"There is no such thing as an economy." - Economist and former Greek Finance Minister @yanisvaroufakis . "Economy comes from the Greek word 'oikos' or family, so economy really means 'how the family is doing'."

We are told, as our Congress is giving away trillions of... 1/18

dollars to the rich, that our country (the richest country in the world) can't afford to help the people as much as other countries have, because we will hurt "the economy". But there IS no one "economy" that is either strong or weak, good or bad. There is only "how the ... 2/18

family is doing".

There are different ways, by necessity, to measure how everyone is doing: the stock market, for one. The value of the dollar. There are unemployment numbers, but those are famously inaccurate. But measuring the working poor is more complicated. You have... 3/18

to look at things like wages vs the cost of living in an area, how many jobs people have to hold, etc.

The worse the working poor are doing, as a group, the easier it is to gauge that group. When they are doing better, they get closer, economically speaking, to the ... 4/18

middle class and we have to look at other measures.

Before the Corona Virus, before the federal government made a decision to close the economy, we were already experiencing the worst inequality in 100 years, thanks to decades of wealthy donors paying off politicians to... 5/18

push tax breaks for themselves while they introduced more cuts, sent jobs to other countries and automation has come on.

In geology, we say that the plates underneath the Earth's surface are always moving, extremely slowly. The big moves, we feel. We call those ... 6/18

earthquakes. And similarly, in the economic system of this country, wealth has been traveling from the bottom to the top for 40 years, but we don't notice it. Then we have a housing crash or the Corona Virus, and the government uses the shock as an excuse to transfer ... 7/18

trillions of dollars in a short period.

These economic earthquakes we notice. Things are already very very unequal. People are struggling, homeless, going hungry, closing their businesses, waiting on insufficient unemployment checks, but our government is giving money... 8/18

to those who don't need it.

If the government had given half that money to the people, we would have spent it back into the economy, giving the system (Which is like a machine, right?) fuel to run. That money travels around the machine, depositing a little here at the... 9/18

supermarket, a little there at the gas station, and a little over here at the clothing store. And almost all of THAT money gets spent back into the economy, minus a fraction of it which goes into the bank accounts of executives.

If the government doubles the amount of... 10/18

money that it gives the people. No, let's say triples the amount of money that it gives the people.... how much do you have saved in your bank account? Thousands? Tens of thousands? More? Most of us do not save that much money. CANNOT save that much money, because our... 11/18

children need a new jacket, or the car is making a funny stuttering sound, or the sink in the bathroom started leaking. We have expenses.

And we know that inflation occurs when we run out of materials or when we reach 100% employment, which we are nowhere close to... 12/18

achieving. So if the government triples the amount of money that it gives us, how much will you save? How much will you have left this time next year? Most of us won't have any of it. We will have spent it back into the economy, giving fuel to the system which we are all... 13/18

a part of.

When the people have more money to spend, the economy, or the family, is happier than when we have less to spend and there is less "fuel" circulating through the machine. Cutting the money we have- cutting wages, cutting government assistance, cutting social... 14/18

security or veteran's benefits- these things don't make our economy stronger at all. They make our economy slower. We should be increasing the money going to people who can't save money, because it can ONLY make our economy stronger. If the government is concerned there... 15/18

is too much money in print, they can tax the people who hoard wealth in investments and long-term accounts- the wealthy. They can stop spending $1.5 trillion per year on war, which is essentially giving money to the very wealthy, only it involves killing thousands of... 16/18

people while doing it, to disguise the fact that you are giving away money.

So if the economy is a measure of how all of us, as a family, are doing, we must always focus on how the lowest people on the economic ladder are doing. The rich are always going to be doing... 17/18

fine, even during the worst crash. They will always have assets to help them. When we focus on the poor, we make the family, as a whole, stronger. 18/18
#EndCorporateRule