The fact that real wages haven't kept up with productivity means that we can't afford as much more stuff as is being produced, but we can still afford more stuff.

I'm not making a point about society, I'm making a point about what real wages mean.

Inflation was fixed in the U.S. when Reagan became president: https://www.pacificresearch.org/beating-back-inflation-team-...

Recent studies in fact show that wages and productivity are still linked: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/3....

And, finally other analyses show that studies on wage stagnation fail to take into account other factors, like the increase in non-wage benefits since the 70s: https://www.cato.org/projects/humanprogress/cost-of-living

These are the orgs who persistently try to sell trickle-down economics, minimal taxation, low regulation, and other discredited, disastrous, and irrational neoliberal policy arguments.

Many are also enthusiastic climate change denialists.

One man's propaganda is another man's truth, and vice versa. Do you really think the EPI is credible? https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/economic-policy-in...

> These are the orgs who persistently try to sell trickle-down economics

That's ironic, given that the phrase "trickle-down" was invented by leftists as a marketing tactic: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/thomas-sowell-on-the-trickle-...

> low regulation

Well, we can agree on that one at least.

> and other discredited, disastrous, and irrational neoliberal policy argument

Never mind. I guess we have nothing to agree on.

> Many are also enthusiastic climate change denialists.

You're clearly influenced by the outputs of a propaganda industry, not the outputs of credible independent research. See what I did there? I'll even one-up you with some links:

https://www.amazon.com/Unsettled-Climate-Science-Doesnt-Matt...

https://www.amazon.com/Apocalypse-Never-Environmental-Alarmi...

https://www.amazon.com/Fossil-Future-Flourishing-Requires-Ga...

How about giving some arguments?

Inflation in 1980, when Carter's presidency ended, was at 12% YoY, the highest they'd ever been in his entire presidency. Rising oil prices were not the only, or even primary, cause of inflation.

From the article: "In the early 1960s, a pair of Nobel Prize–winning economists, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, argued that in order to keep unemployment around 3 percent, U.S. policy makers should be willing to accept that "the price index might have to rise by as much as 4 to 5 percent a year. That much price rise would seem to be the necessary cost of high employment." Both economists were close to Kennedy, who pushed for low interest rates, hoping to spur rapid economic growth."

This idea turned out to be false.

Also from the article: "In the early 1960s, a pair of Nobel Prize–winning economists, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, argued that in order to keep unemployment around 3 percent, U.S. policy makers should be willing to accept that "the price index might have to rise by as much as 4 to 5 percent a year. That much price rise would seem to be the necessary cost of high employment." Both economists were close to Kennedy, who pushed for low interest rates, hoping to spur rapid economic growth."

This turned out to be true. And, lastly:

"In the 1970s, that is exactly what happened in the American economy, often by design. As Frum wrote, "The United States had consciously chosen to inflate its currency. It made that choice because of the political ideology and personal weakness of the men entrusted with the job of managing the American economy: their utopianism, their arrogance, and then finally their cowardice." The inflation that vaulted Reagan into office was not an accident or an incidental effect of policy. It was the result of deliberate policy choices."

Deflation = low employment, high buying power

People can pick between high employment and high buying power but they want both. Having both is impossible.

"It was only after the election, when Volcker knew Carter had lost, that he really clamped down on the money supply. This illustrates an important point: Presidents get the Fed policy they want, no matter how “independent” the Fed may be. If there had been any doubt about this, it was settled in 1967, when Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin buckled under pressure from Lyndon Johnson and eased monetary policy even though Martin knew he should be tightening. This caused inflation to jump from 3 percent in 1967 to 4.7 percent in 1968 and 6.2 percent in 1969."

And:

"Few people now remember how much pressure there was on Reagan to get rid of Volcker and have the Fed run a more accommodating monetary policy. Yet Reagan not only supported Volcker publicly, he appointed like-minded people to the Fed whenever he had the chance. He reappointed Volcker to the chairmanship in 1983 and appointed Alan Greenspan to replace him in 1987.

The result of the Fed’s tight money policy was a far faster reduction in inflation than most economists thought feasible. From 12.5 percent in 1980, inflation fell to 8.9 percent in 1981 and 3.8 percent in 1982. It is difficult to explain just how remarkable this achievement was. Most economists would have considered it impossible in 1980, especially given the big 1981 tax cut, which economists schooled in Keynesian economics generally viewed as pouring gasoline on the fires of inflation."

