Please don't say inflation is at a 40-year high without also saying corporate profits are at a 70-year high.

[applegrove]

https://bsky.app/profile/bladeofthes.bsky.social/post/3ldjooggl4c24


(*Note: this is from years ago when inflation was high, it is way down now)

Robert Reich

Memo to the Media:

Please don't say inflation is at a 40-year high without also saying corporate profits are at a 70-year high.

Give the people the full picture.

[Think. Again.]

1. K&R

[subterranean]

2. Better yet, don't say inflation is at a 40-year high, because it isn't.

It hasn't been for more than a year.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

3. Don't lie. Biden tamed inflation and the rate is way down. But prices only come down in deep recessions or depressions

Lotta MAGA gonna be bummed.

[applegrove]

4. It was obviously a post from RR last year. I still think

the comparison is salient. I added a note to the effect inflation is down.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

6. Sorry. I totally missed the Robert Reich byline. And I didn't mean anything personally. . . . nt

[applegrove]

8. I know you well enough to know that.

[Biophilic]

5. A 70 year high! Jesus how fucked up is that?

[Bernardo de La Paz]

7. To Reich's point, wealth & income disparity is a huge distortion on society right now.

But profits are a good thing. Consider the alternative: losses.

The problem is not profits, but profits distribution and sharing. The rich get rich and stay rich because of public infrastructure, public education, public healthcare, and public social security. They also often work hard for their riches, but also they most often have very good luck in terms of timing and being in the right place at the right time in the "right" families.

There are several ways to share the fruits of happy well functioning societies and some ways for when societies devolve. Choose wisely.

A. Good (high) wages.

B. Heavy taxation of the rich.

C. Profit sharing plans.

D. Worker-owned companies and cooperatives. viz Barcelona.

E. Communism, which leads to stagnation and unhappiness.

F. Revolution, which is tragically destructive.

Some mixture of the first four work very well. E and F not so much but when people are pushed too much, shit happens.

Instead we are going to be getting:

X. Kakistocracy (RFinKjr), kleptocracy (El Caudillo de Mar-a-lago), oligarchies (Vivek, Thiel, Vance), punishing wages, social clampdown, and varying degrees of fascism, all for the billionaires benefit.

This is super ironic because the suckers who elected that gang think they elected populists who will lift them up and free them and finally they too can get rich. They are however right about one thing: they elected people who hate almost everyone they hate. The exception is the elites the suckers elected don't hate the elites the suckers hate; they are those elites.

[applegrove]

9. But how much efficiency is a good thing. It is a word CEOs

use to imply profits and value to shareholders. But if refusing a coffee break to your workers, so they can't have a cup of coffee on their way to work any day, makes you efficient so you can give the wealthy stock buybacks. A good thing? The ceo is saying we have nowhere to invest so take your money. Then the rich get into private equity with that money and where does private equity go? Into the housing market and warp that so people can not get into the housing market as it is to expensive. And the person has no coffee and no housing. So how much efficiency is really a good thing? The goal of housing used to be providing a home through the markets. Now the goal is efficiency. Were things really that bad in all the markets including housing when ceos were not high on efficiencies' fumes in say the 1990s? Did the world fall apart?