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Creation Festival Founder Harry Thomas Arrested and Charged With Multiple Counts of Child Molestation

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wheat-dogg, raker of forests, master of steam12/09/2017 7:55:11 am PST

re: #252 scottslemmons

If Republican voters believed in anything aside from killing black people and fucking children, they’d be angrier about wages being stagnant while prices for everything else are skyrocketing.

Here’s the money quote (pun intended):

Since 1980, America has been struggling with chronic shortfalls in aggregate demand.

The federal government can raise aggregate demand, either through direct public investment or by getting more money into consumers’ pockets through welfare state spending. But the conservative turn in American governance inaugurated by Ronald Reagan pulled way back on that. The Fed itself also went nuclear to fight inflation around 1980: It jacked interest rates into the stratosphere, causing a massive recession and a wipeout for the working class. Unions collapsed, we stopped raising the minimum wage, and we cut taxes on the wealthy. That meant a lot less money went to lower- and middle-class Americans, and a lot more went to the wealthy, where it sits uselessly in financial markets rather than being recycled into new economic activity.

To that I would add banking deregulation. Banks were once required by law to pay at least 5.25% on savings accounts, and as the author notes, CD rates were often twice that or more. After deregulation, banks could pay whatever they pleased, which nowadays is seldom more than 1%. With inflation being 2-3%, it doesn’t take an econ degree to understand why people have no incentive to stash money in bank savings accounts. Plus, banks have all kinds of punitive fees now, even more reason to be wary of banks.