There's plenty of other takes that contradict yours as well, like this one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/briandomitrovic/2011/02/07/volc...

The authors claims that the Reagan tax cuts were a key ingredient without which the inflation reduction may not have occurred at all, or it at least would have occurred at a much slower rate.

But, look at me not carrying on a "discussion" because I keep citing other sources. I should just respond with one single sentence stating my belief as fact, right?

We're not talking about luxuries, we're talking about essentials. A nice iPhone is useless if you can't afford to feed your family or pay your energy bills - which is quite literally the situation many families in the UK are now finding themselves.

Says who? Why can't the people producing stuff simply take lower profit margins instead?

Increasing the cost of potato supply, with - for example - extortionate energy and fuel prices means the potatoes don't get grown in the first place.

This is exactly what's been happening in the UK.

Literally.

Not I-read-this-in-an-econ-textbook hypothetically. But for real in the stores.

This means that the normal way of controlling inflation (e.g. taking money away from people so they can't spend it) is not going to work. And in many ways is probably counter productive as it is making supplying goods more difficult.

Companies don't use some formula where they give a percentage of what you create to you in return, they try to squeeze your wages down as low as possible. It doesn't matter if you produce 5000 bucks an hour or 100 bucks an hour in value for your company, they still want to pay you as little as possible.

Stuff like staff loyalty and retention has been to a large part abandoned in favor of simply keeping wages down.

Just tax the rich (companies) properly. The resources and money is available. The current government chooses not to allocate it properly.

What is happening in the UK is to me 100% the result of the current Conservative Party and their policies.

The rich have historically funded the arts (e.g. patronage), public buildings, public institutions (e.g. Carnegie's libraries).

Useful businesses that require high capital are difficult to get going if no one has any capital.

There's no reason the government couldn't fully fund those things instead.

In fact, "businesses that require high capital" are almost always funded by the government. It's called infrastructure spending.

Let them go, then, the earlier the better and threat them as pariah. What good do you expect to gain from them at that rate?

I'm not sure how it is in France though.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-14/new-york-...

Why do tax reliefs and strategies always benefit the big companies with lots of lawyers.

Lower the taxes of the common folk. Their interests are not being met, but those of the lobbyists.

The problem wouldn't be that they would leave. The problem would be that they would stay and become violent.

Eyeballing this, only 11 of the top 50 richest people in the UK have property as their source of wealth.

There's quite a number of very rich foreigners who economically have very little effect on the UK apart from monopolizing scarce inner city property.

So? Let them be violent. What are they gonna do? They don't have guns like in 'Merica.

They're dangerous not because they'll be violent (they won't be), but because they hold missive political leverage.

Not the structure built on it (well ... not much ... and you can often just tax that through the resources it consumes).

Not only are you taxing the asset that can't flee the country, and which the poor typically don't own, you also incentivise efficient land usage (it becomes too expensive to be a NIMBY).

And if you're talking about companies leaving France, then that's flimsy too. French citizens are among the richest in the world. International companies will pay higher taxes to access that market, and if they don't that's fine, a domestic company can step in or the government can snap up the productive capacity to invest in infrastructure.

Why can they do this? One reason is monopoly power- monopolies must be broken up.

But what else can be done (besides central bank driven demand destruction)? So instead of price controls, a more palatable solution is collective buying. This gives buyers more clout, allows them to bargain for lower prices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyers_club

So we need more large non-profit buyers clubs, things like that. In the US, allow medicare to bargain with drug companies- it's insane that they can not.

An example where this works: my parents live in a gated community. They pay very little for the cable + internet + cell phone because the entire community has a deal with the provider.

Large retailers have this exact role: they certainly demand and get lower prices from their suppliers. We need a non-profit version of this, why should Walmart owners only benefit from their buying power?

This has been tried a lot in the 20th century (starting in the 19th century), usually emerging from the labour movement. I think in food retail and energy it has mostly failed or simply stopped making difference. The profit margins of food retailers are small to begin with and easily lost by being a bit less efficient.

But Europe and the UK in particular has been using a similar model pretty successfully to keep drug prices low. Some argue that costs were merely shifted over to the U.S. I think this is only partially true.

