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
I literally can’t get myself to sit through movies that don’t have women. I’m like where the fuck are the women? Why are there so many men? This is boring as fuck goodbye
Even if it’s historically accurate?
as everyone knows, women were invented in 1990
All the notes of “women weren’t on old time battlefields” are wrong. There were more prostitutes and merchant women than there were soldiers in most every encampment. They followed the armies, marching alongside them, and notably ran the camps.
Many more women dressed as men to fight.
Long before female nurses were officially considered to be a part of the military, they were already on the battlefield. They merely didn’t get written into official reports because they were “invisible women”, “not supposed to be there”. Usually they would be local women running a makeshift care center out of their homes.
Movies involving ancient societies? Guess how many had female fighters?
Spies? Mostly female. Yeah, only the men were caught, usually (because nobody suspected the servant woman), but historians believe most cases had more women spies than men. Most cases meaning across time and continents.
Giving me a movie on samurai? Women were trained as well to avoid being captured and raped, and often fought just as hard as men. One woman notably survived multiple battles, and became a hero alongside her sisters after taking out 7 men before dying in her last fight (usually in sword fighting you’d be lucky to take out 2 enemy soldiers. 7 is fucking insane, but because she was a woman it was shoved under the records how the lord managed to survive).
Women have ALWAYS been on battlefields. Women have an intense history in driving victories and losses alike. They were supply runners, fighters, spies, assassins, prostitutes (look up how prostitutes essentially ran the western world, or even the social status of harem members. They literally fucking ruled), even underground activists.
The only time there weren’t many women were with cowboys. Actual western cowboys tended to be both POC and gay. In fact, any time women didn’t have a near equal or greater presence, there was a LOT of gay men.
History: either 80% female or 100% gay. And it’s 95% POC.
Okay but this is how bad 2017 was that I’m in my basement
just now and a dandelion seed floats by and I’m like that’s weird, why is a
dandelion seed floating right toward me in my basement where there’s no wind
and in the middle of winter? And I let it fall onto my hand and stared at it
for a moment before saying to it, “I’m a scientist and a very practical, down
to earth person… but if you’re some kind of fairy, can you help me out, bro,
and give me a better 2018?” Then I gently sent him on his way and wished him good
luck. Keep your fingers crossed, people. XD
GUYS THE SEED CAME BACK. I PUT OUT MY HAND AND HE LANDED
RIGHT ON IT AND I SNAPPED A PIC OF HIM ON MY PALM:
ISN’T HE BEAUTIFUL?! I HAVE NAMED HIM SILKY DAN, AND HE IS
NOW THE HAPPY WINTER DANDELION SEED OF GOOD LUCK.
REBLOG SILKY DAN FOR
HOPES FOR A GREAT 2018!
I’m most definitely allergic to Silky Dan, but, why the heck not.
theclumsiestninja 