These two charts tell a story. First, the top .1%.
Next, the top 1%. This chart is only to 2023.
Now what you’ll notice is that the top .1% holds about half the wealth of the top 1%.
It’s like this all thru the economy. Everything is flowing to the top, because that’s how the economy is set up. This is sheer insanity, among other things, especially when combined with AI sucking up jobs, its likely to lead to a demand depression. Most rich people don’t get, but a few are waking up.
CEO BRADLEY TUSK supports Zohran even though he’ll raise his taxes, warns fellow millionaires: ‘If we’re not careful, we’ll end up with Elon and 25 trillionaires and unemployment at 19% – that just means the French Revolution.” pic.twitter.com/VeZCCgTRiD
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) November 6, 2025
Meanwhile Trump just went to the Supreme Court to not pay for SNAP food aid. “Starve, peons!” History tells us that food riots are the greatest danger to rulers and it doesn’t take long for them to happen.
As I said before, there is only ONE issue now. Cost of living. People keep telling me Zohran style policies can’t win outside of NYC. Well…
And the Republicans have a shutdown going to make health care even more unaffordable.
Crazed.
Things are going to start changing politically now, and over the next few years. This is the change, which I said decades ago would start in the mid 2020s. Again, it’s here now, though there’s a lot of slogging to go. It’s not a sure win, of course. Neoliberals or fascists may win (more likely fascists), but really the two main options are left wing populism or right (fake) wing populism. The generational pivot is here, and the “we can’t take it any more, you’ve destroyed the middle and working class” is here.
Oh, and one more pretty chart: the effect of our AI overlords on electricity bills:
What can’t go on, doesn’t. There’s not enough middle class wealth left to steal. The US either un-develops or there is a radical change in politics. Either way, politics is going to get a lot more turbulent. There’s a reason why most Trump’s cabinet lives (hides) on military bases now. They know how much they’re hated.
NR
Ian, it looks like the charts are backwards, the top one is about the top 0.1% and the bottom one is about the top 1%.
The article itself is spot on, of course. But I’m not optimistic about things changing for the better. We still have way too many poor people who think that minorities or immigrants are the cause of their problems, and are angry at them instead of the rich. At least in America, maybe it’s different in other countries. I hope it is.
bruce wilder
Practically every national election since 2006 — at least twenty years! — has been a “throw the bums out” poll and yet no change in policy takes place. And, practically, no credible Great Socialist Hope emerges nor a Great Man on Horseback. Mamdani is scarcely believable as the first and Trump is not the latter.
I give the Trump Administration some marginal credit for recognizing in their cracked, corrupt, thoroughly incompetent way that this is a major crisis on multiple economic, geopolitical fronts.
It worries me a lot that the Democratic Party appears to be in complete denial regarding the polycrisis. The Democrats are up to bat next, ready or not. And, after crying themselves hoarse calling Trump a fascist, they are bringing a Party that draws its personnel from the ranks of the Security State. (NOT the DSA, sorry kids — Mamdani is false hope and disinformation)
The technology of control and repression is running ahead of the technology of decentralization and “They” appear confident that they can ride the whirlwind.
Eric Anderson
It’s a crisis of capitalism’s fundamental flaw. The *invisible hand* does not reflect “aggregate consumer sentiment.” As Nathan Tankus shrewdly observes, here: https://www.crisesnotes.com/what-connects-conventional-wisdom-processors-ai-and-the-second-trump-administrations-constitutional-crisis-part-one/
Rather, the market is a “conventional wisdom processor” that “will respond to new information but only when filtered through the predilections and beliefs of the central daily participants in these markets.”
And, as such, ” if new information is not valued by these participants—or at least the average participant expects the average participant not to value that information—it will not impact those markets. An obvious example would be a new scientific report suggesting that climate change was accelerating faster than previously expected.”
Think deeply about this observation and the current political fallout.