(Well, the actual question is DO they have a monopoly, to which the answer is mostly no)

Target has a NET 2.6% profit margin, Walmart has 1.9%, which are on the low side of what you'd expect for a sustainable commodity business. Tesco appears to have a GROSS (not net: this is after cost of goods but before salaries, etc.) margin of 6.5% and Sainsbury's has 7.6%. [1] Obviously their net profit margin is going to be less. This is hardly a company with a huge pricing power dynamic. If you want to see that, look at Apple (24.5% NET margin), Coca-Cola (22.2% NET margin), Visa (50.3% NET margin). (Note however that Coca-Cola's customers are its bottlers and Visa's customers are merchants so their pricing power might be invisible to end consumers)

[1] https://finbox.com/OTCPK:JSNS.F/explorer/gp_margin

Gross is 23.5%- it makes you wonder where all that money is going.. oh yeah, $9.85 B of stock buybacks.

My father once went to buy me diapers and returned with living room furniture set(ugly one also), because this was only one available since month or so, and he had to take it on the spot, because entire shipment will be gone in next few hours.

Then he had to go back to the diaper line and wait a few hours, because I wasn't impressed with the furniture enough to stop eating.

> "It happens when someone decides to raise the prices"

What would drive someone to raise the price of something with the confidence it will still sell at that price?

Rising demand and limited supply. Someone with a monopoly on all the widget production can arbitrarily decide to limit supply (e.g. your "limited edition" MTG card), which is a farce.

More often and importantly, in an environment where there are many producers of a commodity like toilet paper, they suffer input shortages or other increases to the cost of production/delivery. On and on this analysis goes until you get to your question, "why not stop the problem at the source". Where is the source in the price increase in toilet paper? Paper production costs are up? Ink costs are up? Shipping costs are up? Regulatory costs are up? Energy prices are up? Labor costs are up? Freeze all of these by government mandate?

As the guy cutting down trees for toilet paper with a shortage of gas for your chainsaw (meaning it costs more to run), do you want the cost of your product arbitrarily frozen with no regard to your input costs? What if the cost of your logging lease from the government increased? Can you raise the price of the toilet paper logs you're selling? No? How is that fair? What if landslides decreased your tree availability by half, but the number butts that needed wiping hasn't changed, or worse, has increased? Are you to sell your now scarce trees at the same price you always did? Or shall you sell to the highest bidder? What if the government says you can't auction the trees but must sell them for the same price? Maybe you look for off-the-books compensation - free tickets to the game, whatever. Someone still bears that increased cost.

If rising demand relative to limited supply is the actual source of the problem (too many people want toilet paper) why not stop the problem there by simply rationing toilet paper? Turns out this is what happens more frequently - rationing eggs, toilet paper, trying to prevent hoarding, scalping, etc.

Arbitrarily limiting the supply costs of a product or the demand for a product is a temporary solution at best.

> Gives anybody with elementary knowledge of econ a heart attack

Plainly, this isn't true. This opinion is not uncommon amongst so-called "Marxist economists" such as Richard Wolff. You can disagree that price controls and rationing would be the best way to solve the problem, but it is outright ignorant and needlessly insulting to make this claim.

See the Nixon era price controls and how they failed to get inflation under control.

If you fix prices, it just means the product keeps selling out quickly and most people can’t get the product.

This is why prices go up when there is a supply shock (like with eggs and the bird flu). There are fewer eggs available, and raising prices reduces demand until it matches the supply (as people who only kinda like eggs switch to cheaper alternatives). While it sucks that eggs are more expensive, at least you can still buy them if you really like eggs. With price controls, it becomes a crapshoot on whether you can get them or not.

Supermarkets earn a lot on eggs, always have.

Many people don't seem to learn from history. When something appeals to their emotions they follow it blindly.

But focusing on the alleged producers while fleecing the people in the middle (who are not the lower end either) is equally bad.

The people in the middle get high taxes, no real possiblity of ownership, no benefits of the bottom (state help) or of the top (the top just increases their own margins).

The top lobbies government and sets an unfair advantage for themselves, making the whole alleged democratic representation a farce.

The government should be more frugal with their won bureocracy and corruption and lower the taxes for the middle and bottom. The pretende that increasing conditions to the top will drip down is demonstrably false. It's mostly a rigged game, depending on where you started.

In theory, you could do this with toilet paper or loaves of bread too.

In the US, the Fed is not concerned about the bottom. They're solely concerned on the top. Check the numbers, zero interest rates did *not* trickle down. Instead they helped further increase the income inequality gap.

