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> We see ostensibly liberal economists calling for increased sovereign spending and sovereign debt without understanding that the debt treadmill enslaves the po
by wutbrodo 8y ago
> We see ostensibly liberal economists calling for increased sovereign spending and sovereign debt without understanding that the debt treadmill enslaves the poorest the in the heaviest shackles.
Your analysis is missing a pretty critical half: Those in support of leaning more on borrow-and-spend are generally advocating for the increased spending skewed towards the poor and for the taxes that pay for debt service/paydown skewed towards the rich. I don't see how this vision, fully-realized, would "enslave the poorest in the heaviest shackles".
- dnautics 8y agoThe effects of a debt treadmill are compounding, and good intentions do not good policy make. Typically people think, "the poor have little political power because they're poor". Maybe we should turn that on its head: "The poor are poor because they have little political power" I live in the bay area. Even here, companies jockey for federal funding like NIH grants and SBIRs. There's a lot of money in those. I promise you very few if anyone in deep poverty in the city of san francisco (tenderloin, parts of soma) are being awarded these grants. In Europe, where there are social democracies, I promise you an upper middle-class person connected to the technocrats in Brussels is going to be a greater beneficiary of largesse than a muslim from a banlieue in Paris.
- wutbrodo 8y agoRight, I suppose I'm speaking purely abstractly, where a sufficiently-well-implemented system has redistributional benefits exceed the losses to waste, misallocation, or corruption. I'm not as convinced as you likely are that such a system is theoretically unlikely, but I don't disagree too much with your characterization in reality, at least currently.