Then think about Upton Sinclair’s famous quote: “”It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Ask yourself, then: What is the elite’s conventional wisdom, versus, you know, the rest of us peons’ conventional wisdom.
The yawning chasm between the two is the hole we’re all falling into.
Purple Library Guy
bruce wilder,
What exactly is it about Mamdani that bothers you? He’s not a full-on socialist, but he is clear about who the enemy is and every position he has is an improvement on the status quo, and many are the kind of reform that make it easier to do more reforms. I don’t see any way to spin him as a lesser evil, at worst he’s a good less good than other possible goods. So what specifically is the problem?
Dan Lynch
Ian said “there is only ONE issue now. Cost of living. “
Anyone who buys groceries or health care or housing is feeling the pain of inflation in those areas. But historically inflation, by itself, has rarely led to political unrest. Iran, Russia, Turkey, and numerous Latin American countries have had bouts of prolonged, high inflation. It led to grumbling, yes, but rarely led to revolution. Especially if the politicians can blame it on someone else — “it’s America’s fault for sanctioning us,” or if everyone is in it together.
IMHO our current bout of inflation is due in large part to laizzez faire capitalism allowing monopolies to run amok and allowing banks to make housing loans for whatever the market will bear, and we’re not in it together because we have extreme economic inequality. Economic inequality does tend to lead to unrest, and IMHO that is THE ONE ISSUE and has been for sometime.
However, no political movement in the U.S. is focusing on inequality, monopolies, or laissez faire capitalism. Occupy Wall Street flirted with it but they ended up being co-oped by the Democratic party and it seems like most of the people who used to be OWS now have Trump Derangement Syndrome — that everything is Trump’s fault, he’s the new Hitler, we must oppose everything Trump does, and if only Trump goes away we’ll live happily ever after. Sucky though Trump may be, I feel that negative energy directed against one politician is not very helpful.
Feral Finster
@Dan Lynch: ‘zackly. Do we see bread riots in, say, Brazil? On a scale which threatens the state?
I think it was Jay Gould who famously said that he could always hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
spud
i have repeatedly said when you look at graphs like the one from FRED or Picketty, look at the year the explosion of wealth concentration, its 1993.
i have always looked at fascism as the elevation of capital over sovereignty, civil society and labor. and those were the results of bill clinton hideous disastrous polices.
there is no way out of road he set us down. reagan and the supreme court were pickers compared to clinton.
bill clinton destroyed the new deal/fair deal, and Gatt, and here we are.
“New Deal fears of bigness and private concentrations of power were given further ideological ammunition later in the 1930s by fascists abroad. As Roosevelt put it to Congress when announcing a far-reaching assault on monopolies in 1938: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism.” In 1947, Patman even commissioned experts to publish a book titled Fascism in Action, noting that fascism as a political system was the combination of extreme nationalism and monopoly power, a “dictatorship of big business.”
“it was Bill Clinton who signed the death certificate for the Glass-Stegall Act which led directly to the economic collapse in 2007-08. It was Clinton who ended our long-established welfare system. It was Clinton who enabled great increases in incarceration rates. It was Clinton who led the Democratic party to abandon working Americans in favor of Wall Street”
“In the overall picture, it was Clinton, Obama, and the Wall Street friendly Democratic National “Leadership” that elected Donald Trump. ”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/04/01/magazine/costs-secretive-wealth-defense-industry-shell-companies-offshore-tax-havens-empty-luxury-condos/
“Researchers estimate that some 10 to 12 percent of the world’s wealth — trillions of dollars — is now hidden through a combination of tax-haven secrecy jurisdictions, shell companies, opaque trusts, and other mechanisms. The exact amount of hidden wealth is difficult to measure because . . . it is hidden. At the low end, researchers estimated in 2014 that the number was 8 percent of the world’s private wealth, or more than $7.6 trillion. At the high end, the Tax Justice Network estimates between $24 trillion and $36 trillion is sequestered globally. ”
—–
“Clinton stripped antitrust out of the Democratic platform; it was the first time a reference to monopoly power was not in the platform since 1880. Globalization, deregulation, and balanced budgets would animate Clinton’s political economy, with high-tech and finance leading the way.
