Thread by @michaelharriot

There is no imaginable scenario where I am smarter than Adam Serwer about ANYTHING but—despite being known as the "white-people-be-tripping" guy I have an actual degree in (and taught) International Business and Macroeconomics.

This is what I THINK happens to the economy.

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1240101206212653058

First, we have to come to grips with the fact that this country has been quietly building an economy that benefits corporations — NOT NECESSARILY INDIVIDUAL RICH PEOPLE.

All those people that we consider as rich don't liquid assets. They have ownership in corporations.

If Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft etc. went bust, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates would be ok but they would lose BILLIONS. Even people like Oprah, Trump, etc are billionaires because of arbitrary valuations of their net worth.

The value of these businesses is based on perception and SOMETIMES sales or production. It's all a house of well-placed cards.

I say that to say this:

What happens when the house of cards tumbles?

Let's look at this economy we've been building:

Even before this Coronavirus thing, we were building a direct-to-corporation economy. Instead of going to the local hardware store, paying the owner, who pays a supplier, who pays a transportation company, who pays the manufacturer, we skip the middlemen and order online.

MAYBE Amazon or Walmart gets a cut. But they increasingly transport the goods and, in many cases, manufacture the product (or buy it from overseas). The independent trucker doesn't get paid. The cashier doesn't get paid. The man who sweeps up the grocery store doesn't make a dime

But it all goes directly to the corporation. And you know what the most fucked up part of this is?

WE PAY THE SAME PRICES!

This is "free market" capitalism. But the market is never really free because individuals can't compete against behemoth corporations.

But back to this Coronavirus.

This crisis accelerates the growth of those behemoths. Most businesses—if they're lucky—have three months of capital to spare. With no foot traffic, no walk-in customers, those businesses can't survive.

Plus, the last brick-and-mortar customer holdouts realize how easy it is to shop online.
How does the corner convenience store survive when there aren't commuters to buy coffee and gas? How about the paper goods company that supplies the coffee cups?

What about the snack vendor who sold the honeybuns?

It's not just the mall closing (And they will close). But What about the people who sold t-shirts at the kiosks? What about the security guards? It's not just the airlines, it's the Cinnabon and their suppliers.

I'll tell you what happens: The MOSTLY LARGE corporations who survive will say: Instead of hiring people, we should accelerate our automation plans.

More people out of work.

So there are fewer consumers with less money to spend, so there is less economic activity (which kinda defines a recession). BUT... we still gotta eat. We still need toilet paper and socks and screwdrivers. Where do we get these items from?

From the survivors

The corporations

And you know what the craziest part of all this is?

Because of the survivalist, top-down economy we've been building, this recession HELPS the wealthy and large corporations because economic stressors eliminate the smaller, pesky competitors.

But what if I told you there was another way?

What if I told you that we already did it? (Well, only for white people, though.)

If we have any hopes of coming out of this crisis at all, it will mean a total economic reset. We have to unplug the economy and plug it back in

We might as well face it. We are gonna face HARD TIMES and will have to rebuild.

But as long as we're rebuilding, we have a choice to make.

Either we keep building this house of cards that favors the wealthy or we do what we did in the 1930s and what Europe did after WWII

After the Great Depression, the government basically created a middle class for white people (Black people were not included). It loaned people money for businesses. They planned to build HUNDREDS of towns (they only built three full towns) and created the suburbs out of thin air

They mechanized white farms, they fought income inequality by establishing a national minimum wage, they created a program called Social Security, they regulated wall street.

In Europe, after WWII the UK, Italy and other countries socialized their healthcare.

The point of all these programs was the same: To create a middle class that earned a living wage. Slowly, over time, in America, the policies of the New Deal were whittled away.

Why?

Well, the lie you've been told is that it costs too much

But in reality, aside from war, the thing that has increased the debt is this:

We let the wealthy steal our money.

Here is the national debt compared to GDP. It went crazy during WW2 but notice when it started rising:

If you check the tax rates, during the times when our country was doing BEST (MAGAs want to "Make it great again") was when we taxed rich people the most. (If you wanna check, you can do it here, NERD: taxfoundation.org/us-federal-ind…

I'm just showing you that we KNOW how to build an economy that represents the people and guarantees prosperity in exchange for hard work.

If we're gonna struggle anyway, we can actually build a representative economy where whites don't have a 200-year-head start.

One that is intentional about creating opportunities for black and brown people, which starts with the realization that an economy has to be representative of the population and not just built by people who already have privilege and power

Now there are a lot of shit-eating people who hate the idea of big government. But those are the same people who think their parents and grandparent worked their way to the middle class without anyone's help while they actively built generations on the taxes revenue of black ppl,

and others who were excluded from the New Deal (Honestly, though, it was kinda just black people).

The tax act that caused that prosperity was the Tax Act of 1935. It was known as the "Soak the Rich" Tax Act, which is weird because it is a much longer name.

To be fair, if FDR was good at nicknames, he would have called himself "Rosy Freddy Roosevelt" But look at the tax rate that jump-started our prosperity. RIch people had to pay damn near 80% in taxes. In 1936, they passed a law taxing corporations' unused profits.

What if we did that?

We have to hit the reset button ANYWAY. Why not build an economy that ACTUALLY has social security? Because those shit-eaters are gonna be out of a job too.

There is a GREAT example of how this economy uplifts people.

In 1951 a couple in Fort Lee NJ had a son. They weren't poor, nor were they rich. But luckily, they were white. So they found a cheap house in Levittown on Long Island NY.

Now there's an interesting thing about Levittown.

Levittown was built to be an all-white town. Seriously. But that was kinda how the government liked it. Seriously, the people who built the town had explicit segregation instructions FROM THE GOVERNMENT to exclude non-whites.

But Levittown went further and put it into the deeds

Then the government guaranteed low-interest loans to the families who bought the homes. Again, only white people.

Anyway, that couple had a kid and raised him in Levittown. They were just a regular hardworking couple but because they had access to cheap, low-interest homes

They built years of wealth. They saved their money. They could pay for their kid to go to college without borrowing. It was a generational blessing.

Now, today, that couple's kid would SWEAR that he worked his ass off to get where he did and he didn't need no government help.

He would tell you that hard work and a work ethic are what makes America and poor people just don't work hard enough.

That guy is a goddamned liar.

How do I know so much about this guy and what he thinks?

Well, he is one of the main detractors of big government.

His name is Bill O'Reilly.