THREAD
Periodic reminder that while Bezos, Bloomberg, and other billionaires have enormous 💰, they cannot, in fact, spend “unlimited amounts of money.” Their financial resources (significant as they are) are in fact finite. Billionaires can and do go broke.
Periodic reminder that while Bezos, Bloomberg, and other billionaires have enormous 💰, they cannot, in fact, spend “unlimited amounts of money.” Their financial resources (significant as they are) are in fact finite. Billionaires can and do go broke.
A currency-issuing government like the 🇺🇸 OTOH, can never run out of money. It can *spend* too much money, fueling inflationary pressures, but it cannot run out of its own currency. It can always afford to expand existing programs or pay for new ones.
What matters is the economy’s real resource capacity—it’s ability to *safely* absorb that new spending by meeting higher demand with greater supply. Sometimes, it’s important to offset new spending with higher taxes.
But not when the economy has enough resource slack to handle that spending without sparking inflation. It’s all about identifying the limits and managing the inflation risk. As slack diminishes, matching new spending with higher taxes is *one* way to manage that risk.
Should we take steps to aggressively tackle grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality by taxing the rich? Absolutely! Are we so dependent on the rich that we can’t fight climate change and solve other domestic problems without them? Absolutely not!
We can keep trying to go *through* them. (I’m all-in on fighting inequality.) But we need to understand that we can also go *around* them, making it clear that we are not in fact dependent on their riches.
What we can’t afford to do is wait. Some of the challenges we face are so urgent that we can’t afford an “unless & until” strategy that says we can’t take bold action unless and until we extract trillions from the billionaire class. We can’t afford that kind of backward thinking.
