It's refreshing to see John Maynard Keynes pop up from time to time. Whenever I saw a video clip of a rival like the late Milton Friedman, it set off alarm bells in my gut, because he had a way of trying to convince questioners that their concerns were unfounded. It's easy to forget that economics is mostly made up like politics, so I found his adamant defense of various policies (as if they were natural law) grating and even disingenuous.

Where this affected me personally was growing up under Reaganomics, watching Bill Clinton roll back social safety nets under Friedman-driven republican pressure to "control" spending (note that I didn't say "reduce"), then witnessing the abandon of common sense after the Dot Bomb and 9/11 as we entered an us-vs-them black and white view of reality where experienced people like John Kerry were called flip-floppers and discredited through propaganda campaigns.

The COVID-19 pandemic, among other things, finally revealed how disconnected monetary policy is from outcomes. We now live in a world where we witnessed the lowest-paid people die on the front lines feeding us, while people shrilly squealed about the excess of $1400 relief checks. We see how the fight for a $15/hr living wage was eliminated overnight by profit-driven inflation and home prices increasing by 500% or more since 2000. Now half the US and global population lives on basically no money, having no wealth or access to capital to speak of, while a few hundred billionaires own everything, due to the free market abandon of progressive tax rates. I could go on literally forever here, because things have gotten so bad along so many indicators that now everyone can see that the emperor has no clothes.

We could very easily undo all of this today through the democratic process of using our voting power to choose policies which actually help people. The total wealth of US billionaires is $4.5 trillion, about 15% of the national debt. The top 10% owns $95 trillion:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/14/business/economy/wealth-g...

So the money is out there, it's just held in the hands of a small minority of people. Why are we paying the taxes? The national debt is an assured investment that provides those with capital (money) a guaranteed income, while working people barred from capital are the ones paying. In what reality does it make sense for workers to pay people who already have money? Yet this is the basis of our current economic system.

Soo... now what? I highly recommend reading up on Keynes, check out people like Thom Hartmann for an alternative reading of these trends, and avoid broadcast news. Loosely that means to endorse policies which increase the median quality of life, not the average (which is skewed by wealthy outliers). I know that many of you will disagree with my analysis here, but we're past that now. Gen X as a whole has about half the disposable income of Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z have more like 1/4. With the consolidation of most resources and capital under a handful of companies and Congress only aligning with the public's majority vote 10% of the time, we're facing the loss of the American Dream and America itself if geopolitical forces align against the dogmatic policies we cling to.