To blame to poor (read: the powerless) in any way, shape or form is, at best, misinformation. Worse it gives those responsible a free pass.

"I sit on a man's back choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible… except by getting off his back."

Leo Tolstoy

Those spending never reaches the "lower classes", and seldom even reach places where it would have the potential to increase productivity.

It's a tired, old argument that is done to justify stupid spending and enriching certain pockets while claiming to benefit all with a shoddy reasoning that omit the important details

1. Interest-free money for businesses to launch, grow, and advance. This leads to more goods in the market and thus lower prices

2. Free money straight to the people which means more money in the market and thus, inflation, empty shelves, etc.

His general point is that having interest-free money keeps existing players honest since newcomers can come in and start a competing business. Now that the money is drying up, existing players are increasing their moat.

I mean if you blocked companies from acquiring their competitors sure.

Otherwise you just end up with the largest company treating acquisitions as an R&D expense.

The current UK government has not been doing much of this.

We did that in comunism with the known results.

Like they can build housing and windfarms, etc.

(The US actually has more public utilities than the UK.)

To a degree you can do it, have the state own companies. But it will kind of be economically inneficient, high position employees and some politicians will steal money. No one will have the motivation to push farther.

Most US transit systems are bad because the government puts even more effort into stopping them from working (via bad land use, incredibly slow decision making, power-harassing Andy Byford) than it does operating them.

It is only acceptable to give money to corporations.

Seems very convenient and totally unbiased

So I go and register an LTD company now I am eligible for free government money.

We tried that. It all went into real estate and stocks and gave birth to a massive scam industry involving crypto and other get rich quick schemes.

The average joe didn't see much trickle down to him unless he was already invested in real estate or stocks.

Giving away free money without any strings attached to individuals or corporations is a bad idea as they both can be extremely reckless.

Here, we're discussing a different paradigm: interest-free money vs free money. The issue is that interest-free money has little to no use for individuals. They can't put that interest-free money into an existing business and reap the returns. That's why most people just use that "interest-free" money for stocks (margin trading) and even then it wasn't fully interest-free.

The fundamental issue is how to give individuals interest-free money and have them see returns. Maybe using that money toward job training, or starting incubators that find small businesses and infuse them with money, mentorship, etc.

Tax-breaks doesn't mean giving money to businesses, they mean taking less money from businesses.

At least giving money directly to poor people is spent on things that can grow local economies. It is not perfect, but a lot more “stimulating” than giving money to institutions, corporations and rich people.

[1]: https://fortune.com/2023/03/20/is-federal-reserve-too-powerf...

What's the mechanism? A big loan is a big risk. With a big risk you can have either a big reward or a big failure. Smaller loans, smaller risks, smaller rewards and smaller failures. It's proportional. Why do you think of wealth redistribution?

Big risk are if you use that big loan to start a new business, but not if you dump it all on stocks and desirable real estate in hot or future hot areas.

Buying real estate seems sound only because real estate has some good returns last years. But real estate can go down real fast like in 2008.

Many people gambled money, be it stock, real estate, crypto. Some got very rich, some didn't, some went bankrupt, some will.

I don't believe in speculation and gambling. The market can always can catch you on the wrong foot.

I believe in hard work, well invested thoughts and patience. The results might not spectacular but I rather construct my future than gamble it.

For every new billionaire who got lucky there are 100 new beggars who had bad luck.

You tried the wrong thing. You shouldn't hand money without conditions. Instead of letting speculative assets grow, you should only let productive bussineses borrow money with low interests. Businesses which produce tangible goods and are creating jobs.

By contrast I now live abroad in a developing country and it's quite amazing how ripe small business is. Want to sell bread? Okay, bake it and sell it. You can even get it stocked at "convenience marts" easily enough since a that's often just some guy's lower floor transformed in a shop. Talk to the owner, who's probably the guy at the counter, and make a deal. If people like your bread, you're now officially a baker - congrats.

Make it easier for people to sell stuff, and there will be more stuff. And the prices of stuff will trend downwards. While money is a way around these issues, a regular joe who happens to make a great loaf of bread probably isn't especially keen on taking on 5-6 figures of debt just to see if selling his bread actually works, let alone being something he really wants to dedicate himself to.

In some cases, business simply ignore regulations that that are obscure or inefficient to comply with; this leads to corruption and/or shadow economies.

