Deficit & supply chain truth exposed. Republican economic lies continue. We must connect.
Economist Stephanie Kelton exposes the deficit myths. Rep. Brady (R-TX) called out for lying. Tom C, a PDR Posse member's insightful commentary. Supply chain truth.
Topics:
Notes
Economist blows a hole into deficit myth: It’s like the last 30 years of history didn’t happen.
Register: Ask Egberto Anything. It is Saturday, December 4, at 11:00 AM Central.
Stephanie Ruhle calls out this lying Republican on child credit. Democrats must jump on this bigly!
Worthwhile Reads
INSIGHTFUL statement at PDR monthly chat: Broaden our message so that everyone feels connected.
Buttigieg makes it clear that the supply chain problems are a failure of the private sector.
Notes
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Economist blows a hole into deficit myth: It’s like the last 30 years of history didn’t happen.
Economic Professor Stephanie Kelton makes it clear that holding policy hostage to budget deficits is makes absolutely no sense.
The author of the book "The Deficit Myth," Economist Stephanie Kelton made no bones about the deficit v. fiscal policy. Fareed Zakaria asked the professor to explain her statement about those who use the deficit as a weapon. She stated that it was as if the last 30 years did not happen in that regard.
Kelton said that Americans have been programmed to believe that budget deficits are inherently irresponsible. They generally think it is OK doing a time of crisis. She said in normal times they want deficits avoided. They claim the budget is like our personal budgets and driving it up increases inflation and has negative economic consequences. She said the last 30 years should blow up that myth.
Countries like the United States and Japan had run up huge deficits over the last 30 or 40 years with no discernible adverse inflationary effects.
"The US has been running fiscal deficits basically my entire life with the exception of really 4 years during the Clinton presidency," Kelton said. "And we have just witnessed during the last 18 months or so, Congress has committed about $5 trillion to fight the pandemic, supporting the economy, and what did we end up with? We ended up with the shortest recession in US history."
One only gets inflation when there is a shortage of products and services. We teach that in business school but too often we extrapolate that reality to unfounded concepts. Modern Monetary Theory is no theory. It has been our economic experience.
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Stephanie Ruhle calls out this lying Republican on child credit. Democrats must jump on this bigly!
Republican Rep. Kevin Brady gives Democrats the opening that they must focus on, child credit worker freedom, & family values. The GOP is neither for family values nor for good jobs. They are just terrible.
Stephanie Ruhle started out asking Republican Representative Kevin Brady of Texas about the Fed's performance. He objected to them supporting big government stimulative policies. It is cold comfort coming from a leader in the Republican Party that has consistently supported tax cuts and deficit spending. But that was not the cause of Stephanie Ruhle's ire. It came from a more fundamentally lying statement he made.
Kevin Brady claims that child credit is a welfare program That creates worker shortages for businesses. Understand this, one of the leaders in the so-called family-values party shows little value in moving children out of poverty. Instead, he prefers ensuring that every working-class America partakes of the antiseptic form of slavery perpetrated by most corporations.
Several companies have proven that if corporations pay a living wage, there is no worker shortage. It is all about supply and demand. But our corporate structure only believes in supply and demand as a method of raising prices for us all. They do not want any worker power.
Democrats must use the true Republican mantra to tag them as anti-family, anti-democracy, and anti-morality. Here are their tags.
Republicans do not support the Medicaid Expansion to the Affordable Care Act. That means they knowingly support the deaths of many and thus they are murderers.
They do not support a child-credit that has cut child poverty in half. Republicans do not value children.
Republicans do not support family leave. They are anti-family.
We must go on the offensive and stop forcing ourselves to defend lies like CRT and more. We must force the media to take up the Progressive narrative as it is the narrative of humanity and what Americans want.
Worthwhile Reads
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INSIGHTFUL statement at PDR monthly chat: Broaden our message so that everyone feels connected.
We have an Ask Egberto Anything on the first Saturday of every month. A PDR Posse member, Tom C made a message observation we must heed.
