Economic And Political Apocalypse Is Baked Into Biden-Harris’s Senate-Gated Path Of Business As Usual

 

-by Emorej

Declining Economy And Public Health

Unless there is a massive federal rescue of local governments, and populations dependent on them, quickly after Biden and Harris are sworn in, there will be a perfect storm of rapid economic decline driven mainly by the following:

· More homelessness will hit renters, alongside former homeowners who have been foreclosed upon, and former small business owners who have shut down-- while ownership of real estate (and future rents) will shift even further into a small number of super-rich hands (who are skilled at resisting local government tax increases).
· The increase in homelessness, unemployment and poverty will increase the need for local government services (including those of police and fire departments).
· Most state and local governments, and their employees, will quickly go bankrupt-- as pandemic-deepened revenue decreases, and expense increases, collide with legally and economically constrained borrowing ability.
· Investors who acquire infrastructure from bankrupt local governments (and from bankrupt small businesses) will have no economic incentives to invest in expanding, maintaining or even properly operating that infrastructure for the benefit of people who cannot pay for the services of that infrastructure.
· The healthcare “market,” and especially its “consumers,” which already suffered from the above trends before the pandemic, will continue suffering even more severely until near-universal availability and adoption of vaccine-type solutions (unlikely for at least another year or two), and this suffering will spill over into other markets as people continue to avoid contact with potentially infectious strangers.
· All of the above will, even more than before, (i) increase unemployment, (ii) decrease revenues and profits of most private business, (iii) decrease the tax revenues of all governments, (iv) increase the needs of the populace and the previously mandated obligations of governments, and (v) feed into self-reinforcing feedback loops.

Politics And Procedures

Ensuring occurrence, of the above collapse in the economy and public health, will be Mitch McConnell’s top priority in deploying his Senate veto powers. The only way for Biden-Harris to avoid this blame will be to implement, without the Senate’s consent, major Executive Branch actions including the following:

A. Stop covering up the facts that:

· massive money creation, for the benefit of the investor class, has become routine (and indeed has barely ever been interrupted) over the past 12 years-- as Trump’s Federal Reserve tripled down on the “quantitative easing” (bank and investor bailouts) ramped up by Obama’s Federal Reserve, and
· most of this money has not “trickled down” to 90% of our population because the 90%’s purchasing power has been persistently too low to incentivize investors to invest in employing this 90% to produce more goods or services for this 90% to purchase.

B. Connect the above trillion-dollar dots to admit and explain to voters the facts that:

· taxes don’t “pay for” money creation or for spending by the Federal Reserve or by other arms of the federal government, and
· inflation is caused not by money creation itself, but only by a narrower causation chain: in which, in some economic circumstances, (i) increase in money being spent, (ii) causes increase in demand for particular goods or services, (iii) at times when supply of those same goods or services cannot be quickly increased at similar cost-- by the market or by the government.

C. Increase the purchasing power of the entire population (without most of the “means testing” that becomes largely unnecessary once inflation is demystified) by:

· redirecting the now-routine massive flow of money newly created by the Federal Reserve, and
· exploiting the Treasury Department’s constitutionally-specified power to mint “commemorative” coins, while simultaneously
· increasing the supply of any under-supplied goods and services, (i) primarily, through incentives for private market participants (subject to regulation of unfair competition), and (ii) secondarily, through direct government investment or provision of services (by the federal government or by local governments enabled by flow of the above newly created money).

D. Tattoo the words “market failure” on the forehead of every post-Keynesian economist and, if any of them don’t have pension accounts over-stuffed with bribes from rich ideologues, encourage them to supplement their social security payouts by working as comedians telling jokes with punchlines like:

· “Assume a can-opener,” and
· “That can’t be a $20 bill on the sidewalk because, if it was, then somebody would have already picked it up.”

The joke has been on the 90%, while the investor class has been picking up ever-more dollars from public sidewalks during the last decade-plus, making ever-more obvious the hollowness of the still-ruling ideology of “hard money” (“for little people”).

If Biden-Harris spend even a few months pretending, to still not ‘get’ that this ideology has become a joke, then, without Trump’s personality and pandemic to run against, the Democrats will suffer from the 2024 Presidential election becoming the mother of all anti-incumbent waves.