Thread by @DeficitOwls

It's Day 7 of our online book club for @StephanieKelton's The Deficit Myth!

Today we're reading Chapter 7, and we'll post highlights below. Read along and post your favorite parts with the hashtag #TheDeficitMyth.

Happy reading🦉...

"For decades, America has placed trust and power in a global network of financial and political elites who have profoundly failed to address the economic concerns of most people on the planet." #TheDeficitMyth

"Our government’s fiscal deficit wasn’t cause for concern, but America faced other deficits that mattered enormously: deficits in good jobs, in access to health care, in quality infrastructure, in a clean environment, in a sustainable climate, and more." #TheDeficitMyth

As opposed to being "a nation of rugged and atomized individualists, Americans shared an interconnected destiny; that we all rise or fall together as a people." #TheDeficitMyth

The federal budgeting process is "a process designed by technocrats to shackle policy options, to elevate the needs of abstract ledger entries over the needs of flesh and blood human beings." #TheDeficitMyth

In the service sectors, "employers hold all the leverage and use every trick in the book—from outsourcing to franchising to hiring contractors rather than full-time workers—to keep pay and benefits as low as possible." #TheDeficitMyth

"In some places, effectively, there was no recovery from 2008. The job market just pulled up stakes and left." #TheDeficitMyth

"Ultimately, the good jobs deficit comes down to the way money flows through the economy. Right now, those flows grant good pay and great benefits to a small portion of fortunate Americans, and meager pay and little-to-no benefits to a great many more." #TheDeficitMyth

"it’s fair to say the typical working American has no money put away for retirement. One study found the median retirement account balance among people of working age in the United States is… zero." #TheDeficitMyth

"Working families should save, but first we must build an economy in which they can." #TheDeficitMyth

"In the neighborhoods like Madison-Eastend, which are 90 percent black, the life expectancy rate was less than 69 years; while in the nearby Medfield, Hampden, Woodberry, and Remington neighborhoods, which are 78 percent white, life expectancy is 76.5 years." #TheDeficitMyth

"According to the Census Bureau, health-care-related expenses forced 8 million people into poverty in 2018. Research indicates that 137 million Americans have faced tough choices due to medical debt in just the past year." #TheDeficitMyth

" Our health-care deficit leads to lost time for work and for play, but also to the worst lost time of all: the years with friends and loved ones that so many people lose because they die too soon." #TheDeficitMyth

"We have told young people that the way to climb the income ladder is to go to college, that this is the pathway to higher lifetime earnings and more financial security. That is no longer true. You need a college degree just to hold on to the rungs." #TheDeficitMyth

"Again, it is never money that the federal government lacks to address needs like infrastructure and housing; real resources are the actual constraint." #TheDeficitMyth

"You might think there couldn’t possibly be any deficit more consequential than the fate of the global climate that sustains human civilization. But there’s one more gap in American life that...cuts even deeper.... it's our democracy deficit." #TheDeficitMyth

"Poverty, with its unending psychological stress, its food insecurity, and its exposure to pollution and lead and disease, does enormous damage to human beings of all ages—but especially to children" #TheDeficitMyth

"When they become extreme, inequalities in wealth and income begin to widen inequalities in the political realm. The rich and powerful can attend high-dollar fundraisers, maxing out political contributions that give them access and influence over the political process."

"Homeless people line the streets of New York, San Francisco, and LA, on blocks where the bars and restaurants roar with money." #TheDeficitMyth

"Functionally, the participation of most Americans in our democracy often seems irrelevant—which raises the question of whether meaningful democracy is even possible in a country with such vast economic inequities." #TheDeficitMyth

"The profits and power wealthy elites can find in *not* addressing these problems are just so much greater than the profits and power to be found in addressing them." #TheDeficitMyth

"Many of our firms are now feudal economic fiefdoms, in which a small group of wealthy owners give orders to—and extract value from—the labor of vast numbers of everyday Americans." #TheDeficitMyth

"Democracy means that we all have a voice, that we all have a say, and that we all matter. We need a politics that recognizes that and restores the fundamental equation in a democratic society: one person, one vote."

That's it today, tomorrow is Chapter 8 of #TheDeficitMyth