PDR Posse member/supporter Tom C visited our monthly chat with a commentary that I thought all needed to hear, Register for "Ask Egberto Anything" here.
Tom C described the silos that groups in America are becoming.
"Our country is becoming so polarized, Tom said. "And so disunited."
He laments the false freedom many are convulsing about. He laments the "Don't bother me with your problem" attitude. Unfortunately too few understand that one person's problem today could easily be the other's tomorrow."
"I was making notes today," Tom said. "Just thinking about it's just too bad that we have this attitude in our country that, you know, freedom is everything. Or for a lot of people, it's like, don't bother me with your problems. You know, it is, you know, just solve your own problems. Be on your own. Be an individual. Be a man or whatever. You know, it's like it is sad."
Tom then expanded on the statement I made about hue, race.
"You know what the problem is?" Tom said. "I was thinking of this too the hue, man, you know you talk about hue, man, so hue is part of our as part of who we are. We always judge by appearances which is sad but what really is the color problem today? I think it is green. Well green for money and also green for nature. So we've got these two, the two greens involved here. We help nature. Should we help you now? Should we just be concerned about ourselves and go for money?"
Tom C then ends with the most prescient statement.
"They [many Republicans] have this cultural mindset that this is the group I'm in," Tom said. "And I want to identify with you now, the people here. And they don't see themselves as part of a bigger culture and part of a problem that needs to be resolved. So it's that's one of the things that Democrats have to work on and try to appeal to, the poor people of rural America and the people that are left out in the working class. We have to broaden that whole movement so that everybody feels connected."
Buttigieg makes it clear that the supply chain problems are a failure of the private sector.
Do you want the government now? Buttigieg makes clear that the supply chain issue is a private sector issue. But we will help.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is great with words. He lays out the message for others to change the narrative. When Dana Bash asked about the supply chain problem recently, his message was spot on.
"We are going to continue to see challenges," Buttigieg said. "The steps that we're taking are making a difference. But think about all the things that have to happen to get a product to a shelf on time. Fundamentally it's up to the producers the shippers and the retailers and we're doing everything we can to help them move those goods across infrastructure that's often outdated. Look, we've got demand that's off the charts. The retail federation is predicting an all-time record high in terms of sales. We've got supply which is in some cases, actually up, but not up enough to keep up with that demand. And then the biggest thing of all, of course, you have the pandemic. The pandemic is poking holes in supply. No matter how good any company or any administration is. We're going to keep working on things like the port issues smoothing out anything else that is within our control but the only way we can really put these disruptions behind us is to put the pandemic in the rearview mirror which is why the president has been leading decisively to do just that."
Capice? It is up to the private sector to get their act together. We will try to help with your profit-greed supply chain mismanagement with Just-In-Time inventory (JITI). And BTW, we will have to do it with substandard infrastructure because you greedy plutocrats refuse to pay your fair share of taxes.
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Democrats/progressives/liberals, being aligned with being educated, keep thinking making logical arguments to change the minds of people somehow makes political sense. Sure sounds a lot like progressives standing on the sidelines in 1930s Germany saying the population is not stupid enough to be suckered in by that CLEARLY know-nothing Hitler.
The Republicans know better. Changing the greater population's mind about something is a propaganda/brainwashing effort, NOT a debate of logic and facts. The GOP recognized and began working on that philosophy a long time ago, but still within my lifetime.
FoxNews wasn't actually a new idea. People miss that. FoxNews was nothing more than bringing right wing propaganda AM radio to TV. Think like a businessman. Murdoch never would have gambled money on something as expensive as a TV station without already having a successful model (AM rant radio) to strongly suggest the investment would pay off and not flop.
How does this apply to today's postings? "Economist blows a hole into deficit myth". Ya, we progressives just LOVE all those nice educated factual arguments, don't we? Makes us feel great.
Before I go further, I should emphasize Ms. Kelton's work is great. I'm not attacking it. I'm only out to attack efforts to use it to win elections.
