Jon may be the world’s best interviewer right now. The Feds solution for inflation is simply to hurt workers. Jon says that’s wrong while economist Larry Summers twists his imaginary evil mustache on tv. Larry thinks he has Jon regarding Apples profits when Jon slays him on TV. Should be illegal.
If you don’t have the time then just watch 1 minute from mark 6:00 to 7:00 or read the write up below from the balanced Daily Kos.
Jon Stewart goes head-to-head with economist Larry Summers over corporate greed and inflation
The mainstream belief among modern capitalists is that too many people working means a tighter employment market, making it harder for employers to fire and replace workers, meaning labor has more bargaining power, which in turn means rising wages....m.dailykos.com
The mainstream belief among modern capitalists is that too many people working means a tighter employment market, making it harder for employers to fire and replace workers, meaning labor has more bargaining power, which in turn means rising wages. These rising wages mean rising demand, and therefore rising inflation. The fact that Americans’ wages have not kept pace with the inflation rate should be a red flag to these economists—but why think too hard? It is a profoundly myopic, self-serving, and ultimately inhumane view of an economy that disregards facts in service of being able to grow profits on the backs of the majority of humans living on the planet. This view is very quickly parroted throughout the traditional media landscape where most “experts” brought on represent the wealthiest one percent of our country, and they would like to continue making larger profits.
Stewart reminds Summers that our continued lack of success in having an economy that serves the majority of Americans and not simply people Larry Summers has in his contact list is because elected officials have deferred to people like Larry Summers who cannot see how terribly self-involved his concept of economics is. “And if you look at the recovery in the pandemic versus the recovery from 2008, when you stimulated the economy at the demand level, jobs had plunged in the pandemic and then they shot back up. The recovery in 2009 was painstaking, but the stock market did great. So our fiscal policy and our monetary policy has always been on the side of corporate easing.”
The very easy-to-understand problem here is that Summers is openly promoting the loss of 2 to 10 million jobs in order to loosen up the labor market for the richest employers. There is no shortage of data and studies that show that Black and brown people are the last to be hired, the first to fired, and the people Summers is suggesting take a hit for the corporations are going to be predominantly Black and brown. You know what a bad policy for progressives is? Firing the people who are being hurt the most by corporate greed.
Jon Stewart, instead of calling Mr. Summers a quack, tries once again to get Summers to interact with the facts, “But what you're not addressing is not all of inflation was stimulus. The tools that we have, though, are basically saying to somebody, everyone's paying more for gas and groceries and that's really hard. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to throw 10 million of them out of work. So that we all don't have to share that burden. Why aren't we attacking corporate profit in any way? Because that's been estimated to be 30% of inflation, 40% of inflation?”
What that fucking dunce Liebowitz knows about economics and monetary policy wouldn't fill the back of a matchbook.
Murica has been painted into a fiscal corner through massive idiotic gubmint spending and zero interest rates.
Xiden's inflation has made the zero-interest bonds, issued since the regime of his mulatto mental midget boss starting back in '09, (the bonds that SVB and A LOT of banks are holding the bag for) practically worthless.
Where that pious dope is right is that this is largely the fault of The Fed and its worthless fiat commercial script....But he's totally full of shit on virtually every other avenue of attack.
