CBO expects federal debt to double over next 30 years

[Einzige]

Marxists warned you about all of that, of course.

[Kate1999]

Looks like the end is near.

Everyone laughed in 1984 when "1984" didn't happen.

Those who warned about black helicopters and jack-booted thugs 30 years ago were called nutjobs, but who is laughing now?

2021 will be even worse.

Millions will become homeless.

Vaccines and masks will be mandatory. This vaccine may have a microchip implant and cause death, paralysis, or infertility.

Guns will be banned.

The stock market will crash.

There will be inflation and wage deflation.

Patriots should drop out and withdraw from the system now.

Buy a sailboat or move to a small white town in South Dakota.

Buy guns, gold, and food.

The elites are intentionally destroying the US because the ruling class wants to kill off the 99% and own all the wealth and land of the world.

The globalists have closed all the doors and covered all of the bases.

The ruling class will open concentration camps and kill millions by using starvation, a civil war, and WWIII.

Everything is illegal and you're being wiretapped 24/7.

The elites give campaign donations and cushy job promises to politicians to drive up the debt, start wars, and build the police state while ignoring the freedom candidates.

The ruling powers hack election machines, forge ballots, and support illegal immigration to ensure that the globalists control the world.

The elites own the media, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the government.

Americans need to go off the grid and form a new society to avoid becoming a hostage to the NWO.

Anyone who disobeys the 1% will not be allowed to work, travel, have a bank account, start a business, see a doctor, go to school, or drive.

Pass the word.

[pbrower2a]

(03-10-2021, 11:29 AM)Einzige Wrote:

(03-10-2021, 10:33 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(03-08-2021, 03:11 PM)Einzige Wrote: The aggregate economy - the total capitalist world economy - is far less profitable today than in the 1900s.

Based on what?  Profits today are often hidden, but even the share totally in the open is astronomical.  Look at a company like Apple that is valued at over $1Trillion, yet manages to create this with a workforce of roughly 13,000.  No Gilded Age 1.0 megalith even comes close.

Michael Roberts has calculated the U.S. rate of profit since the War and found it to be in a pretty steady decline since the late 90s after peaking in 1963. Even if aggregate profit in raw dollars rises astronomically for the publicly visible  monopolist corporations the total profitability of the system as a whole is in massive decline.



Esteban Maito's work agrees with this, analyzing global profitability throughout the world. His work suggests a radical drop in profitability in the total world system as an aggregate since the 1800s, a profound global profitability crisis punctuated by apparent gains






A lot of what is published about profitability is just propaganda to make the capitalist system look healthier than it is.

The falling rate of profit is a well-known reality to Karl Marx. The explanation, not necessarily his, is that as capitalism matures or goes stale, more suppliers are attracted to any activity with a high profit. Manufacturing becomes more efficient as capitalists discover shortcuts that cut costs without damaging quality, and longer runs of production ensure that volume negates the need for huge profit margins. A 15% rate of profit looks adequate for staying in the business. 

The falling rate of profit has consequences. Most obviously, capitalists must keep the overall demand high. Consolidation of failing businesses might give the few survivors  a few more years of operation. 

OK, just because something used to be profitable for manufacture and sale (let us say televisions with cathode-ray tubes) does not mean that those will remain profitable. They are gone from the market. They are unwelcome even as donations at thrift shops even though they were once fully adequate for consumers. They just don't get made anymore. See also old-fashioned typewriters. See also film-based cameras and video-cassette recorders. Many of those are still operable. 

If one looks at the pattern:

1. A new product is introduced, and it has a limited market and limited sources for suppliers. Lenders are skeptical. It has few potential customers and those few people will pay a fortune. Can you imagine spending $2000 for a video-cassette recorder around 1980? Some people did! 

2. High profit marines encourage competition. Profits are high enough that entities in similar business jump in. Lenders and suppliers want in on the profitability. Profit margins shrink, but volume overpowers that. People think that they are getting a bargain when they see something with a lower price tag. Competition is still "gentlemanly", as there are early costs to recover. New firms manufacturing the item don't have those costs. 

3. Engineering resources find ways to cut cost without hurting quality. Higher technology really means doing more with less material or less-costly components. Production runs lengthen, and sales volume increases. Prices fall. 

