hey so @ you poor souls following me, I haven’t disappeared, I’m just travelling and internet is a precious precious commodity, so stay tuned if you feel like it
From a macroeconomics standpoint, Bridges is completely accurate.
The problem with most Tories (and many Republicans in the US) is that they either have big business interests at heart or have bought the lie that government is like a business. Government is not a business! Microeconomic principles, even ones that apply to entire industries, don’t apply to governments!
Here’s the fundamental macroecomic model of an economy:
(image from tutor2u)
Notice that the system is circular. The model shows that the economy inherently needs to be balanced. If some households are making hundreds of times the income of other households, they will put the vast majority of that money into savings and investment.
This is bad for the economy.
Some savings and investment is necessary. But too much means the little green arrows are siphoning off vast portions of the peach demand arrow (”purchases of goods and services”). This means that companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pie. Even if you heavily fund those companies, many will collapse due to lack of demand for their products, unless they become monopolies and the sole practical source of their product. Monopolies are technically illegal in the US, but we have them anyway because of this problem (and a lack of enforcement).
The other way you can damage the demand arrow is by shifting the proportions of the purple income arrow. Most people make money from wages, so if you significantly decrease those relative to dividends, interest, profits, and rent, you’ll harm the majority of households. In turn, this again decreases the peach arrow because many households only need a set amount of a given product in a year. The fewer households that can afford the products, the lower overall demand, because the remaining households won’t buy up the difference.
Households with average levels of income spend far more money than they save, of necessity, and they do so at a relatively steady rate. This is good for the economy.
Households with incredibly high levels of income - millionaires, etc. - save far more than they spend. They tend to make their money off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents - not wages. Therefore, to improve the economy, including increasing tax revenues for the government, two basic steps are urged by almost all macroeconomists:
1. Increase wages, especially at the lowest end. This expands the tax base and drives up demand for basic goods and services, stabilizing the industries necessary to a decent quality of life: agriculture and food production, clothing, housing, education, transportation, etc.
2. Use progressive taxes, in which those who make the most money, particularly off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents, pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. This allows that money to be spent directly on goods and services or to be redistributed to poor households, who will in turn spend it on goods and services. In both cases, money that would have gone into savings and investment instead goes into demand. This makes businesses more successful and a large number of households more prosperous. Society as a whole benefits from decreased crime, lower health problems, and improved public goods like education, roads, emergency response, infrastructure, etc.
Macroeconomics is the opposite of an individual business. Individual businesses study how to take the most pie for themselves and keep it. Macroeconomists - and governments - study how to make the pie bigger and distribute it in such a way that society as a whole benefits from the growth.
Conservatives: doing economics wrong for the past several decades by deliberately pretending that knowing how to run a business is anything like knowing how to run a government. Being fiscally cautious and being uneducated do not have to go hand in hand. (I’m both, for example.) But the rhetoric for slashing budgets has been laden with errors and ideology since at least the 1930s, and I’m tired of it.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE MORONS AT THE BACK IN OUR GOVERNMENTS
Or as Paul Wellstone used to say, “We all do better when we all do better.”
Ta dah.
Thank you.
I wish the part about aunts on facebook wasn’t true.
i’ve been trying to hold back but. i gotta see what bill and ted fanfic is like. i gotta do it
this literally sounds like a line from the movie what the hell
this fic is actually GOOD i’ve never been more angry in my LIFE
i’m so mad and you should be too
listen i’m trying to stop clogging everyone’s dash with this nonsense but this is honestly the best line i have ever read in a fanfic in my entire LIFE i’m laughing so hard
i don’t know how i expected it to end to be honest
Funny enough, there’s a long history of worker’s struggle in the Appalachians and South.
Redneck Revolt is a good group organizing in these areas around this identity and history.
Yeah regions where mining, agriculture, and similar industries are dominant tend to have a history of socialist organizing and labor agitation, funny how that works
i love how many people are commenting on this basically saying it’s an oxymoron for rednecks to be communists like… in what universe is it an oxymoron for… actual poor and working-class people… to be invested in an ideology & movement that centers around working-class/labor struggle… lmao ????
literally the only reason why there has been a shift in later years is cus of fear mongering to the point where capitalist criticism has become a taboo even for lower class poor people. like many the southern states are some of the poorest states in usa??
“Let’s show these fascists what a couple of hillbillies can do!”
-Woody Guthrie
coming from a non-informed point of view i feel like once again this is Reagan’s fault because he targeted workers unions a good deal…
People are saying its a oxymoron because “redneck” is usually synonymous with “racist/stupid af” in america. And “racist/stupid af” in america tends to steer very far right.
But there is a actually a whole population of “redneck” that isnt racist at all. They’re actually pretty well educated, theyre just poor and do poor people stuff. They’re the ones who end up introducing black people to white people shit. Like moonshine, mudding and camping. Theyre a trip to hang around.
Theres actually a lot of overlap in the “redneck” and the “hood” culture (large tight knit families, general disdain for authorities, love of bbq…etc), but the rich white people in power dont want people to know that because if the all the poor people reguardless of color realize they have shared interests band together and raise hell. Its over for the 1%. So they try their hardest to emphasize and exaggerate the cultural differences, in hopes of convincing the low income disenfranchized whites to vote right.
I LOVE capitalist critical Appalachian culture. One of the first things i learned that fueled my interest was the origin of the word ‘redneck.’
Coal mining was HUGE from the mid 1700s to the early 1900s in states like Virginia and Pennsylvania as coal was a primary source of fuel for a lotta shit. Unsurprisingly, mine owners were capitalist pigs and exploited the hell outta coal miners. Like, paying them by the pound of coal they brought in rather than by hours worked, paying them in vouchers that could only be used at the store owned by the mining company, and offering no kind of health assistance when workers would inevitably succumb to illness and injury caused by the work they did. So miners began to unionize in the mid 1840s. To show solidarity and to make their employers take notice, unionists would wear red bandanas around their necks. And thus, the term ‘redneck’ was coined to describe the union supporters who eventually dismantled a lot of the exploitive practices used by the coal industry.
Love these! Just discovered the hillbilly leftie podcast the Trillbilly Worker’s Party, and I am so excited to see more leftist organizing in these parts. We have an amazing history of labor struggle, and a fair amount of labor wins, in this region.
Happy Pride Month Eleanor Roosevelt was queer, the Little Mermaid is a gay love story, James Dean liked men, Emily Dickinson was a lesbian, Nikola Tesla was asexual, Freddie Mercury was bisexual & British Indian, and black trans women pioneered the gay rights movement.
Florence Nightingale was a lesbian, Leonardo da Vinci was gay, Michelangelo too, Jane Austen liked women, Hatshepsut was not cisgender, and Alexander the Great was a power bottom
Freddie Mercury is well known for his attraction to men but was also linked to several women, including Barbara Valentin whom he lived with shortly before he died. Friends have talked about being invited into their bed and walking in on them having sex (documentary Freddie Mercury: The Great Pretender)
btw im really over cis/straight girls (cishet ppl in general) going to pride because it’s this fun party and they can post about it on all their social medias and look SO ‘woke’ but in their real lives they don’t wanna share a locker room with a lesbian or trans girl and get fucking rude when they go to gay bars and a girl hits on them or a trans girl walks into the bathroom while their taking a selfie. i honestly don’t care if going to pride is some sort of feel good thing to boost your ego, please leave us alone because pride is NOT for straight cis people !
“we invited you to pride when it was a protest and you didn’t want to come but now that it’s a party you seem to have invited yourselves”
You are a guest in someone else’s house; act with respect.
