Post #4888736 · Elektrine

2026-07-24 09:26 UTC

@GeofCox@climatejustice.social Im all for looking at things from diverse perspectives, less so for making statements that sound like declaration of absolute truth. For certain monetary, tax and economic systems are complex. Clever people get paid lots of money to figure out clever/complex ways to work around 'issues' in the system - generally this is wealthy people/corporates attempting to avoid tax or regulation - which they often achieve. But you could include things like govs using Public Private Partnerships to take finance off balance sheet. This all adds more complexity. It gets increasingly difficult to get a reasonable understanding - and so its hard to counter stuff like repeated government giving a simplified explanation of countries finance being the same as an individuals/households finance to justify austerity. Which was amplified by mainstream media and widely accepted/became a common understanding. /continued

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@dazinism@social.coop 2026-07-24 09:48

@GeofCox@climatejustice.social I remember, shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, many progressive economists screaming about the ridiculousness of considering the finance of countries to be similar to households and implementing austerity. Yet here we are with massively degraded public services and many local authorities teetering on bankruptcy. The path taken after the financial crisis was ideological and sadly, due to the continued capture of government by the wealthy, that path massively favoured the wealthy. Quantitative Easing and a very long period of incredibly low interest rates facilitated accelerated transfer of wealth upwards to the wealthy. Amazingly all the time since 2008 governments kept spending tight when they could have borrowed at incredibly low rates & put it into building a strong economy. Various ideological positions are held as unbreakable (eg. The Fiscal Rules) that hold things back. /cont

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