From telecommunications to media to oil to banking to trade, Clinton administration officials—believing that technology and market forces alone would disrupt monopolies—ended up massively concentrating power in the corporate sector. They did this through active policy, repealing Glass-Steagall, expanding trade through NAFTA, and welcoming China’s entrance into the global-trading order via the World Trade Organization.
Starting in 1998 and continuing to this day, the mortality rate among white Americans, specifically those without a high school-degree, has been on the rise—leaving them scared and alienated.
Old problems also reemerged. Financial crises unseen since the 1920s began breaking out across the world, from Mexico to East Asia, prompted by “hot-money” flows. Deflation, rather than inflation, and a capital glut, rather than a capital shortage, started to concern policymakers. And it turns out, according to a McKinsey study, that a disproportionately large amount of the productivity gains from the remarkable computerization of the economy were the result of just one company: Walmart, the new A&P. The mega store’s economic influence “reached levels not seen by a single company since the 19th-century.” The gains of the 1990s, it turns out, were not structural, but illusory. Early in Bush’s term, the stock-market bubble burst and wages collapsed. A few years later, a global banking crisis, induced by a financial sector that had steadily gained power for 40 years, erupted. Concentration of power in the private sector, it turned out, had its downsides. ”
https://x.com/JeanJacquesDes7/status/1938632067778318522?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1938632067778318522%7Ctwgr%5Ebd2c1923a3694dbd4702cdccf28669d751c913ca%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2025%2F06%2Flinks-6-29-2025.html
Ahmed Fares
As this Washington Post article shows, electricity prices are rising, but it’s not due to AI data centers. In fact, AI data centers lower the cost of electricity.
[selected quotes]
Over the past few months, Americans have looked aghast at their rising electricity bills — in New Jersey, for example, prices have risen 19 percent just in the last year — and found one clear scapegoat: data centers. As these energy-sucking operations proliferate, the thinking goes, they require more and more electricity, pushing prices up for everyone from big companies to small households.
The argument has become a political flash point. In Virginia, the Democratic candidate for governor, Abigail Spanberger, has said she will push data centers “to pay their own way and their fair share.” Last week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) wrote on X: “These data centers are massive electricity hogs. … Somebody has to pay for it all — and don’t believe any politician who says it won’t ultimately be you.”
But a new study from researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the consulting group Brattle suggests that, counterintuitively, more electricity demand can actually lower prices. Between 2019 and 2024, the researchers calculated, states with spikes in electricity demand saw lower prices overall. Instead, they found that the biggest factors behind rising rates were the cost of poles, wires and other electrical equipment — as well as the cost of safeguarding that infrastructure against future disasters.
That runs counter to traditional wisdom. Economics 101 teaches students that if demand rises, prices tend to go up. But electricity isn’t like any other economic market. Most of the costs in the system aren’t from pushing electrons through the grid, or what experts call variable costs. Instead, the largest costs are fixed costs — that is, maintaining the massive system of poles and wires that keeps electricity flowing. That system is getting old and is under increasing pressures from wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather.
More power customers, therefore, means more ways to divvy up those fixed costs.
[end quotes]
https://archive.is/20251026143354/https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/10/25/data-centers-electricity-prices-rise/
Dan Kelly
You better keep pushing him.
Mamdani isn’t going to do any of these things out of the goodness of his heart. He is very much a crafted caricature somewhat in the mold of AOCIA – to steal Fiorella Isabel’s nickname for Ocasio-Cortez. In fact, Mamdani grew up richer and more privileged than AOCIA.
Yes, I know, not every fighter for the oppressed need come from ‘rags’ or even a working class background themselves.
But just be honest about it.
It should be said here that Mamdani’s wife supported the takfiris and the Zionist-inspired regime-change operation in Syria.
