Comment by an0malous
4 days ago
The money printing during COVID screwed everything up. Most of the capital was directly given to banks and businesses, fraudulently in many cases and unnecessarily in most, and everything pooled up into real estate and stocks so anyone who had already owned a large proportion of those became absurdly wealthy in the span of a couple years and everyone else effectively lost 20-30% of their income through inflation. The majority of all money was printed during COVID, no one voted for this to happen, no one bothered to even communicate how it was decided how much money would be printed and who would get it, and no retrospective has ever been done. It’s never been more clear that a small group of the wealthiest investors in the US run the show and the majority of people are wage slaves who had the ladder kicked out above them. Now we’re seeing an administration and elite class that is openly ransacking the country for whatever profits it can extract from a dying empire. I have no idea how this ever gets fixed.
> The capital was either directly given to businesses, fraudulently and unnecessarily in many cases
Especially concerning when a bunch of politicians were in on it, ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
https://fortune.com/2020/07/08/ppp-loan-recipients-members-o...
>ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
Wasn't that widely understood during the pandemic? All the coverage I've seen mentioned that the loans for forgivable if certain criteria were met, and nobody was like "yeah it's fine because it's a loan!".
The problem is that these loans went to _businesses_, not workers. There was an orgy of corruption, with newly formed LLCs claiming to have dozens of workers.
And then these loans were just forgiven. And since they went to businesses, Republicans are completely silent about that.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program
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You get the money back the same way Roosevelt did, 94% tax rate on the rich.
The effective tax rates have went down modestly, but approximately no one was paying anywhere near that. They were playing the same financial engineered fuck fuck games that are played today to get around it. It's the poor and middle class that can't get around those tax rates.
Nobody paid those high tax rates. Everybody was writing off cars, home offices, hobbies, "business" dinners, and everything else.
The tax simplification that occurred in 1986 struck a bargain: We'll lower your tax rate, but we're not going to allow you to take all those BS deductions anymore. The effective tax rates barely budged.
An effective 94% tax rate is a huge drag on the economy, since it makes risk taking impossible to justify. You'd be stupid to start a business or invest in a startup at that rate. There's no surer way to throw half your work force out of work.
Wealth reform is needed more than any point in American history
Yea the covid money printing is regularly pointed to as a reason why MMT is clearly bad but that ignores that there’s literally a solution to this problem in MMT. Raise taxes to reclaim the money. It’s a trivial solution which is sadly politically incredibly challenging.
> Raise taxes to reclaim the money
Only works if the government doesn't turn around and spend the money. And feeding dollar bills into a furnace just looks bad.
What a horribly dystopian thing to say
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And yet, the amount of redistribution that's happening has never been higher, far exceeding the era of "94% tax rate on the rich", never mind that nobody actually paid that rate because the tax code was full of exemptions at the time.
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...
Those graphs are about income, not wealth.
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I don’t see how this graph shows that claim. It says it’s graphing the effect of welfare on income ratios between top 10% vs the bottom 50% then just has an arrow pointing down saying “Stronger redistribution”
Where is the connection between the percentage being graphed and whatever their definition of “stronger redistribution” is?
And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
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Google Disaster Capitalism.
What we've done to other countries has finally turned inwards. It was just a matter of time.
Oh the sweet shock therapy. Kids sniffing glue, women emigrating to prostitute, emergency services and doctors killing people for kickbacks, oligarchs, organized crime. Fun times.
a big war, probably