Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id583138585
today’s robust employment market is giving workers a real chance of rebalancing benefits that until now have largely been restricted to the elites. This rising worker power has triggered alarms among the top tiers. What they want is a weaker labor market, a rising army of unemployment to redress power in their favor. Cue the inevitable calls to cut back government spending, roll back Social Security and other entitlements to reestablish economic precarity, and thereby reduce worker leverage.
✏️ The true motivation of cutting government spending on public goods 🔗 View Highlight
id583141073
Interest rate increases (i.e., tighter monetary policy by the Federal Reserve) have generally been regarded as the optimal weapon to reduce inflation—the argument being that higher interest rates work to slow down economic activity, curb demand, and thereby curb underlying price pressures.
✏️ The argument is that “interest rate increase” is the best tool against inflation because it slows down economic activity. 🔗 View Highlight
id583141184
for every borrower hurt by rising rates, there are savers who benefit from the additional income derived from higher rates.
✏️ The reality is that interest rate increase hurts the borrowers while benefiting the savers. Who are the borrowers? Working/middle-class people Who are the savers? Wealthy elite Result? Greater economic inequality and inflation still high because you didn’t curb all the spending. 🔗 View Highlight
id583143757
The Social Security trust fund itself is an accounting fiction, much like the idea of a “lockbox” that supposedly holds funds in trust for SS payments. The reality is that the dollars are spent into existence by the Treasury.
✏️ Not sure I get it, but I assume this is basically saying that things like social security and GOSI (i.e. national social security systems in a government that has sovereignty over its own currency) can never run dry or be depleted. The treasury just “manifests” more? 🔗 View Highlight
id583144155
any marginal change that reduces their advantage invariably leads to the return of the old nonsensical shibboleths: The country is facing national bankruptcy; entitlements like Social Security and Medicare must be therefore “reformed” (i.e., cut). All the while, billions continue to be appropriated for wars of choice and the question of national solvency is never raised.