Mamdani has said he doesn’t support Hamas which should be a huge red flag immediately as they are the only entity that hasn’t/won’t sell out the Palestinians Mamdani claims to care about.
The fact that Mamdani is keeping Tisch as head of the NYPD also speaks volumes and again goes right to the heart of the matter as Tisch is uber-Zionist galore and the NYPD is notorious among many US police for using brutal dehumanizing ‘Israeli’ tactics on US citizens.
Free buses are nice and would be a big help to so many, and of course free healthcare would be a godsend for poor and low and middle class people of all stripes.
Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen anyway, it seems like there is more talk around these issues than any concrete plans to acheive them and of course there is going to be all manner of pushback but then there isn’t much evidence at all that Mamdani is really fighting for this to any serious degree.
Every time he meets with some group of rich Zionists his positions – which let’s be honest aren’t exactly ‘hard left’ or anything approaching it to begin with – his positional speak seems to slowly inch away from a true grit fighting position.
To end with where I began, and to state the obvious for anyone even nominally leftist:
Push him. Keep pushing and see how he responds and then you can decide if he is even worth an ounce of your precious time.
Because he’s not going to do anything on his own any more than Obama was.
—
https://inv.nadeko.net/84hqzyJtPLk?t=88
https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=rDWiBHYgBRM
—
Has Kshama Sawant reached out to Mamdani? I know he hasn’t reached out to her but it wouldn’t hurt to try to contact someone in the Mamdani machine.
The sooner he is either outright exposed – or starts truly fighting for the oppressed – the sooner the better, right?
—
You can also just blame Bill Clinton for everything.
Clinton should be before a firing squad but good god spud. Do you have anything else to say?
bruce wilder
@PLP
RE: Mamdani
My point was not about who Mamdani is — I personally want him to be successful as a socialist. NYC is a hugely challenging space and we will see. I will hope.
My point was about how he is being used in the media to present a double brand message. Part of the message is to discredit him as the caricature of a “communist” for the rubes of the right. Part of the message is to legitimate the Democratic Party as a party of the left, eager to lead a populist revolt on behalf of the working class.
The second message is key to “the lesser evil” claims of the Democratic Party. AOC and The Squad were used previously in the same way. The Squad was at most, what? 4 Congress critters who did not even mostly vote together or do anything to oppose Pelosi. Meanwhile, the main transformation of the Democratic Caucus was drawing a dozen or more new Members from police, military and intelligence agency backgrounds. The latter was working a transformation in the composition of the caucus with implications for policy and solidifying the coalition with shadowed interests. Mamdani was elected on the same day as security state Democratic governors in Virginia and New Jersey. And it was a brand celebration — the Party on a roll!
Carborundum
Those estimates of wealth concentration are almost certainly too conservative (i.e., real wealth will be more concentrated). Income inequality estimates, which are easier to produce, look to me to be much too close to those wealth estimates for them to be accurate. (It is common for official statistics to understate wealth inequality – as an example, StatCan estimates of wealth concentration derived from the Survey of Financial Security are markedly lower than those generated by the PBO.)
Stormcrow
Ian Welsh wrote …
As I’m nearly certain you already know, the shock that finally broke the Romanov dynasty and the old Imperial system both together, was food riots in Saint Petersburg in early February 1917.
SOP for this situation was long established policy: if the gendarmes can’t shift the crowd, then you simply call in the Cossacks.
They were the “gendarmes of last resort”. Before the 1917 food riots, that had always worked.
But by that late in the war, they’d been tapped for draftees just like every other conceivable pool of manpower in the Russian Empire. And a lot of them had been exposed to the lethally shambolic chaos that was utterly typical of logistics and battle management by senior Imperial officers, saving only Alexei Brusilov. They’d been stuffed into the meatgrinder with absolutely nothing whatsoever to show for it except lots of fresh mass graves, and hopeless cripples who were entirely too obvious.
So, unbeknownst to anybody high enough in the Imperial socioeconomic pyramid to matter, they were fed up.