4. As the item becomes less expensive it starts appealing to people more sensitive to price. People start buying it as gifts. Maybe newer models are technologically better, so replacements become a reality. 

5. At some point the object becomes cheap and banal. Production goes to low-cost areas (USA to China). Production costs and margins are low.  Aggressive marketing becomes the norm.   Competition makes the object a commodity instead of a luxury. The market is saturated. 

6. Emphasis likely goes from selling the object to selling complementary goods.
 
7. In the end the object becomes obsolete. The market is saturated, and new purchases are for population growth or for replacement. Meanwhile something very new and improve enters the market. Initially fiendishly expensive. the newfangled innovation remains for well-heeled customers. But that comes to its own pattern, and as that newfangled innovation follows a similar pattern, it might start supplanting the old object. OK, a company like Philips, Sony, Matsushita, or Daewoo might be behind both the one-time miracle and the increasingly-banal and cheap object now doomed because the new one is better. Costs will catch up. 

8. at some point, "product death" becomes a reality. 

What we saw with table radios, rotary-dial phones, monaural discs, wringer washers, black-and-white TV's, reel-to-reel tape, mainframe computers, and eventually gasoline-powered automobiles. Costs fall, technology improves, markets saturate, and products go from luxuries to commodities. What really is new under the sun?

[Kate1999]

If debt doesn't matter, why not just send every American a monthly check for $900 trillion?

[Einzige]

The explanation actually is his. Marx’s labor theory of value is that profit (value) is an abstract representation of human surplus labor time, which is “abstract” (measured quantitatively as time) because it is formed from labor which is social. The social character of labor makes it able to be measured quantitatively, as an average — all humans spend time laboring (in different “concrete” ways) in a global market. Marx’s theory shows that the development of the market on a world scale causes human labor to become measured as an averaged unit of time, and so the value of all commodities comes to represent the socially necessary labor time for their production, which is “alienated” or externalized in money which quantitatively represents it.

Workers are commodities. Because it appears as though workers sell the quality of their labor when they go to work, capitalists can exploit workers by paying them by the hour and making them produce more value than they consume, since the value of all commodities is the labor time necessary for their (re)production. Workers, as commodities, only have to be paid what they need to survive, so that their labor is produced for another day of work.

Capitalists can increase the surplus of labor/value, while keeping wages constant, in two ways: by lengthening the working day (absolute surplus) and by increasing productivity (relative surplus). The former can only go so far as a result of the physical capacity of workers, but the latter is constantly happening as production is revolutionized by technology. This is where the falling rate of profit comes in.

In production, workers must be replaced by machines for profit to be produced on an ever greater scale in our limitless growth economy fueled by competition. On the side of exchange, more and more commodities are created that actually hold less and less value, since value comes from labor-time. But, in a non-planned economy based on private property (which is a social relation, and different from “personal property”) where individual producers must compete against each other, there is only speculation as to what the values of these commodities actually are. So, a bubble is created in the market. Think of the housing crisis, where too many houses were assumed to have value that they did not have. Each crisis of capitalism is a crisis of overproduction because of the contradiction in the value of commodities caused by the replacement of workers by machines.

The falling rate of profit is also the reason why there are so many “bullshit jobs” that circulate value rather than producing it, like cashiers, etc. There is too much technology for productive work to continue to be increased, so the service industry has been expanded.

There are offsetting tendencies to the falling rate of profit, like war, in which a destruction of value on a mass scale allows increases in productivity again. But, eventually, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall reasserts itself in crises.

These crises cause a destruction of commodities (houses going unused and being demolished during the housing crisis). Workers are commodities too and they must lose their jobs when the crisis shows that they are not valuable enough to be used (employed). In Marx’s theory, this creates a massive working class and a tiny capitalist class, with the former having in its objective interests a social revolution that changes private property to social property and organizes production rationally according to need and ability. There has never been a socialist state in an authentically Marxist sense. If we do not socialize production, plan the economy to balance the needs of our species with the earth, we face extinction.

