I fully agree it’s a big contributor to the idiot caucus reaching critical mass. But consider that Limbaugh has been around since 1992 IIRC, if not longer.
It’s true there was a lot of stupidity coming out of talk radio even at that early date. But those guys weren’t an enemy of intellectuals. They presented themselves as the intellectual facts-and-logic guys. It wasn’t until Sarah Palin came on the scene that I remember seeing the anti-intellectual movement starting to cohere, the kind that disdained all expertise and learning in favor of tribal purity. Palin came and went on the national political stage, but she kept her grift going hard on social media. I totally believe Trump watched and learned from her.
Anyway, my broader point is that America was already broken in this way before Trump ever came on the scene. He just identified the cracks in the bridge and started stomping on them as hard as he could. We’re worse off for having elected him, but he just made existing problems worse.
No, having wealth concentrated in the hands of fewer people means that the general population is increasingly dependent on the financial decisions made by a smaller number of people. Would you rather live in an economy in which Jeff Bezos, Ray Dalio, and a handful of other people decide where to invest money in a new headquarters or industrial plant, or one in which you have a lot more smaller cap companies making those same decisions all over the country?
It’s not a coincidence that some of the worst financial crises - the Bank Panic of 1907, the Great Depression, and the Great Recession of 2008 - occurred at a time when wealth inequality was at its highest.
The economic considerations are part of the problem; the other problem is that they inevitably have more influence on the politics of a nation, and a disproportionate one at that. They decide whether to fund that public transit system, that school system, that healthcare system, and since they often don’t need to use these systems to the same degree that the general public does, they often choose not to fund them. So then the question is…if they don’t, who does?
I can identify with this sentiment - let’s just lift up the people who are feeling left behind. But from everything I read, they were mostly content with their status until Obama’s election shocked them into realizing that black people might be moving up the social ladder ahead of them, leaving them on the bottom.
I just don’t know how to do an economic outreach to people whose main concern is staying out of last place but not investing any competitive effort to do so.
Well, they are our main strategic competitor and are doing very well by recognizing that laws of supply and demand aren’t governed by so-called good intentions. The good thing about the rise of China is we won’t have the luxury of indulging foolish notions indefinitely.
Dollars aren’t wealth. Non actualized dollars in the form of market capitalization are even less so. Currency is not required for productive effort. What is required are raw materials, knowledge and labor.
Your experience may be different, but in mine, I’ve found that a proprietor generally needs capital in the form of currency in order to procure raw materials, knowledge, and labor.
Currency facilitates trade but is not necessary for production. Policies that redistribute paper or bits in a database may actually be counterproductive. Think about the homeless situation in California. Is that a lack of paper money or a lack of housing problem?
Having lived in California, I have a firsthand knowledge of the situation. You have a concentration of people in finite space. Moreover, you have a concentration of people with an average income in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, moving into areas the “nice parts of down” creating an over-demand. Those who can’t quite afford the surge in rent in the desirable areas then move to areas that are less desirable and then “gentrify” them, moving out people who’ve lived there for a decade or two if not longer. Rents rise while wages remain flat for blue collar workers. More of their flat blue collar incomes go toward paying rent, and they have less to spend on anything else. There’s your housing crisis.
No but people with millions of dollars can band together that no new housing gets built to relieve the pressure on the housing market.
To be sure, the natural forces of the market are going to make housing more and less affordable, and I don’t have a problem with that in and of itself, but it’s a matter of degree. We could impose rent controls, but the maximum rents are arbitrary and, if in line with market forces, still leaves a lot of housing unaffordable, as I found out some years ago when I ran into rent controlled housing in San Francisco and Daly City…which was hardly affordable.
It would be easier if there were controls on income, rather than rent.
Neither one of those is good. What is good is to build more housing. If the supply of currency to housing is high the cost of housing is high and increasing currency does nothing to alleviate the problem. If you want things you must produce things.
People have equated the concept of currency with wealth and the two are not at all equivalent.
If the supply of currency is high relative to the cost of housing…that probably means that there is a supply of higher wealth/income individuals relative to those who have just income and wealth. There is a finite amount of land in San Francisco, which is a 7 X 7 mile tract of space. The excess supply of Googlers and AirBnB’ers don’t want to move to Martinez or Antioch; they’ll gentrify Oakland. But in so doing, they push out those who’ve lived on low wages or fixed incomes for years. They push out teachers who were earning middle class incomes teaching for the San Francisco and Alameda Unified School Districts.
The point is increasing the money supply without increasing productivity results in nothing but ignorant voters empowering exploitative politicians and higher prices. If you want to solve problems of scarcity you can’t enact products that exacerbate scarcity but sound good. You actually need policies and incentives to produce.
At some point the legacy of our post WWII industrial might isn’t going to be a sufficient advantage in global competition. The Chinese and other nations understand that. Our politicians, for the most part understand that. Unfortunately the majority of voters, obviously, do not.
I think you are correct about this. The use of housing in San Francisco, however, is a terrible example to make the point. Housing in San Francisco is pretty close to a zero sum game given the geography of the area. In many other areas, the problem is not that the supply of goods is limited due to an underlying physical limitation. It’s a lot more likely that the issue tends to be that goods are distributed inefficiently, or that the incentive to increase production isn’t there.
But the increased money supply is NOT the reason that California has a housing crisis in 2020. The financial crisis of 2008 cleaned out the underwater borrowers in the early 2000s – they moved to Texas, lol. The housing crisis of 2020 has been about, well, 12 years in the making (okay, maybe 40 or 50 years in the making, due to the demand for a very thin sliver of land 50 miles within a beach). You’ve got 38 million residents in California, and the overwhelming majority of them live in a very thin sliver of land along the coast. As anyone who’s spent time in CA can tell you, it’s actually a geographically large state, with a LOT of uninhabited land. If you drive on I-5, there are plenty of places where you might fall asleep behind the wheel, lol.
In fact there was massive amounts of construction to the East of San Francisco, as pre-pandemic traffic reports could easily show you. That led to long commutes. But not a lot of space in San Francisco for new housing, unless you want to tear up Golden Gate Park perhaps. And even that wouldn’t help much.
Given that you responded to a post about real income by misunderstanding purchasing power, it’s pretty clear at this point that you literally cannot explain why I’m wrong.