Bernanke Lost the G Spot: Can Someone Turn On His Light?

The economic rationale for more a progressive stimulus package, which we hear now several times a day, is that the poor and the freshly unemployed will spend whatever money they get. Give them more money in the form of food stamps or unemployment benefits and they’ll drop more at the mall.

Money, it has been observed, sticks to the rich but just slides off the poor, which makes them the lynchpin of stimulus. After decades of hearing the poor stereotyped as lazy, stupid, addicted, and crime-prone, they have been discovered to have this singular virtue: They are veritable spending machines.

You don't want to miss what Barbara Ehrenreich is saying now about working in America...

All this is true, but it is also a form of economy fetishism, or should I say worship? If we have learned anything in the last few years, it is that the economy is no longer an effective measure of human well-being.
We’ve seen the economy grow without wage gains; we’ve seen productivity grow without wage gains.

We’ve even seen unemployment fall without wage gains. In fact, when economists want to talk about life “on the ground,” where jobs and wages and the price of Special K are paramount, they’ve taken to talking about “the real economy.”

If there’s a “real economy,” then what in the hell is “the economy”?

The quotes above are from Barbara's blog post, Clitoral Economics.

Read it. You'll like it. It's truly a gem.

I'm thinking her first sentence alone will make you smile.

Comments (1)

Nora Thomason

Barbara's post is masterful. It's about time that people start pointing out that the economy has been tanking for the middle class for five years - and it only gets attention from our government because now it's finally effecting THEIR stock prices. No one paid attention or cared when we couldn't afford our food, our mortgages, our cars, our gasoline or our utility bills. No one cared in the last 7 years as our wages stagnated and all of our living prices escalated. And, this so-called "stimulus package" still does nothing for our lowering wages and escalating living costs. The "stimulus" package may help the stock markets that are dependent on consumer spending - but will do nothing for the middle class who is hurting and will continue to hurt, despite what the stocks do or don't do.

Posted by Nora Thomason | January 25, 2008 10:54 AM

Posted on January 25, 2008 10:54

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