America: *rapidly turns into a dystopian nightmare, committing rampant human rights abuses and starting internation trade wars with sworn allies, then blames Europe*
Britain: *self implodes in a Brexit shitstorm of its own making with no end in sight, then blames Europe*
JK Rowling is at it again with her utter shite against Scottish nationalism.
She was able to selectively crop tweets that she believes paint ‘Scottish’ nationalists in an evil light.
Ethnic nationalism is abhorrent. Everyone knows this, but this user doesn’t actually claim to be a Scottish nationalist. They just say they are Scots. As a matter of fact…
One look at the profile though and this ‘Scottish Nationalist’ seems to take pride in flying the Union Jack which is something I can’t imagine a Scottish nationalist doing. Sorry JK, think they are one of yours.
Next up she thinks that’s she got the Yes campaign pinned by selecting tweets from an account called ‘Alba Rising’ who has posted white supremacist and anti-Semitic tweets.
Again…not a Scottish nationalist. Actually someone advocating for Corbyn…rather telling.
In short, JK Rowling tried to attack the Yes campaign over something twitter accounts with about 20 followers posted. And then failed to realise they were on her side.
Of course, if one of her 14 million followers hold any abhorrent views…we wouldn’t automatically assume JK Rowling is a racist, would we?
See also this response;
It gets worse thanks to JK Rowling retweeting Nazis;
I dont think she realizes (or cares) about the harm shes causing because in her mind Scottish nationalists are just as bad as Nazis and so it’s worth it.
JK Rowling is at it again with her utter shite against Scottish nationalism.
She was able to selectively crop tweets that she believes paint ‘Scottish’ nationalists in an evil light.
Ethnic nationalism is abhorrent. Everyone knows this, but this user doesn’t actually claim to be a Scottish nationalist. They just say they are Scots. As a matter of fact…
One look at the profile though and this ‘Scottish Nationalist’ seems to take pride in flying the Union Jack which is something I can’t imagine a Scottish nationalist doing. Sorry JK, think they are one of yours.
Next up she thinks that’s she got the Yes campaign pinned by selecting tweets from an account called ‘Alba Rising’ who has posted white supremacist and anti-Semitic tweets.
Again…not a Scottish nationalist. Actually someone advocating for Corbyn…rather telling.
In short, JK Rowling tried to attack the Yes campaign over something twitter accounts with about 20 followers posted. And then failed to realise they were on her side.
Of course, if one of her 14 million followers hold any abhorrent views…we wouldn’t automatically assume JK Rowling is a racist, would we?
From a macroeconomics standpoint, Bridges is completely accurate.
The problem with most Tories (and many Republicans in the US) is that they either have big business interests at heart or have bought the lie that government is like a business. Government is not a business! Microeconomic principles, even ones that apply to entire industries, don’t apply to governments!
Here’s the fundamental macroecomic model of an economy:
(image from tutor2u)
Notice that the system is circular. The model shows that the economy inherently needs to be balanced. If some households are making hundreds of times the income of other households, they will put the vast majority of that money into savings and investment.
This is bad for the economy.
Some savings and investment is necessary. But too much means the little green arrows are siphoning off vast portions of the peach demand arrow (”purchases of goods and services”). This means that companies are fighting over a smaller and smaller pie. Even if you heavily fund those companies, many will collapse due to lack of demand for their products, unless they become monopolies and the sole practical source of their product. Monopolies are technically illegal in the US, but we have them anyway because of this problem (and a lack of enforcement).
The other way you can damage the demand arrow is by shifting the proportions of the purple income arrow. Most people make money from wages, so if you significantly decrease those relative to dividends, interest, profits, and rent, you’ll harm the majority of households. In turn, this again decreases the peach arrow because many households only need a set amount of a given product in a year. The fewer households that can afford the products, the lower overall demand, because the remaining households won’t buy up the difference.
Households with average levels of income spend far more money than they save, of necessity, and they do so at a relatively steady rate. This is good for the economy.
Households with incredibly high levels of income – millionaires, etc. – save far more than they spend. They tend to make their money off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents – not wages. Therefore, to improve the economy, including increasing tax revenues for the government, two basic steps are urged by almost all macroeconomists:
1. Increase wages, especially at the lowest end. This expands the tax base and drives up demand for basic goods and services, stabilizing the industries necessary to a decent quality of life: agriculture and food production, clothing, housing, education, transportation, etc.
2. Use progressive taxes, in which those who make the most money, particularly off of dividends, interest, profits, and rents, pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes. This allows that money to be spent directly on goods and services or to be redistributed to poor households, who will in turn spend it on goods and services. In both cases, money that would have gone into savings and investment instead goes into demand. This makes businesses more successful and a large number of households more prosperous. Society as a whole benefits from decreased crime, lower health problems, and improved public goods like education, roads, emergency response, infrastructure, etc.
Macroeconomics is the opposite of an individual business. Individual businesses study how to take the most pie for themselves and keep it. Macroeconomists – and governments – study how to make the pie bigger and distribute it in such a way that society as a whole benefits from the growth.
Conservatives: doing economics wrong for the past several decades by deliberately pretending that knowing how to run a business is anything like knowing how to run a government. Being fiscally cautious and being uneducated do not have to go hand in hand. (I’m both, for example.) But the rhetoric for slashing budgets has been laden with errors and ideology since at least the 1930s, and I’m tired of it.
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE MORONS AT THE BACK IN OUR GOVERNMENTS
Or as Paul Wellstone used to say, “We all do better when we all do better.”
Ta dah.
Thank you.
I wish the part about aunts on facebook wasn’t true.
Rush's tumblr archive 