Consequently, this time they refused to draw their sabers.
And that was that. The total collapse of the Czarist government followed in less than a month.
And don’t even get me started about China, prior to 1911.
DMC
As Mussolini said: Fascism is nothing but Corpratism.
Purple Library Guy
bruce wilder: Ah, I see. Yeah, I get your point there.
mago
Right on Dan Kelly. I have to change my mind these days as much as a teenager changes her clothes. I recently thought the PTB would find a way to eliminate Mamdani, but nope, likely he’s just another establishment tool.
Hey spud, I’m old enough to have been politically aware during the Clinton years and took note of the shitty things he did, and I’m not tal king about cigars inserted in Monica’s private parts or blue dress stains.
The catalog as you partially highlighted was extensive, and the effects reverberate through the decades. However, I still contend that St. Ronnie got the ball rolling, and here we are today neck deep in doo doo, close to drowning.
Ai yi yi. Living in a sunset world I hear wolves howling in the distance.
Mark Level
I’ll respectfully disagree with a Dan Lynch claim based on my own experience. I participated in the Oakland area Occupy for several months until Obama, with the help of the City government, violently shut it down. (The mayor at the time was somebody named Jean Quan who had supposedly been a Maoist when younger and attending UC Berkeley. She was entirely compromised and willing to use police violence to crush Occupy.) People like the great Boots Riley (distinguished not just in the music industry, but in film as well, see 2018’s “Sorry to Bother You”, which started as an examination of precarity and veered into weird sci-fi.) were among the participants. We shut down the Port of Oakland for at least a day, and nobody was lining up to sell out or surrender . . .
I haven’t given up on Mamdami for now, will heartily endorse Dan Kelly’s “You better keep pushing him.” Supposedly he has NOT immediately dissolved his Coalition like Obama did, which is a helpful sign. We will see. On the other hand, his nonsense about “Hope” seems straight adopted from Obama the Traitor-Oligarch-Sellout which is concerning.
Somebody on here attacked those of us who refuse to blindly surrender our critical thinking skills as members of “the Judean People’s Liberation Front” or some such schismatic nonsense. Since the person some years back repeatedly enthusiastically endorsed Justin Trudeau’s illegal (he lost in Court) stealing of money from some leaders of “the Trucker Protests”, openly endorsing the kind of theft that Germany does to, say, pro-Palestine protesters or those who admit that Ukraine was never going to win its (Nazi/ Banderist) Crusade against Russia, I cannot be insulted by taunts from someone who is a Fascist Fellow-Traveler, but who I expect would bray angrily if Trump starts to do the same thing here. (Which some members of his Admin have demanded.) I would do so as well, but at least I don’t have a Team between the Zionist-Oligarch duopoly and despise them all equally.
Finally, I think Mamdami if he is a realist will know better than to surrender. There are lots of Zionists and confused “Commie” haters who literally want to kill, deport or permanently jail him for Thought Crime. I can’t believe that he is (yet) a Sell-Out on the level of AOC, who was always a CIA Op. since she worked in Ted Kennedy’s office back in the day. On the other hand, again, Chris Hedges’ warning about believing in “hope” remains relevant. Even in the Pandora’s Box tale, the sophisticated take is that Hope is as big a Curse as all the other messes inside that box, and not a palliative.
Genuine or not? Time will tell. If not, we can look forward to a near-future of food riots, Civil War, etc. The bad times are nigh, he is a politician so he’s likely to betray us, but let’s wait until it’s explicit in case we’re wrong.
KT Chong
The problem is not the system. It is the culture.
Specifically, White Christianity.
KT Chong
This one is about to blow up.
A TikToker, Nikalie Monroe (@nikalie.monroe), has been conducting a social experiment that is still ongoing. Since last week, she has called over 40 houses of worship and posed as a desperate mother with a crying two-month-old baby who has not been fed since the previous night (with pre-recorded crying baby audio playing in the background during the calls). She begged not for money, but for baby formula to feed her baby.