In more cases, business is simply discouraged and doesn’t grow, or just doesn’t start at all.

The messy patchwork is city, (sometimes) county and state licensing and taxation framework in the US is a huge drag on small business.

I am not arguing for no regulation, licensing, or taxation, only that these entities recognize that requiring businesses to file paper tax returns every quarter, even if they have done zero business in a given city is a significant hindrance to business activity.

This is an excellent idea. Just lower the barrier whatever that barrier is.

Some people can think that lowering the entry barrier can result in subpar products and services but in fact the higher the competition, the higher the quality will be.

If this were true, then appliance manufacturers who produce higher-quality goods would be rewarded. But instead, we're at a weird state where appliances are still not cheap while also not being built to last.

Competition isn't guaranteed to keep the market honest; I'd argue once a market passes a certain size the number of people who can spot lemons becomes insignificant, and then it's a race to the bottom.

Excessive bureaucracy and excessive legislation have the perverse effect to seemingly protect the consumer while in reality helping the big players. Small players will go out of business while new players can't enter. It wouldn't be much surprise if powerful lobbies ask for such legislation while they pretend they think of the public good.

No one likes competition, even entering the bar as a new lawyer is difficult.

Sure, you can raise the standards so much that only multi billion companies will be able to comply. In fact that is what we witness today. How many mom and pop shops still exist compared to the '60s?

Let's just be honest with ourselves that these regulations cause us to have less stuff, and consider when they are worth it, and when they are not.

And 100% - making it easier for individuals/businesses to comply with regulations is winners all around.

I don't believe "safe" and "good quality" are necessarily aligned. I live close to a dairy farm where they sell (their own) unpasturised milk. You bring your own bottle, fill it, and pay in the honesty box. The farmer has a (small) disclaimer suggesting that the milk be boiled prior to consumption, but I don't believe any of the local buyers actually do that.

Q: Should this be forbidden?

UNPROCESSED Raw Milk (animal species)

There should probably be a poster or something created by the FDA that quickly summarizes the risks involved with not performing each of the mandatory safety steps for normal retail 'Milk', and it would be helpful if more detailed information were available on a website and from the local health agencies.

Some states such as California do have special exemptions for "cottage" production of low risk foods such as bread.

https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CEH/DFDCS/Pages/FDBPrograms...

In other industries it's much easier to legally start selling things. Want to make screwdrivers and sell them to the local hardware store? Go ahead.

Bread was just an example. Just try to open a small corner shop and see how easy it is. Almost any small business has legal obstacles and a barrier as a high to entry as a large corporation. While the corporation can pass that barrier, little guys can't.

> Want to make screwdrivers and sell them to the local hardware store? Go ahead.

I doubt you can do it without having to pay attention to thousand of different regulations.

It's only when you start making all sorts of things for yourself that you really start to see how completely irrational the markup on many things is, which then begs the question - why isn't anybody simply dropping the prices by 50% and making a killing? And the only answer I can really see is because it's become really quite painful to be able to sell things in America, unless you want to go all-in on it.

I'd also add that in terms of food safety, the big concern is not small business, but big business. Buy food from an individual or a family and you're eating what they're also eating for dinner, and probably have been for decades. By contrast at e.g. McDonalds, those executives probably aren't touching their "product" except for photo ops. Their only motivation is to maximize profit, which often comes in the form of sacrifices in quality or even safety of what's sold. [1] And this has always been true. "The Jungle" wasn't about Joe Bob's streetside shop.

[1] - https://www.meatpoultry.com/articles/20650-lftb-to-be-classi...

Sure if you bake a few loaves of bread at home then that probably seems cheap in terms of ingredients. Now add in your labor, allocate costs for utilities and kitchen appliances, and figure out what it would cost to drive around all day delivering that bread to retailers. Suddenly it's not so cheap.

But yeah I think that's weird and destructive. Wouldn't it be better to prominently track and celebrate how much new housing is built?

OTOH, many people have all or most of their net-worth tied up in their home price. So even though NOTHING CHANGES when that price goes up or down, it has a psychological affect on them, who vote a lot.

Small plots of land are dominated by HOAs. Finding small plots of "unregulated" (no HOA) land requires one to live very far from a city & decent grocery stores.

I'm not a big fan of the red tape of regulation & how regulations can be abused by large capital, but in the case of housing, HOAs are a bigger problem. Of course, there are also municipal regulations which require small plots of land to be more tightly regulated re: housing.

