Man in a Shed: The Middle Classes

Showing posts with label The Middle Classes. Show all posts

Monday, October 17, 2011

The threat to the middle classes (US)

Below is a lecture by Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School - and I think a Democrat , in 2008 on the collapse of the middle classes in the US. Its about an hour I'm afraid. However if you have the time its well worth watching.

Note this is before the full impact of the debt crisis has hit. Whilst things may be different in the UK in some respects I suspect there's a similar story here also.

This is going to be a source of not inconsiderable trouble.

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman