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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It’s not just about winning, it’s about ideology. Embracing demsoc candidates wouldn’t just be a change in strategy, it would be a change in the party’s core ideology. Ideology is why political parties exist. Political parties are usually based in ideology, that’s why in other democracies there are liberal parties, conservative parties, socialist parties, Libertarian parties, etc. But here in the US we don’t have a system of political ideology plurality, so the two parties that we do have are often fighting internally to determine what the core ideology of the party will be.

    You know why so many Democrats don’t like demsoc candidates? Because they’re not demsocs. They’re social liberals or neoliberals, and they want the Democratic party to remain an ideologically Liberal party.

    If our democracy were more like most every other democracy on the planet, the neoliberals and the demsocs would each have their own party, and they wouldn’t need to be engaged in this constant, zero sum fight for control of one party.





  • “Democrats must be bold and meet this moment,” he said. “This is the urgent work in front of us: to stand up to authoritarianism, to protect care and dignity, and to make life better for the people who count on us.”

    Sure, Democrats, be bold. Meet the moment. Stand up to authoritarianism…then immediately fold, faster than Superman on laundry day. But, I don’t doubt you will succeed at making life better for the people who count on you, who are of course your donors, and other elites and oligarchs.




  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.worldtoA Boring Dystopia@lemmy.worldRemember
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    27 days ago

    No body wants that.

    Somebody must want it, otherwise it wouldn’t exist. And that’s fine. People want what they want, I don’t think it’s mine, or anyone else’s place to tell someone what they can or cannot like or want. But, I hope you understand why it’s hard for some to find the motivation to fight for a society that they don’t particularly like.







  • This really comes down to technocrats vs the people. The technocrats want to double down on neoliberalism because many economists and other experts are telling them it’s the only way. The field of economics, especially in the US is mostly just a cult of free market evangelists. Technocrats like Klein believe in listening to experts, which I would normally strongly agree with, but I just can’t listen to experts who advise that we double down on the same god damn policies that have left so many millions of Americans feeling left behind, desperate, and hopeless. It’s insanity.



  • I didn’t mean to imply that I think what I’m suggesting is possible in the current system. I should have made that more clear. That’s my fault. I understand that what I’m talking about would require significant systemic changes. To you, that might essentially make it impossible, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. People made the existing system, there’s no reason why people couldn’t make a different system.




  • When you print money, it devalues all the existing money because there’s more of it but the extra value it generates hasn’t materialised yet.

    Money doesn’t have value. Money is just a medium of exchange. It can be anything, a pebble, a shell, a small piece of metal, a piece of paper, or, most commonly today, digits in a computer. Things are what have value. Consumer products and services, raw materials, etc. Money is just a stand-in for those things. Simply increasing the amount of digits in the computer isn’t going to suddenly increase prices. What would affect prices is if you transferred a bunch of that newly created money into everyone’s checking accounts, all at once. That would lead to inflation, because, as I already said, if you put money into people’s hands (or checking accounts) they’re going to spend it. This would increase the number of dollars pursuing goods and services, but the amount of goods and services wouldn’t increase right away, so there would be more money relative to the same number of things, and prices would go up. So, just don’t transfer all of the newly created money into people’s checking accounts.

    Like I said, put some of it into an account that can only be used to pay bond holders. You know, the people the US Federal government owes all their money to. That money would trickle out of the Treasury department as the Treasury made payments to bond holders, it wouldn’t just be some big, sudden cash infusion into the broader economy. The same is true of using the money for Federal infrastructure projects.

    I’m not suggesting the Federal government should default on its debt. Not at all. They should pay back bond holders, at interest. All except one: the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be paid back because they’re the ones who create the money, and they can manage the creation of the money so that it doesn’t lead to too high of inflation.


  • All of this is just so stupid, it’s so unnecessary. There’s no reason growth must be correlated with increased debt. The Federal government doesn’t need to borrow money for anything, they create their own money. They don’t need to go to people and say, “hey, lend me some of your dollars so I can pay for the army, or roads and bridges,” they can just make more dollars. The US Federal government is a sovereign currency issuer, they make the money. You wouldn’t need to borrow money from your friend if you had a legal money printer at home that could print an infinite number of dollars.

    But I know, inflation. Yes, if the Federal government made a bunch of money and went around dropping it out of hot air balloons, inflation would go up. When people get money in their hands they tend to want to spend it, this causes increased demand, supply can’t necessarily keep up with the sudden increase in demand and you get inflation. There’s a pretty easy solution to this problem: don’t print a bunch of money and just hand it out to people. Print it, and use it to fund infrastructure projects or public services. Put some of it in an account that can only be used to make payments to bond holders. I know the infrastructure projects would mean money being put into the hands of the people who work on those projects, but I doubt that would increase the overall inflation rate very much, and if it did you could always just pull back on the infrastructure spending when inflation was high and ramp it back up when the inflation rate goes lower.