An Open Market on Economics

[Friday]

well maybe if they went to Capitalism camp and learned how to stop being lazy

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

[beatbandito]

Minimum detail version for the public boards:

A lot of companies seem to know they're currently too overloaded to check every claim and are abusing that, from what I've seen first hand. Worsening the issue even further.

[Mongrel]

[Büge]

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Oil briefly went negative today. Specifically, Western Canadian Select.

[Büge]

[Thad]

Come next week, Bernie Sanders is the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. And he's already going straight to budget reconciliation because trying to get ten Republicans onboard with a Democratic budget is a gigantic waste of time.

I think we should think about how we use reconciliation in two ways. And it’s still not clear to me whether the two ways end up being in one piece of legislation or two. One is, dealing with the immediate crisis. Children in America are hungry. People are sleeping on the street. People are facing eviction. People have no health care in the middle of a pandemic. That is the immediate crisis of today, and it must be addressed.

But, there is also a systemic crisis that has been brewing for years that must be addressed. … What we’ve got to do is create millions of good-paying jobs, and that means clearly, as the president-elect has indicated, rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, our roads and bridges. And I would add affordable housing to that, as well.

But it also means creating millions of jobs by transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels to energy efficiency and retrofitting homes and buildings throughout this country, and moving to sustainable forms of energy, and creating jobs in health care. If this crisis has told us anything, it’s that we don’t have enough doctors, we don’t have enough nurses and other health care personnel. We have to build a primary health care system which is now in very, very poor shape.

So, short-term, we know what the crises are. People are desperate. … They’re worried about getting evicted. They’re worried about not being able to go to the doctor.

Second of all, we have structural problems that have to be addressed as well, to get the economy to work for working families.

So that's a start. Course, he's still going to have to pass something that's palatable to 50 Senate Democrats plus Biden and Harris, so those are some obvious constraints. And the next question is about Medicare-for-all, which he acknowledges ain't gonna happen under Biden but hopefully we can take a couple steps closer to it. And lastly, the interviewer asks him about cutting defense spending and he says he wants to but that it's (understandably) not his top priority right now.

[Thad]

I...think our relief payment from the IRS will be just about enough to...send back to the IRS to pay our taxes?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I appreciate effectively not having to pay any taxes this year, but man, I'm not sure I could ask for a clearer demonstration of how absurd and unnecessarily convoluted our tax system is.

[Metal Slime]

No ethical consumption under capitalism and all, but shit Amazon. Between this, employees having to relieve themselves in the nearest containers to maintain productivity standards, and everything else, you aren't even trying to hide the malice anymore.

[Brantly B.]

100% perfect DNA match of the template right-wing political blogger. Now that they're all out of a mainstream job I guess they've managed to glom on to the idea of Corporate RealNews.

[Friday]

"an american company"

yeah okay Amazon you're just like a small business owned by mamma Ruth and she is getting on in years and could you please support her local sourced yams

[Thad]

Masnick's on the "she threatened to break up Amazon for criticizing her" train, which is disappointing.

My comment on the article:

I think it's a dumb, nonsensical line -- making snotty tweets to a senator takes no power whatsoever; anybody can do it -- but I think reading it as a threat of retaliation for speech is a bit of a stretch. I don't see how it articulates a position toward Amazon that's any different from the one Warren's been taking for years.

[pacobird]

the nicest thing i can say about amazon is that they get out of paying taxes by investing profits back in the company, as opposed to, say, apple, which gets out of paying taxes by moving all its money to ireland

[Mongrel]

Axios: Once a fringe theory, "greedflation" gets its due