• gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 hours ago

    So we the people are giving them (allegedly) $1000 instead of the multiple thousands that they could have produced for the economy.

    sigh. the world is significantly more complicated than that


    The people are dissatisfied economically, and that’s why they voted for Trump.

    So, what determines people’s income? Wages on the free labor market are determined through supply and demand.

    When there’s a lot of supply of labor, i.e when there’s many people who could work in the country, high supply lowers prices. Prices for labor are also called wages. High number of people in the country --> lower wages. That’s where the “immigrants are taking our jobs” saying comes from. The point is not only that they’re taking jobs, but also that wages drop if there’s more supply in labor power.

    (What these republican jackasses forget to mention is that this also affects the birth rate. A lower birth rate is good for the people because it means less supply of labor power --> higher wages in the future. Yet the republicans are consistently for a higher birth rate, which makes their whole point that they actually care about the economic situation of the people inconsistent.)

    What these republican jackasses also forget to mention is that it’s not only about the supply of labor, but also the demand of labor. Higher demand means higher wages, and lower demand means lower wages.

    Now, if you’ve ever built a house you will know that the vast majority of labor requirement goes into building the house, not maintaining it. The same is true for the economy. The economy grew rapidly in the last 200 years mostly because of technological inventions, which lead to a lot of real growth in the world and that created a large demand for human labor, which made wages rise high, which is why people could live comfortably in the 1960s on a single wage income per family.

    The economy slowed down growth a lot in the last decades (+0.5% annually in 2019 compared to +3% in 1990) so that reduces the demand for human labor drastically. That’s why people earn less today than last century. If the republicans were honest, they’d recognize that fact, and they would respond by saying “ok, the free labor market doesn’t pay enough wages anymore to feed the people, so we need to help the people by giving them a universal basic income, financed by taxing the rich”. That would do significantly more to help the people than deporting immigrants, by the way, it would help at least 10x as much. That the republicans completely ignore this and don’t even speak about it shows that they are dishonest and do not have the people’s best interest at heart.