I don’t have to explain Andrew Sayer’s title, above, in any detail here. The ultra-rich lie, cheat, steal, and get laws written to protect their interest at any and all costs. They prate Friedmanite neo-Liberalism, Starve the Beast, and Trickle Down (on the pee-ons, natch) non-stop while they set up one financial catastrophe after another, as we have seen (This Time is Different; A Nation of Deadbeats, The Big Short). They demanded that the financial typhoons (H/T Tommy Smothers) get bailed out with vast gifts opaquely labelled “Quantitative Easing” while underwater mortgage holders got left high and dry, to mix my metaphors.
This book appeared in 2015, after Bushonomics and the Neo-Con Forever War profiteering, but before Trumponomics. None of the advances of Bidenomics was predictable at the time, but many of the book’s suggestions appear in much of the discussion of Green New Deals, Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax, and so on. I look forward to the new Congress in 2025, when we hope and expect (but without any of that Gottverdammt complacency we keep getting bugged about) that we can comprehensively take care of the filibuster, voting rights, Supreme Court reform, and a few hundred other good ideas.
The main reason why inequality has increased over the last generation in so many countries is that the incomes of those already rich have increased so much faster than everyone else’s.
That statement is necessarily true by definition. We need to do better than that.
How can it be claimed that we can’t afford the rich? Here’s a short answer.
Their wealth is mostly dependent ultimately on the production of goods and services by others and siphoned off through dividends, capital gains, interest and rent, and much of it is hidden in tax havens. They are able to control much of economic life and the media and dominate politics, so their special interests and view of the world come to restrict what democracies can do. Their consumption is excessive and wasteful and diverts resources away from the more needy and deserving. Their carbon footprints are grotesquely inflated and many have an interest in continued fossil fuel production, threatening the planet.
Yes, that’s more like it.
Pink Floyd - Money (2023 Remaster)
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