Yikes… this one right here:
(about halfway down)
my economics education is admittedly limited, but that seems terrifying… that says that the entire economy is a speculative bubble, since long before I was born… and this graph ends before the internet, before the dotcom bubble, before the accelerating cycles of VC tech speculation that have happened since… I have to imagine an updated version of this would look much worse.
My only complaint is that I think a lot of these graphs should be on logarithmic scales.
Because money is created in computers and have no real value. Its a virtual limitation humans have created. The banks “print” more when they get instructed to. Inflation increases but that only affects poor people. Rich people keep getting richer since they own all the resources humanity needs to get food, housing and various equipment.
Money decreases in value every year, so unless stocks go up, you lose money every year. If you dont have savings in stock, you are losing money every year. Stock market savings is therefore not optional in this system.
Its all based on debt in the end. With debt, people cant easily get out of the system and needs to keep paying interest for their entire lives.
Because money is created in computers and have no real value. Its a virtual limitation humans have created. The banks “print” more when they get instructed to.
This is kind of a half-truth, and kind of a misunderstanding, and kind of “babby’s first grasp of fiscal policy”. It’s a surface-level understanding at best. Yes, the money is effectively valueless in itself - or rather, the money has only the value that society ascribes to it. Money (or currency) actually works best this way because it only needs to function as an abstract placeholder for value - it’s just a stand-in to exchange for goods or services. If the money itself has more value when held than it does when exchanged, you get stagnation and then societal collapse.
Money isn’t just “printed” - in order for the US government to create new dollars it has to issue government bonds which are purchased by the reserve banks. The money doesn’t just pop into existence from nowhere - the government sells future debt (bonds) to the banks in exchange for money to spend now. The amount owed on bond payouts is the national debt.
Rather than being based on nothing, what this effectively does is tie the value of the US dollar to general confidence in the productivity of the US economy. As long as the economy is productive, the US government will continue to collect taxes and will be able to continue paying on the bond debts. If the bond payments cannot be made and the government has to default on its loans, that kills the confidence in the sale of future bonds which means the government will have trouble selling them, which devalues the dollar in the short term. (if the government can’t pay off the bond as agreed, why would anybody buy the bond?)
I think it’s worth pointing out here that Trump talking about the US refusing to pay its loans is one of the stupidest fucking things any US government official has ever said in history. Even suggesting that that might happen damaged the value of the US dollar, which literally hurts every single person living in the US. The US is one of the very few national governments that can claim to have never defaulted on its loans, which is a big part of why the US dollar is still the global reserve currency even with all of the other nonsense going on - people who work in international finance consider it to be reliable. The ability to pay off debt is the value of the US dollar. Not paying the debt breaks everything.
Yes it’s a cycle, kind of a shell game. In theory as long as the economy continues to increase in productivity, the increase in tax income will outrun the growth of the debt (especially as the relative value of the debt drops over time due to inflation). Whether this works long-term is… indeterminate at this point. It’s unstable right now, but it hasn’t actually failed yet. There is certainly a lot of valid criticism, and it hasn’t prevented wealth concentration. It may have essentially turned the entire economy into a pressure cooker.
None of any of that has anything to do with the rampant speculation represented in the one graph I picked out. The futures trading in that graph is primarily speculation on the future value of company stocks, not currency trading or government bonds.
Good point about Trump. But I think he fully intends to wreck America. Its kind of obvious from his policies so far. He is not stupid, he is just having other interests in mind.
Trump wants to devalue the dollar to make the US more export competitive. He looks at China’s mercantilism with envy.
Unless you get gold boullion. That always goes up.
Until we get around to mining asteroids.
It is easier to see the change of trend line when linear though. It really drives home the magnitude of the problem. Not everyone can properly interpret a logarithmic scale.
1973 is when the Heritage Foundation was founded.
I wondered why everything went to shit that year. Now it all makes sense. The rich all got on the same page.
Skip to the end and you’ll see that the driving factor is less beef consumption
So basically, the US dollar which is the global reserve currency, goes off gold standard, Israel gets a shit ton of money suddenly, and everyone is poor, fat, unhappy, divorced, living with parents, and without a home at a decent point in life. The global birth rate goes down. Savings accounts are fucked. It’s almost like we should have a currency backed by something other than the sentiment of some old rich white men that belong in a rest home.
The declining birth rate is only a threat to the capitalist. Can’t have ever increasing growth if there are fewer victims to fleece.
Declining birth rates are a challenge under socialists systems also if you have a population skew towards the elderly. If 60% of the population is retired and now heavily utilizing a universal healthcare system, how is that being paid for? Ideally some of their tax income would have been saved for their healthcare needs later in life but that rarely happens.
Its the very nature of constant growth that causes those imbalances.
If you look at the CPI one that was steady for years then started going up, that would be when we started targeting a standard amount of inflation. Many of the other graphs can be attributed to this.
I think you could argue this change also allowed people to get pay rises or maintain pay and still be worse off, which could explain other graphs.
me spending 3 minutes looking for Saddam Hussein:
It can kinda be loss. Just count and separate the downward trends for the first three panels, and the prominent ‘L’ at the end for the 4th.
Except billionaire wealth.
Exactly, thats the only thing that goes up in America.
That and US funding to Israel also goes way way the fuck up in 1971. That sure is convenient.
I always thought of Israel as Americas puppet state in the middle east. Then they invaded Afghanistan and Iraq for
democracyoil and power.But still, I think the US is hell of a lot better than China and Russia.
God said, “Oh look, scoffingLizard was born. Well, fuck this whole time period in particular.”
Nah,
Inequality is way the fuck up
That line on the graph had to be trimmed off, just wouldn’t fit
Read the label in the top right.
Good point
I’m old
I didn’t have my reading glasses
All good, fisting enthusiast at Lemmy nsfw
Where… where were the glasses?
This shows the start of it.
1971 is the year is all starts the downward slide.
Fucking Milton Friedman
regan
Carter started it. He was the first neoliberal president
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