extremely high minimum wages, fixed prices for food, state-sponsored housing, etc.
Ooooooooo scary!
Totally the same thing as literally exterminating entire groups of people based on characteristics they were born with.
In all seriousness though, you should look at what Finland has done regarding "public housing," and how great it has been for them. Spoiler alert, they're actually really nice, and affordable. Because nobody is looking to maximize a profit.
But please, let me know how "Finland is much smaller than the US, therefore impossible."
Well yes. They can go for it because they considering their size, they have a strong economy. They are literally the 3rd
most prosperous country in the world.
If you can afford it, go for it but firstly you need to make the money.
And how do you think they became prosperous? You have to give people the chance to spend money to have a growing economy, otherwise everyone's keeping money for later and nothings flowing.
Because they have a strong service sector that produces revenue and also good high-technology manufacturing. You make money by producing revenue not from sponsoring everyone’s life. Sure, you can invest in people at the beginning but they need to start making money for your investment to pay off.
lol yes ok very dangerous and equivalent to fascism understood
my opinion of centrists has completely flipped, I totally get why "spending too much" and "enforcing an ethnic hierarchy" are the same degree of evil
snark aside: you should reflect about what exactly money is, what it's used for and what it represents, and how a government spending its own legal tender differs from household finances.
The right side is fascism, the left side is plans to raise the monthly minimum wage, impose price ceilings on essential foods, electricity, gas and petrol, repeal Macron’s deeply unpopular decision to raise the retirement age to 64, and invest massively in the green transition and public services.
Exactly those are the views you mentioned. All these are extremely expensive and financing all of them without the debt increase is practically impossible. Combine it with almost no relevant plans how to improve economy and you have got quite a dangerous situation. You cannot just spend money without earning it.
Raising the standard of living and improving the purchasing power of the individual DOES improve the economy because it enables more people to spend more on foods and services. They are financed by raising taxes on the ultra wealthy and corporations. The money is already earned, the difference it whether it gets pocketed and horded by executives or recirculated into the economy by improving the standard of living of the populace
Those ultra wealthy people and corporations are not that stupid. If they see they can exist and pay less in a different country, they will just move. Everyone will be happy apart from the country which rose the taxes.
Of course that rising living standards improves economy but not in a way where you just sponsor good housing for your whole population.
Well sure they don’t flee New York, California and other places where despite high taxes they can still make large amounts of money. Simply because most of development is there. If they can make 50k a month and pay 50% taxes in NY (just an example) compared to 10k and 10% taxes somewhere else (they would just stay).
However, this is not California/NY and you can easily check what high taxes do here. People register companies in Ireland and Cyprus, so they can pay the least taxes possible. Then, due to european union being european union, they can operate in their home country.
That's not how modern monetary policy works, by the way. The US dollar has a ton of power worldwide for many reasons, so we determine what our money is worth, period. This is why every time the US government has spent money on "demand side" solutions (stimulus checks, etc.) they have provided nothing but upside.
This little trick that capitalists don't want you to know about: it's all bullshit. They want us to keep injecting cash into failing banks rather than just paying for people's garbage mortgages.
We owe nothing to nobody because those debts will never be paid (who would they even be paid to?).
There is zero practical reason (beyond "oh no, billionaires and multinational corporations need to pay taxes wahhh") that we cannot spend as much money as we like on every social program we like. Prove me wrong (or just read about "Modern Monetary Theory" as I'm not an economist).
For example, one third of population lived in poverty (in Greece) due to economic crisis. Is that not enough to take responsible money management seriously?
Greece doesn't have the largest economy in the world. Their currency isn't the Petrodollar like USD is. The world economy runs on USD. I don't think you understand just how much power and freedom that affords us with regards to spending. Not your fault because it's been hammered into us for decades by "fiscal conservatives." But the actual reality is that we have far more control over these things than those people want you to think.
The only way spending on social programs could ever possibly tank the US economy is if billionaires and corporations purposely did so out of spite, and desire to return to the times when they could get away with being robber barons (AKA right now). And unfortunately, it would probably work.
That said, even if you don't believe that Modern Monetary Theory is real (again, you should read about it from actual economists, not me), we could very easily take care of every person in this country, legal or not, if we even modestly reduced our "defense" budget, and properly taxed corporations and the uber-wealthy.