We keep getting to feel great about this kind of stuff while we watch the right wing propaganda machine laugh at us and continue making progress increasing right wing power. In other words, face REAL POLITICAL FACTS. Did all this feeling great about our being correct prevent a 6-3 activist right wing Supreme Court?
Here's the parallel from business. Business person #1 has totally convince him/herself s/he has exactly the product/service consumers need, and has all kinds of facts and figures to prove it. Yet a competitor is getting all the sales with a competing product/service. So person #1 gets the joy of going bankrupt being absolutely convinced they had the best product and the consumers were idiots. The competitor gets to enjoy being a billionaire totally not caring what person #1 thought.
Bottom line. We need to STOP trying to TELL the consumers (voters) they're fools for not buying our product while we happily go bankrupt "knowing" we knew what was best for the consumers. Face the fact if we want to be successful, supply the consumers (voters) with what they want to buy. THEN as we have power, we can do all the other things. For example, its only after having told the consumers (voters) that we're selling what they actually want to buy that we can then change the voting laws. After all, it's precisely what the Republicans have been doing for decades now. Tell the consumers (voters) we're selling one thing, and then after they give us their business use the power to Gerrymander and change the voting laws.
So... stop trying to tell the consumers they're wrong about the deficit. They don't "feel" it. It's a losing argument. It would take decades of persistent propaganda to move the needle on that. INSTEAD, blame the deficit on the Republicans.
This bring us back around to messaging. STOP playing defense on messaging. STOP running retreating into a defensive posture every time the Republican spin machine invents some new soundbite. Go on offense.
Not only slam the Republicans with soundbites, but disarm their soundbites and/or turn them around.
As just one example, we need to stop just running away and playing defensive in response to "tax and spend liberals". In fact, playing DEFENSIVE against that soundbite is PRECISELY what using this book POLITICALLY is trying to do. (The book is fine, but not all that useful in the greater political sphere.) Instead, we need to acknowledge the consumers (voters) are "buying" the "product" that says "deficits are bad" and rejecting the "product" that says "stop worrying about deficits".
So all this gets us to promoting a "borrow and spend Republicans" soundbite, combined with actually making an effort to campaign on the fact it's the REPUBLICANS who keep increasing the deficit and Democrats who keep lowering it.
If Republicans are being successful with their "deficits are bad" message, then GREAT. Leverage their success and turn it against them. Go on offense against the Republicans using their own messaging successes against them.
Unfortunately Pete failed to word one thing carefully enough, and while rushing to promote infrastructure missed an opportunity to point out the impact of the GOP War on Working Class Wages and Benefits.
#1. Just saying "ports" is now unfair to the "ports" themselves. The "ports" are unloading the ships but facing problems with businesses not moving their containers out of the ports fast enough. So the containers already on shore have been clogging up the process. Pete could have clarified that while also giving his department a pat on the back by mentioning their efforts to get those containers not being efficiently handled by businesses out of the ports themselves and into other longer term holding areas. The Ports of LA and Long Beach just recently had to impose a $100 per container per day fine on businesses for leaving their containers clogging up the ports.
#2. CEPR had a good paper on how its the collapse of trucking in America which is currently responsible for not getting the containers moved around the country. Average age of truckers has now risen to 55 due to the GOP attack on the Teamsters as part of their War on Working Classes Wages and Benefits. Thanks to this War on Working Class Wages and Benefits, it makes sense nobody wants to go into trucking as a career.
In other words, the free labor market judged a while ago the results of the GOP War on Working Class Wages and Benefits as it pertains to trucking and decided to not supply the market with truckers.
There is an attempt, which hasn't gained much steam yet, to try and shift blame away from the GOP War on Wages and Benefits and toward the lack of trucking schools. Here again, we see the GOP trying to mislead to avoid acknowledging free labor market economics.
Trucking schools are free market enterprises. If there was a demand by workers to learn trucking, trucking schools would pop up everywhere trying to make money teaching people trucking. It's only the lack of anyone wanting to learn to be a trucker because of the GOP War on Wages and Benefits having made trucking unattractive that causes nobody to want to invest in trucking schools.