To be fair every American president could be charged with war crimes so every administration has motivation to expand and extend presidential immunity.
We were apparently silly to think otherwise.
A small ray of sunshine in an otherwise shit news week.
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housing, collectibles, used vehicles basically everything pretty much
everyoneâs loaded right now
If your definition of âthe economyâ is âpeople with lots of money are doing greatâ, then okay I guess.
But the financial security of the bottom third of Americans is not good. And Iâd argue itâs trending worse.
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Thatâs okay it all trickles down. Donât worry about it. Someone has to wash that boat.
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Wages at the bottom are definitely going up, but youâre not wrong. Itâs a weird moment in the economy not a good moment in the economy. It also feels a lot like the blow off that usually comes before the big crashes. Weâll see Iâve been expecting the economy to crash for a long time now and havenât been right yet. Iâm sure I will be eventually and hopefully itâs not too bad.
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This is probably an oversimplification at best (and just plain wrong at worst) but I think the reason that the economy feels âweirdâ right now is that the K-shaped experience of 2020-2021 has been really stark. There has been a mythology for a while about the collective benefit of aggregate economic growth, i.e. the ârising tide lifts all boatsâ mythology that remains very popular particularly among economically right wing people so their personal gains in wealth can be framed as part of a broader social gain. As we know, this story has been a lie for several decades up to 2020 and what we saw was a pattern where the well off captured all the gains and everybody else kind of stagnated. This in and of itself is a very bad outcome with all the corresponding negative impacts that arise from wealth inequality. Having said that, I think there was a general sense that this was still relatively ânormalâ economic activity, as long as the pie was getting bigger there would be technocratic solutions to dividing up the pie in a way that is socially coherent.
2020 blew that up big time. Weâve really crossed a Rubicon in the sense that the experience of the past year and half has been so dramatically divergent with the economic situation of the well off getting so much stronger and the situation for everyone else not just stagnating but getting markedly worse. Itâs like our economic house was burning from wealth inequality and we didnât just let it burn, we threw gasoline all over it.
This is kind of bleak, but I have a depressing feeling that this isnât a one off K-shaped situation. I think humanity is teed up for a succession of global crises in the near future (collapse of western democracy, catastrophic climate change, plus all the ones we donât see coming) and I think that K-shaped outcomes will be the new normal. With each successive disaster the situation of the well off will improve and the situation of everyone else will get worse. The nakedly stark injustice of it all notwithstanding.
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I want to agree with both of you. I think BSâs point that wages are finally on the rise for people at the bottom is a very important one. Business owners are finally getting the memo that youâre going to get more hires by raising wages than by whining to the media about how you canât hire anybody. Even fast food places around me are advertising that theyâre paying $14/hr or more starting. I realize the Fight for $15 need some inflation adjustment, but we may be almost there even without changing the law. The bottom could drop out or something, but I think at the very least weâve bottomed out for the people at the bottom, and things are starting to improve.
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Maybe. Itâs a PR disaster for the people on the good side of the K shaped recovery⌠and public sentiment was already turning against them before COVID made everything so much more obvious. I think weâre fast approaching a moment like the early 30âs where the very wealthy have to cough up a good size chunk of value to the population to avoid societal collapse for at least a couple of decades.
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Of course I hope you are correct. And this is perhaps as likely or more likely than my doom and gloom scenario.
Whatâs the path to this? Iâm not seeing it.
Yeah the likely path is to Latin America style mega-wealth for a tiny sliver of the population, with a trip to the morgue for anyone who fights it.
Things generally continue the way they have been going until they donât and then usually diverge sharply. One of my pet peeves is trying to predict the future by projecting a trend out with a ruler. It ignores the reality that usually there is some kind of reaction to something happening. If I raise my prices on my customers in an unjustified way my revenue will climb in the short term but then collapse as they find other vendors who arenât screwing them. It can take time, sometimes a lot of time, especially when the person pushing the line in a certain direction have a lot of power⌠but eventually shit breaks and it all collapses.
Last time we reached the brink the wealthy decided to bend rather than get broken. Weâll see if theyâre that smart this time.
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If they can actually supply a trip to the morgue for anyone who fights it. The entire US military canât even pacify Afghanistan in 2021. Our population is large, has resources, and has skills. If thereâs a period of resistance the other side wonât necessarily win. The side that wins is usually the side thatâs willing to bleed the most and we already know they arenât willing to bleed at all personally.
You canât actually hold territory in the modern world without the consent of the people who live there. If they want you to leave badly enough you can send in the Marines and youâll still eventually leave with your tail between your legs. Also good luck getting the Marines to shoot American citizens the way they shoot Afghans. They recruit soldiers from the lower class and a meaningful % of the lower/middle class have military backgrounds.
What youâre missing is that our lower class rural population is frothing for fascism. All the next Trump has to do is throw them a few scraps and dial up the racism.
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Cities have plenty of people with skills and are actually pretty hard to pacify. Trump represents a bunch of lower class people (and relative to the oligarchs everyone in this thread is lower class donât get it twisted) wagging the dog on one of the two major parties in the US political oligopoly. From the perspective of our oligarchs itâs a huge shot across the bow.
Iâm not saying itâs going to go one way or another. Theyâre building autonomous drones for a reason.
Oh so that means heâs going back up to the original amount and throwing the corporate tax hikes and the environmental stuff back inâŚright?
Right?
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Past obvious. Move the fuck on already.
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1402337994317651969?s=20
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