Your “borrowed money” point is a good, but the real key is your second point on govenrnment dependency.
The author’s hypothesis has some rational basis - I’ve always wondered how we could have such poor labor participation, yet avoid the horrors of the Great Depression, and part of that is just pervasive government assistance in what’s become more than a “safety net”, on its way to a “safety hammock”. Consider just folks on disability assistance - if I recall correctly, that number has just about doubled under Obama. Surely there hasn’t been some sudden epidemic of work-related injuries - people are gaming the system, to the detriment of the economy as a whole, and the regime could care less.
And that should be the root concern of the increasingly poor worker participation rate - work not only boosts the economy at the macro level, it’s necessary for self-esteem at the individual level. I’m convinced that the skyrocketing suicide rate among working age white males is tied in to the lack of meaningful jobs in this economy. I’d be curious to see what’s happened to the divorce rate under Obama - again, a male who can’t find a decent job isn’t going to have much in the way of self-respect in his own family.
And to top it off we have a running background of deteriorating race relations (egged on by the scum in this regime) to further depress the populace.
Yeah, that is the other side of the equation. If you make people obsolete, they feel useless, which makes them even more dysfunctional. It’s a vicious circle.
On the borrowed $$ thing. The $$ isn’t even really borrowed in the traditional sense. It is created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve. Then it is lent to banks, which lend it back to the Government—at a marginally higher (but still low) interest rate.
One problem this causes is that it results in an inability to price Capital efficiently. This problem no doubt negatively impacts the Economy, but you rarely hear the Talking-Heads address it. I would guess that it helps the Big Banks and Crony Capitalists.
The other problem with this approach is that it robs savers of their interest. This is increasingly a problem for me and many others. So, we have less $$ to spend. But no one cares about us, as we are old-ish, White people who tend NOT to riot.
Yep. There were, probably still are, lots of lawyer billboards in Florida about how to get on taxpayer-paid disability. Ditto for food stamps...er, I mean for SNAP. Plus, there a lot of people pushing disability or some other sit-on-your-ass-program on Facebook now.