
No, it will happen. This is called helicopter money. This is not about rich people worrying about normal people that can't make ends meet. This is an injection of liquidity into the economy. It doesn't matter how much money the Fed jams into a bank when the bank is more worried about its crumbling fractional reserve than making no percent on a business loan. This is not welfare or socialism. That's what this is.