Hi mindmeld; Re: "Hmmm. What is QE doing to the price of goods? I wonder…Stagnant incomes and rising prices can't be good for the 99%."
If you think prices are rising now, wait till we come out of this slump. Then you're going to see real inflation.
But, as before, your argument completely misses the point.
What you're saying is that "the current situation is bad" and "therefore QE is wrong". That does not follow. Depressions take about a decade to recover from. If we get to 2018 and still no improvement in the economy, then you can start your whining.
In fact, in *every* depression incomes are stagnant. Of course they're stagnant now, have you even cracked a history book on economics???? You can't blame stagnant incomes on QE. Stagnant incomes are practically what defines a depression you dummy. It's always like this. It has happened, in this country, a dozen times in the past 300 years and it's gonna happen another dozen times in the next 300 years. And every time incomes are going to stagnate. Get used to it.
To show that QE is bad you have to compare QE to what would happen in the absence of QE. So? Do you think that if we didn't have QE incomes would be soaring????? How about looking at the rest of the planet you dumbass. Incomes are stagnant *everywhere*. The world economy *sucks*.
What a f'ing idiot. Talking to you is like shouting down a well.
In 2014 we're going to triumph at the polls. I expect us to win in 2016 as well. Hopefully by that time the economy will be doing well enough that a hard money policy won't destroy the economy and the public will credit the Republicans with saving the economy (which would have eventually come back just like it has so many times in the past and will so many times in the future, in so many countries, no matter who is president or what the banks do).
The time to implement hard money (if any) is when times are good. Times are *not* good now. Hence the stagnating incomes. That's why this is not a good time to talk about hard money.
-- Carl
P.S. Asking people to implement hard money in bad economic times is hopeless. It never happens. And in good times, it's hopeless too. When times are good no one cares about sound money. That's why hard money isn't going to happen. And if we went on a gold standard? All it would mean is that instead of our money supply being "controlled" by the Federal Reserve, it would be controlled by miners and the international market in gold.
Putting the US on a gold standard would be a disaster about an order of magnitude worse than Obamacare. That's because Obamacare only screwed up around 10% of the economy, a gold standard would screw up everything. Our whole economy is designed around the assumption that the dollars we use are constantly devaluing. You can't change that overnight. There is no way to get to a "hard money" world from the world we're in. It's the right-wing equivalent of the socialist dream of single payer healthcare. Or more accurately, single-payer everything.
Historically, the Republicans (under Lincoln) destroyed the value of the dollar with "green-backs" to pay for the Civil War. That debt was repaid and the US was put back on parity to the gold standard. It took about 20 years and the result? 20 years of depression. They should have just revalued the dollar, but they were confused by a presumption of a relationship between morality and money. The hard money advocates now are suffering under a similar assumption. No. Soft money is not evil. Money is just a medium of exchange. If that medium tends to change in value with time, people will adjust to it. We've adjusted to it. Changing it now isn't going to be painless and it isn't going to lead to a world where incomes never stagnate.
And selling hard money to the public as a cure for the business cycle is just as wrong as Obama selling the ACA to the public as a cure-all that would decrease the cost of healthcare. If the Republicans get voted into office on the basis of "hard money is a cure for what ails ya", they will be voted out of office the same way the Democrats are being voted out now. As incompetent fools and liars. Don't push us down that road. It is an old road. The economies that went down that road had depressions and booms that were far worse than the mild ones we have. |
