How to Eliminate the Rich Without Raising Taxes: Create Inflation

Forty years of non-stop repetition of repug and Wall Street lies have persuaded most people who are not economists that the worst economic fate possible is inflation.

In fact, inflation is the worst economic fate possible only for the filthy rich.

The worst economic fate possible for the rest of us is unemployment. Just look around; it's happening right now.

We have high unemployment (anything above one single person in need of work is too high) and low inflation (when was the last time you got a raise) which is why the filthy rich are getting filthier by the minute and the rest of us are losing ground by the mile.

On top of that, interest rates are so low that other countries are paying us to borrow money from them, which means the U.S. government could borrow $10 trillion tomorrow, create 10 million $50,000 jobs with good benefits and rebuild the country repugs have spent 40 years destroying.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal:

But as Paul Krugman points out today, we’ve had more recent experience with the debate over inflation and deflation, and learned anew that there are distinctive class biases at work in allegedly technocratic monetary policy positions:

Throughout the recent debate over monetary policy there have been apocalyptic warnings about Zimbabwe/Weimar and all that, but also constant invocations of the 1970s. My side of the debate has made a point of explaining why this situation is nothing like the 70s. But ask a different question: how did the 70s get framed as the ultimate bad time? For sure they weren’t good — but the really bad times for ordinary working families were the big recessions, which took place under Reagan, to some extent under Bush I, and above all after the financial crisis….

Think about how weird it is…for people in 2010 or 2011, amid the wreckage, to be saying “Watch out — if we’re not careful this could turn into the seventies!” (cue ominous soundtrack).

But there were some people for whom the 70s really were the worst of times — namely, owners of financial assets.

In other words, how much inflation is considered intolerable remains a question of whose ox gets gored.