re: #177 Blind Frog Belly White

So, that Chase Bank tweet this morning, and the responses to it, remind me why I really hate smarmy older adults.

If you missed it - since it’s been removed by Chase - it basically is an imaginary conversation between a person and their bank balance where the whole reason why a person has no money is presented as being their profligate lifestyle.

This has led to a flurry of dumbassery on the part of well-off older generation folks nodding sagely and saying the bank is right and it’s all the fault of Millennials that they don’t have any savings. And a lot of rehashing of who to blame in the 2008 financial crisis. And a lot of really stupid economics from those same smug Olds.

Sure, yeah, it’s smart for people to save money. But really, that only works for an economy if most people don’t. Ask Japan during their lost decade when their economy stagnated because everyone was saving money. You can’t grow an economy on thrift. You grow it with spending. This is so blindingly simple and obvious that I’m still amazed more people don’t see it - there are no manufacturing jobs for goods people won’t buy. There are no sales jobs selling those goods that people won’t buy. There are no corporate profits to hire people to make or sell goods that people won’t buy.

I’ve told this story before - I knew a guy on another forum who said, “If only Americans would save their money, learn how to fix things, or do without, to be frugal and not spend, America would have an economic boom like the world has never seen!”

And he was 100% serious! And of course, couldn’t explain how you get a boom with nobody buying anything.

/rant

Not to mention the fact that those Olds (in which category yrs. truly probably falls now) were born, came of age, worked and (now) retired in an economy where a slow, often-irregular, but steady growth in both the micro- (personal) and macro-economic spheres was a given - allowing large numbers of people to be able to both spend AND save. And those conditions were pretty much consistent throughout the latter half of the 20th Century. But aren’t any more.

Thomas Piketty covered this pretty thoroughly in his Capital in the 21st Century (2013), unfortunately, his conclusions contained the obscene concept of a wealth tax, so was basically hooted down and ignored: in the US, anyway.