Debt is a heat sink, which is why Japan failed to spur inflation for two decades despite pulling every spending lever they could come up with. Debt kills economic dynamism, robbing the economy of the capital it requires to invest, expand.

To get to inflation out of borrowing + consumption, you need supply to not keep up. For most of the prior two decades for the US, supply kept up (courtesy of the China manufacturing juggernaut, which was a deflationary force for US consumers). The China effect has reached its end in terms of peaking, the next two decades will not see that kind of offset benefit (at least for the US).

Over the coming decades, the US will see similar problems that Japan did in terms of being unable to spark expected levels of inflation, despite high spending and debt problems. The cause will be the same, more and more of the economy will be locked up in the freezer as debt (typically yielding ever lower interest, in a downward spiral).

As long as execs and CEOs are free to reap the benefits brought by their staff without paying any of it back this problem will continue to be exasperated.

Another contributing factor in the matter is the fact that politicians seem to be immune from the affects of their policies.

This gives them very little incentive to actually help people at the bottom of the totem pole as their funding is coming from the very same people whom are essentially exploiting a desperate workforce.

Is a shelf stacker in Sainsburys a high skilled job? No. Is it absolutely crucial in order for Sainsburys to have a working business? Yes.

The same is true for the cleaner in a bank. If a bank is covered in dirt and stinks people are not going to bank there. Likewise with cleaners of trains and pretty much any other industry.

When you pair the fact that governments are funded by the same people whom are also funding a divisive narrative throughout all media outlets you end up with a grim and bleak outlook for society.

As someone that has come from below 0 to get a good job and try and get out of the council estate poverty cycle it really strikes a nerve when people act as though we get given handouts for nothing.

My mother worked her damn arse off through my childhood and continues to do so now as a 69 year old woman with chronic health issues. She has been left behind and forgotten by society and ill informed people seem to lack any ability to see beyond the outliers in shows like benefits Britain.

Err, votes are the biggest incentive for politicians.

> Is a shelf stacker in Sainsburys a high skilled job? No. Is it absolutely crucial in order for Sainsburys to have a working business? Yes.

Not really, they will soon use robots.

> The same is true for the cleaner in a bank. If a bank is covered in dirt and stinks people are not going to bank there. Likewise with cleaners of trains and pretty much any other industry.

I think in Japan cleaning is robotized already.

> When you pair the fact that governments are funded by the same people whom are also funding a divisive narrative throughout all media outlets you end up with a grim and bleak outlook for society.

Governments funded from taxpayers money.

Not sure if you are aware of the little old B word which was proven to have been based on a campaign of lies.

As for your remark about robots replacing shelf stackers and cleaners. I’ll leave that as the ill-informed and provocative comment it is.

Regarding government funding, governments spend public tax payer money, yes. Political parties receive their funding from private donors who ultimately end up expecting some kind of payback for their donation/bribe. Which ultimately comes out of the tax payer’s pocket.

This creates a cyclic system which is built to extract wealth from the bottom and middle classes in order to feed it back to the society’s richest people.

It can, and has at times, meant:

- Corporate bailouts and "welfare"

- Tax cuts

- Deregulation

- Lobbying / big money donations

Sometimes it means some of the above, other times it means all of the above. But the point is that no one on the fiscal conservative side of the aisle has ever come out and used the term "trickle down economics." Their opposition uses that word because it is loaded and it speaks to their base.

> Those spending never reaches the "lower classes"

What spending are you talking about? The OP was talking about removing barriers to creating business and attributed these barriers to good intentions. We can probably safely assume that the OP is a fiscal-conservative who favours deregulation and a business-friendly environment. And for what it's worth I am not trying to take one side over the other, you just lost me at "spending." The OP is talking about the exact opposite of spending. They are taking a "private solutions over public solutions" position. One where you spend less by having less overhead and red tape standing in the way of those who want to produce goods & services thus creating abundance of supply which lowers prices in addition to more jobs which puts more money in peoples' pockets.

Global ecosystems are already in a free fall, we don’t need to “encourage production” [by deregulating industries? perhaps getting rid of those pesky environmental and worker protections? (that’ll definitely help out those workers) ] and even more rapid resource consumption.

In the US the rate peaked at 91% on earnings over $400k - which is about $4m adjusted.

