Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Thursday, August 04, 2011
Thort For The Day
I am still irked by this "family budget analogy" that is out there doing so much damage in the world. Here's another go:
Let us assume for the sake of argument (even though it isn't really true) that when poor, working-class families experience hard times, they have to "tighten their belts", reduce their consumption and concentrate on reducing their debt levels.
Even given that, we must also be aware that rich families, with large amounts of assets, don't have anything like the same constraint. Does Warren Buffet reduce his lifestyle and look at his outgoings when his share price falls? Does he hell. Even much further down the chain, if a senior executive is made redundant he won't immediately take the kids out of private education or sell his car. In many cases, professional people going through redundancy might even be sensibly encouraged to go back into further education or invest in retraining for a different career, taking on more debt to do so.
Are the USA and UK, if we are to analogise them to families at all, more like the working poor, or more like the very richest families in existence? Particularly in the case of the USA, it kind of answers itself, doesn't it?
What really irritates me is that you know that a sizeable majority of these tools going on about austerity and managing household finances have never seen a credit card bill they couldn't pay in their fucking life. And a majority of the rest are actually the kind of people who run up a million dollar bill at a jeweller's just because they can.
this item posted by the management 8/04/2011 01:28:00 AM
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