Here were the results when I last checked:
Total calls: 40 religious organizations so far (i.e., churches, a mosque, a temple, and a Satanic Temple)
• 37 Christian churches called: 5 yes — 32 no
• 5 offered immediate help (all small or community-focused):
• 2 of the 5: Black Baptist churches (e.g., East Somerset Baptist, Louisville, KY)
• 1 of the 5: Appalachian small rural church (i.e., Heritage Hope Church of God, Somerset, KY)
• 2 of the 5: Catholic parishes serving Latino communities (e.g., Our Lady of Fatima, Alcoa, TN)
• 32 refused or redirected without action → All 32 were white-led churches (mostly Baptist, evangelical, megachurches, and LDS)
• Only 1 mosque called (i.e., Islamic Center of Charlotte, NC): Immediate yes — offered to deliver formula and more to her, no questions about her faith
• Only 1 Buddhist temple called (Won Buddhism Temple, Chapel Hill, NC): Immediate yes — offered further community support, no questions about her faith
• Only 1 Satanic Temple called (suggested by her follower): Immediate yes — offered baby formula and additional food aid
Overall tally: 8 yes, 32 no
Links to Nikalie Monroe at:
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nikalie.monroe
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NikalieMonroe
Only one mainstream news has picked it up so far — but her experiments are about to go viral and international:
Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/nikalie-monroe-church-call-experiment-starving-child-poverty-snap-benefits-11022815
KT Chong
There was supposed to be one more yes, but I missed/could not find that video.
spud
Dan Kelly,
if you want to address and fix a problem, you have to know what it is, and its causes.
so many think the fix is to just tax them. but you can’t. you have to know how this mess was created.
jimmy dore has a video out today of thousands screaming tax them.
but you can’t just tax them, what i put up is just partial empirical evidence of how just so thorough those hideous disastrous polices, protect the parasites from taxation and regulation as they feed till we all die.
mago,
reagan was no better, or worse than jimmy carter, a truly stupid ignorant man, that paved the way for reagan, just as clinton and obama paved the way for trump.
trump won the 2016 gop nomination by calling out by name those who did what to whom in previous gop regimes.
chris hedges understands, he says time after time, it was all bill clinton.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xEyHZipNBM
Bill Clinton Sold Out the Working Class | Chris Hedges
thomas frank ran into the same problems i am addressing,
https://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/
By Thomas Frank
“Evaluating Clinton’s presidency as heroic is no longer a given, however. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the corporate scandals of the Enron period, and the collapse of the real estate racket, our view of the prosperous Nineties has changed quite a bit.
Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton’s administration that deregulated derivatives, that deregulated telecom, and that put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave.
He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit.
Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society.
He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him. If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious.”
if you want to win back the working class, just take a look at how trump wrestled the GOP away from the country club republicans in 2016, he named names.
but the difference between trump and what we want and need, is another new deal.
it cannot happen though. unless we are willing to reverse every single hideous and disastrous policy that bill clinton set in stone.
mago
@spud. Yes, I know the peanut farmer who lusted, aka Jimmy Carter—a fledgling neocon—was an aw shucks scammer who smoothed the way for Raygun, and he had his predecessors as well.
It’s a corrupt lineage stretching back to St George Never Tell a Lie Washington and beyond.
Whatcha gonna do?
Step right up,
Bend right over
Gonna give you the business. . .
Tom Waits got it right almost five decades ago.
We’ve been reamed for a long long time, and it ain’t over yet . . .
mago
That Fat Lady?
She ain’t never gonna sing.
spud
mago
we have been here before. this is nothing new except, we were so thoroughly stripped of our abilities and wealth this time, that i believe it cannot be reversed. that’s how thorough the job was done from 1993-2016.
many people blame the founders, the constitution etc.
but as i said, we have been here before. Lincoln stripped the oligarchs not only in the south, but the north. his green back dollars, stripped the those who own the gold write the rules. and they most likely they were behind is murder.
