TED talk: It's the middle class consumers, not the rich who create jobs

[Darth]

The US government can print as much money as it wants. That's the benefit of a free-floating currency, it can print endless amounts of dollar bills, and as long as the speculation on it is good, it is valued. ...

How is that a benefit? It's an invisible tax, every dollar they print lowers the value of dollars in wallets. Worse still, it's a regressive tax. Who is the first recipient of the freshly printed dollars? Banks, who are obviously mighty thankful, second in line is their rich buddies, lobbyists and their politician servants (to keep the tap running). Because the banks are the first recipients they get to spend their dollars before the markets have adjusted to the new amount of cash, they get good bang for their buck. The last recipients don't.

It could, but the way the world market works these days means that injecting any substantial amount of money into the total financial market would fuck over everything. I thought of this when the bailout happened [$700 billion to the banks], wondering "well why didn't they just divvy that money up instead to every single citizen of the US?" Supply vs. Demand. If suddenly every individual in the US was a millionaire, it would drastically increase inflation because everyone would have tons of money and could buy everything they wanted; demand for everything would go up but supply would not have gone up significantly, and when demand goes up against supply, prices increase exponentially. Basically, within a few months, a chicken sandwich at Wendy's, normally costing $5, would instead cost around $5,000.

Right, if they gave $45,000 (14trillion/300million = roughly 45k [bailout was a lot more than 700billion]) to everyone there is inflation (though the policy is progressive rather than regressive) and everyone's money loses it's value. The same exact thing happens if you give the same amount of money to just 5 people, only the inflation hits only after the first few recipients in the chain spend/invest. Either way there is inflation, the difference is when and who loses. The way the bailout went down was the absolute worst way it could have gone, of all the terrible choices they could have made, in typical fashion, they made the very worst.

And the US economy is, despite what S&P [the same people who said that AIG and Goldmann-Sachs were good investment choices right up to their collapse] says, a constant investment-worthy good-speculation choice. Namely that it is a free-market enterprising nation and that it has shown that even in its worst of economic depressions it still can muster up the manpower and resolve to become an industrial superpower [which the turks have never managed to do...funny...when they collapsed, they simply collapsed and in the last several centuries they've never recovered...yet we did so in only three decades...huh] which later becomes a military and commercial superpower.

Can't mention AIG and government-sachs and then claim its a free-market enterprising nation, it's a corporatocracy (also, you meant lehman brothers yeah?)

cast disagree with much of the 2nd or 3rd paragraphs of your 1st post =P