This is also why middle class tax rates are so high in Nordic countries, and most affluent nations with good social welfare structures. Taxing the rich isn't nearly enough. The US would have to shift to a much higher tax system for everyone, and the US middle class (which is spoiled by relatively low income tax rates) will not go for it (not yet anyway).

It you take all the cars from the top 1% and give them to the other 99%, how many additional cars do you suppose the average family will get? How about for houses? How about for haircuts?

Completely inaccurate. Giving people money that came from taxes does not increase the money supply.

Giving people money that came from selling bonds does not increase the money supply.

Only printing money increases the money supply.

So while one could nitpick some points about the specifics of government actions as relation to monetary supply, even if we take all of your points for granted - there would almost certainly be inflation proportional to the amount given. The only way there would be no inflation is if this action didn't increase monetary velocity.

That's why, for instance, the Fed is currently raising interest rates. They want to 'gently' brake the economy (while trying to avoid breaking it) such that people stop spending so much money, and inflation cools down. By contrast countless countries have tried to solve inflation by simply naively tackling the problem.

People don't have enough money to buy chicken? Well obviously we just need to give them more money! And that's how you get Zimbabwe. [1] Alternatively, another direct approach is to say "Okay - companies may no longer charge more than $0.50 for a chicken." That's how you get Venezuela. [2]

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trill...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/venezuelas-empty-shelve...

> So tax $1.10 for every $1 redistributed

I would say this is also mostly innacurate. Velocity is one factor, but may or may not be the driving factor depending on circumstances.

If a global pandemic shuts down most of the manufacturing cities in China, and a war in Ukraine takes Russian energy and Ukrainian grain out of the supply equation, then the velocity of money is irrelevant compared to supply constraints.

Also, it's not just about the money supply. It's about who has the money and what they do with it.

Taking money from a rich person who might have had it tied up in stock, and giving it to a poor person who takes it to the grocery store - will not put anything more on the shelves in that grocery store. In the aggregate, it MUST do one of those three things. It may ALSO decrease the price of stock as it's sold by the rich people.

Clearly the economy is complicated, and it's hard to follow around the money. That's why I like to get back to fundamentals. Not even economics, but basically physics: We can't consume what isn't produced. Money is to some degree beside the point. If we want people (of any class) to have more stuff, then we must allow for that stuff to be produced.

Not exactly. Printing simply introduces new money supply. Borrowing (or selling bonds in our case) comes with a corresponding liability that decreases the supply over time in an aggregate amount greater than the original amount, and results in a corresponding difference in behavior from the borrower.

The government hands out that money, and people use it to buy more bonds, then the government hands out more money, and repeat. There is now more money in the world.

Yes, if you unwind everything it will go back down, but that's never actually done.

With a corresponding liability that will eventually remove more money from the system than was introduced. This is of course a dramatically different equation.

I defy you to find any policies in capitalist countries that are intended mainly to "help the poor." Even the liberals' beloved FDR claimed he was just trying to save capitalism with his social programs.

The policies are not intended to help working people. They're only helping non-working, non-contributing parasites on society.

In the UK particularly, there are multiple examples of welfare putting women in multi-million pound houses in elite areas.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297796/The-single-...

This isn't meant to help British laborers. It is explicitly designed to destroy them.

This is mostly true, but it isn’t always, and it isn’t a perfect formula.

For example, there are some goods that have zero or negligible marginal costs to provide. For example, a streaming service. If people use the extra money they get to buy Netflix subscriptions, it isn’t like there will suddenly be a shortage of Netflix streams. It doesn’t take many resources to add additional subscribers for Netflix… it isn’t exactly zero margin, but it is pretty damn close.

This is even somewhat true for some physical goods. There is a lot of latent productivity in our economy… factories only running at 50% capacity, for example, or mines that aren’t producing all the ore they can because the demand doesn’t exist for what they produce. If demand suddenly increases because there is more money being spent, they can increase productivity without putting strain on the productive capacity of the industry.

Obviously this is not infinite capacity, but it is why it is not as simple as “creating more money == 1 to 1 equivalent inflation”. In other words, you aren’t going to get a 10% inflation if you add 10% to the money supply. It would be some fraction of that 10%.

Which specific policies of this Conservative government amount to a change in the direction of giving more money to more nonproductive people? If anything, exactly the opposite has been happening, and yet inflation has been getting worse.

So tax wealth rather than income?