Giving money to the people would have kept the economy going and allowed it to better adapt. The money that corporations kept out of the economy prevented us from pivoting as efficiently as we could have. But it's been very clearly proven that the states with the most restrictions had far lower excess mortality rates during COVID. The restrictions worked incredibly well. Had we simply made sure that money went to the people we'd have been far better off. Inflation came from the retiring boomers (which peaked in 2020, this advanced a bit thanks to COVID, but would have happened within the decade anyway), corporate greed, and Russia running out of Soviet era materials to sell at rock bottom prices. There was no policy that was going to change that. Maybe you could have delayed it by being better prepared for COVID and not ignoring it for so long, but that would have just delayed it. We had 30 years of record low inflation due to cheap Chinese labor (which is now gone forever) and liquidation of the USSR assets (also mostly gone). Inflation was going to come back this decade. Especially with boomers retiring.
1. We didn't "shut down the economy." 2. The alternative to mitigation in the face of the pandemic was who knows how many more deaths and even more Americans with severe, lingering health problems that would have destroyed lives. It also would have had our healthcare network overly taxed for years and really would have damaged the economy longterm. It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Thank heavens you didn't have a say in things. If you wanted to tell us you didn't understand big-boy issues without telling us, this sure did it.
We absolutely did. Your short memory strikes again. I remember going out onto empty roads with almost every business closed. And you can believe all you want that the money printing was needed, but it did in fact drive up inflation, and it benefitted those at the top, not you the little 1200 or whatever you got was eaten by inflation many times over
Like Trump did? Remember the $600 checks? But, I still do not like Trump, for who he is. However, he did do some things right.
Because nobody wanted to wind up as a corpse stored in a refrigerated trailer in a hospital parking lot. Inflation that was inevitable, and much of which has been shown to be a direct result of profit taking.
He didn't want to give the Democrats any campaign leverage. But now these kinds of handouts are becoming normalized. And politicians have little incentive to refrain from using those types of bribes. Meanwhile, the root causes are ignored.
Kind of. That was a payment that allowed him to give the vast majority to corporations. All of the money that went to corporations (and has been found to have been wasted) should have been given to individuals. It should have been monthly payments to every American.
Correct, the 2017 Trump tax plan basically gives an extra $60K a year for families in the top 1%. Tax cuts for the top 5% are 3 times larger than the tax cuts for the lower 60% of the population, revenue base for the government lost $2 Trillion in 10 years (which of course hurts programs that are supposed to support the poor) and last most of these trickle down schemes, did not actually do anything for the working stiffs. He basically took money that would have gone to struggling families via government funded or supported programs and put them in the rich's pockets. The whole trickle down economy basically transformed the US from a labor based economy to an investment based economy and this, by default, favors the rich. Ronald Reagan is the one that put the US on that nonsense track and unfortunately, people like Trump and the GOP continue to spread the bullshit that this is how you revive the economy.
If you can remember going into empty stores the economy wasn't stopped. Otherwise, they wouldn't be open and you wouldn't be there. I'm going to say this one more time for the righties in the back, our country was worse off both in terms of per capita deaths and the economy that most of our peer nations during the pandemic under Trump. We've surpassed all those countries in recovery under Biden. As bad as our inflation is, it's been worse around most of the world. That should be all the proof you need that Trump was an abject failure as president and you'd have to be a fool to put him in any position of power again.
We have all this data from the past 45 years that it doesn't work and still there are suckers that fall for it.
It might have worked, were it not for greed. You have all these giant corporations getting incredible tax cuts, and instead of using those to bring down prices (accept momentarily for appearances), or otherwise injecting it into the economy, they pocket it. Then they raise prices. They gouge the customer for profit on top of what they already saved. Everything is put on the lower classes while the big guy sits easy. The wealth gap continues to grow, eliminating the middle class.
In a society that either was altruistic or there was no benefit to getting rich beyond and certain point, yes, then it might have worked. We live in neither.
It was government ordered and enforced. I never said I went into empty stores, I said they were closed, and they were. I don't know what planet you're from. Your mind seems to be too far gone from watching too much MSNBC. You're a lost cause.
People in those lower tax brackets aren't paying any income tax anyway. So there is nothing to cut. Simple math. Simple logic. The real question you should be asking is why we have an income tax at all.
Stores were still open. People still worked in there. You could still purchase groceries. It was government enforced relief for the stores because nobody would have come to work at grocery stores if they had to deal with dumbass COVID deniers in the store spitting all over everything. So they prevented the public from entering to keep all of the morons outside.
Ones that were deemed necessary were open,c me any others were closed and put out of business. And who was responsible for the fear?