Lincoln proved what the gold standard really was.
the oligarchs were then beaten again from 1933-1993.
so real weaknesses can be exposed in every system imaginable.
so trump is just finishing off what bill clinton and obama did not.
what comes next is anyone guess.
but that system whatever it is, will be full of weaknesses, absurdities, and contradictions. just like all systems so far.
Eric Anderson
It’s like I said gang … we’ll know soon enough. Mamdani either goes up, and takes the crowd with him, or he’s done.
Shumer’s seat looks ripe.
Ian Welsh
Carborundum,
100% agree on understatement. And when you consider how bad the numbers are even when under-counted?
All economic stats right now are manipulated. I don’t trust inflation stats at all, and haven’t for years and I have deep doubts about a lot of unemployment numbers as well. GDP is getting to the point of almost being worthless, even when adjusted on a PPP basis.
Bill H.
It matters, I think, that most of the wealth held by the ultra rich is fake money, created by the Fed out of thin air (“quantitative easing”), and put into the stock market because government and commercial bonds were paying miniscule interest at the dictates of the Fed, which created the fake money to begin with.
What happens when that fake money blows up and the stock market, where all that super wealth resides, goes into the crapper? Somehow, the filthy rich will make the poor people pay the price.
spud
Bill H.
agreed, its fake money. and the GDP is not our number, it belongs to the rich, they get almost all of it.
the real value of the stock markets? look at the numbers pre 1993 to give you a idea of their real value.
back then a lot of production was still in america, as well as canada.
today’s value is based on a paper only bubble started in 1993. nothing really backs that paper, no production, no middle class to speak of, a failing demand economy.
paper backed by nothing can’t take even a slight wind, and down it goes. that is why untold trillions of dollars since 2008 has been thrown at the markets, and things get even sillier, just like the pictures of parasites standing outside the markets in new york waiting to hear today’s rise in the markets in 1929, as the surrounding economy collapsed.
as far as inflation numbers go, if you do not need to eat, have a roof over your head, health care, or just about any insurance, a car, heat and electricity etc. inflation is quite tame.
that right there tells you how bad inflation really is.
Joan
I support Mamdani’s platform, even free access to buses, which I normally am against. The reason I’ve been against it in the past is because I didn’t trust the implementors of these programs to have a nuanced plan regarding extremely stinky people and people wilding out on the bus, whether from drugs or a mental breakdown.
I live in the US, without a car, in a place where that is inconvenient. We are about 3 hrs from the Canadian border, so very cold winters with lots of snow. I’ve been on multiple buses where people stank so badly I started getting asthma (and I don’t have asthma). I’ve also been on a bus where a man started freaking out. This alarmed me and I felt unsafe. I ended up getting off the bus at the next stop and figuring it out from there, which was inconvenient in winter.
I hope Mamdani’s people have some social workers on staff to anticipate the downsides of completely free buses and address them. Otherwise regular people will stop riding. For someone who can afford other options, it often takes only one bad experience and they swear it off. Overall I trust him to be intelligent and I hope he succeeds.
NGG
As I tell some of my friends in discussing this exact state of affairs. Both political parties have been legislating for the rich —- just in varying degrees. Obviously most folks are fed up with this. The question is — who, what, when, where, how this will change?
Failed Scholar
@Joan
I sympathize with your public transit experience, I’ve pretty much had the exact same experience (except with lunatics screaming at me in my case) that, for a long while I would rather walk 45 minutes in -20°C instead of take the bus. Eventually I began enjoying the ride again, but that distaste after events like that sticks a long time.
I don’t support transit being free, but something like a nominal charge for everyone ($1 a trip?) would be a lot better for most people and would serve as a way to keep track of how popular routes are for the transit commissions.
Purple Library Guy
That’s a real issue. On the other hand, my understanding is that one reason Mamdani wants to go with completely free is to speed up the service by skipping the whole fare-collecting thing. Apparently the buses in NY are a tad slow.