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Comment by causalmodels | Hacker News Reader

This system isn't a failure. People's incomes have gone up during the pandemic so the stock market has also gone up.

There is a dire problem around the collapse of small businesses, but rich people usually get rich through capital markets rather than small business.

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The stock market did not go up because of the increase in people's incomes. It went up because of several trillion dollars worth of cash injections from the Federal Bank. For everyone else, unemployment has pushed to 10% on the low end and I'll repeat the part about 40 million people looking at evictions by the end of the year.

And "rich people usually get rich through capital markets" is just a fancy of way of saying they have ownership of everything and profit off of other peoples's labor

Incomes have gone up, including for the unemployed. Fiscal stimulus can accomplish much more than monetary policy through the multiplier so comparing headline numbers doesn't mean anything.

And yeah rich people own assets. That's like the definition of a rich person. Take your ax and grind it somewhere else.

Incomes went up only for the unemployed who got the $600/week unemployment benefit, which just expired. And that's just for the pandemic. Real wages, the actual value of one's wages relative to the expenses in costs in society, have been in a decline since the 80s. Yet, the wealthy have come to control more and more wealth.

This isn't some ax to grind. This is life under a system where the wealthy rule and the rest of us have no choice but to work for them or starve.

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