How the economy is doing has always been a contentious topic, particularly when friends and family with different politics gather for Thanksgiving dinner. And the question has gotten even thornier this year, with consumer sentiment and polling data about the economy becoming historically de-linked from official measures of economic health like GDP. It’s not our job to tell people how they should feel about the economy, but we can at least add some facts as context to common complaints.
The economy is doing well, exclusively by the metrics the owner class sets.
Their metrics for the economy revolve around them metastasizing their wealth, and no supply side sycophants, that doesn’t mean it’ll lift your little peasant boat.
For context, the Fed considered it to be an emergency that for a short period of time laborers could actually have enough leverage to set terms of employment with their employers, the horror! Their answer was to use their interest rate mechanism to attack that emergency as hard as they could.
They were successful by their own definition of success. The economy is great now, the value of their digital seas of selfish capital were protected at laborer’s expense, and all is right with the rigged capital markets again, according to those same people calling economic inequity a feature rather than a bug at least. The owner class would consider the economy perfect if we’d just work 16 hour days 7 days a week for minimum wage without complaint.
May this economy crater into dust, and cause enough pain that it will never be rebuilt in a similar form to perpetuate greed cruelty generationally. I’ve no hope for it happening near term, the oligarchs have too much control over force and propaganda, but it will one day. Rome fell under the weight of its own greed too.
And Rome didn’t even yet have the technology to abuse that would have allowed their own runaway selfishness and decadence to literally reverse terraform the planet against their own survivability. I’m not superstitious enough to believe in karma, but I’ll admit its a pleasing notion with regards to the growing climate change catastrophe of our own greed and greed enabling making.