I keep being told it’s because of the Republicans that we can’t have nice things. So what gives in California? We should be overflowing with progressive policies.
I keep being told it’s because of the Republicans that we can’t have nice things. So what gives in California? We should be overflowing with progressive policies.
They are trying. AB 2200 aims at laying the groundwork for universal healthcare. Minimum wage just went up to $16 for everyone and $20 for fast food workers. There are experiments going on in several cities with guaranteed income. But everything comes with a cost, and the state is having budget problems. There have been job losses associated with the wage increases. Employers have begun to get very picky about who they hire for even minimum wage jobs. Hours have been cut.
Even Democrats realize one state can’t offer free stuff without attracting every freeloader in the country. Someone has to pay for the benefits, and if they tax those folks too heavily, they’ll find another place to live. There’s a real limit to how many social programs can be offered before they break the piggy bank.
Your conclusion makes no sense. California can’t afford the policies because states don’t print their money, the federal government does. And California doesn’t get much help from the federal government. So it’s constrained by what it can tax locally.
Those policies would work perfectly and cause no budgetary issues if the federal government paid for them by printing money.
The massive printing of money from 2008 to COVID really not make people realise that? We CAN pay for everything. The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.
The solution of not having enough money is to print more money? I couldn’t figure if you’re serious but apparently you are…
I think @novibe@lemmy.ml is oversimplifying by quite a lot, but not completely off base.
The most condensed explanation I’ve found is by Second Thought: Why The Government Has Infinite Money.
The links in the description are great as well, and answer some common questions and counter-arguments.
New documentary film: Finding the Money (BitTorrent magnet link)
The film barely makes any class analysis, but is otherwise good.
If you want a Marxian economic perspective, I highly recommend Michael Hudson. He dispels a few misconceptions here: The Use and Abuse of MMT
Ah yeah, that’s how Zimbabwe did it, too! 💡
Zimbabwe is not sovereign monetarily. The US is the most monetarily sovereign country in the world. They can literally print trillions and it doesn’t do anything to inflation. It has happened multiple times already!! Like why would people deny reality?
Because its not a solution, it just makes the problem worse. It’ll just create even more money under 100 people can gobble up.
The money exists! It needs to be liberated from wasteful uses such as arms, billionaires or shareholders. We can also print more money, sure, but without first fixing the underlying spending/allocation/hoarding issue, we’d only be feeding the dragon.
He says that, as a state, California can’t afford to do this. Your response is this makes no sense, this would all work if implemented at the federal level.
So even assuming your points are valid, this isn’t an option for California.
Printing money means taxing those that have cash or assets valued directly in the units of the currency being measured. Those who mostly hold other assets (say, for example, the means of production, or land / buildings, or indirect equivalents of those, such as stock) are unaffected. This makes printing money a tax that disproportionately affects the poor.
What the government really needs to do is tax the rich. Many top one percenters of income fight that, and unfortunately despite the democratic principle of one person, one vote, in practice the one percenters find ways to capture the government in many countries (through their lobbying access, control of the media, exploitation of weaknesses of the electoral system such as non-proportional voting and gerrymandering).
Bailing out large enterprises that are valuable to the public is fine, as long as the shareholders don’t get rewarded for investing in a mismanaged but ‘too big to fail’ business (i.e. they lose most of their investment), and the end result is that the public own it, and put in competent management who act in the public interest. Over time, the public could pay forward previous generations investments, and eventually the public would own a huge suite of public services.