[pbrower2a]

(03-11-2021, 10:04 AM)Einzige Wrote: The explanation actually is his. Marx’s labor theory of value is that profit (value) is an abstract representation of human surplus labor time, which is “abstract” (measured quantitatively as time) because it is formed from labor which is social. The social character of labor makes it able to be measured quantitatively, as an average — all humans spend time laboring (in different “concrete” ways) in a global market. Marx’s theory shows that the development of the market on a world scale causes human labor to become measured as an averaged unit of time, and so the value of all commodities comes to represent the socially necessary labor time for their production, which is “alienated” or externalized in money which quantitatively represents it.

Attorneys and accountants bill by the hour. Time is money, and the money that an attorney gets for his time is typically far higher than what a convenience-store clerk gets for time spent doing light work that requires little imagination or self-direction. Attorneys and accountants are not paid to waste time; convenience-store clerks mostly wait for customers. People get expensive educations so that they can be attorneys and accountants. Convenience-store clerks are likely happiest on the job if they have low-normal IQ's and minimal education. They need to be smart enough to know enough to not say the "magic words" that can get them fired and that they can't get away with taking money from the till. Smart people who end up as convenience-store clerks, unless they are perhaps college students working their way through college and see that dreary work as a means to an end, hate their jobs and often their lives in general... and quite possibly the political system.     

Workers are commodities. Because it appears as though workers sell the quality of their labor when they go to work, capitalists can exploit workers by paying them by the hour and making them produce more value than they consume, since the value of all commodities is the labor time necessary for their (re)production. Workers, as commodities, only have to be paid what they need to survive, so that their labor is produced for another day of work.

Quote:Capitalists can increase the surplus of labor/value, while keeping wages constant, in two ways: by lengthening the working day (absolute surplus) and by increasing productivity (relative surplus). The former can only go so far as a result of the physical capacity of workers, but the latter is constantly happening as production is revolutionized by technology. This is where the falling rate of profit comes in.

In short, the markets mature as the customer base expands and the production run increases.  For that knowledge we do not need Marx. 

Quote:In production, workers must be replaced by machines for profit to be produced on an ever greater scale in our limitless growth economy fueled by competition. On the side of exchange, more and more commodities are created that actually hold less and less value, since value comes from labor-time. But, in a non-planned economy based on private property (which is a social relation, and different from “personal property”) where individual producers must compete against each other, there is only speculation as to what the values of these commodities actually are. So, a bubble is created in the market. Think of the housing crisis, where too many houses were assumed to have value that they did not have. Each crisis of capitalism is a crisis of overproduction because of the contradiction in the value of commodities caused by the replacement of workers by machines.

Again, "attorney time", "accountant time", or "engineer time" is more costly than "retail sales-clerk" time. It is safe to assume that capitalists and economic elites associated with the capitalists (executives, corporate attorneys, and political stooges) fare best when they exempt themselves from competition while compelling workers to compete against each other. Even this has its limits. An employer at some levels can always threaten an employee "someone else wants to take your job" and may have the chutzpah to show his current employees a stack of job applications by people who would take their jobs. 

Quote:The falling rate of profit is also the reason why there are so many “bullshit jobs” that circulate value rather than producing it, like cashiers, etc. There is too much technology for productive work to continue to be increased, so the service industry has been expanded.

Retailers are also installing self-checkouts, which likely reduce the number of cashiers and baggers. One good reason for cashiers is to ensure that people don't get away with shoplifting. For real "bullshit jobs", look to the bloated bureaucracies that most giant enterprises have. Could it be that people paid to pretend to work shuffling papers but instead hate their work and lives as proletarian toilers might otherwise read Marx, Engels, Lenin et al and decide that a socialist revolution is about due?     

Quote:There are offsetting tendencies to the falling rate of profit, like war, in which a destruction of value on a mass scale allows increases in productivity again. But, eventually, the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall reasserts itself in crises.

War is a racket, said Smedley Butler. 

Quote:These crises cause a destruction of commodities (houses going unused and being demolished during the housing crisis). Workers are commodities too and they must lose their jobs when the crisis shows that they are not valuable enough to be used (employed). In Marx’s theory, this creates a massive working class and a tiny capitalist class, with the former having in its objective interests a social revolution that changes private property to social property and organizes production rationally according to need and ability. There has never been a socialist state in an authentically Marxist sense. If we do not socialize production, plan the economy to balance the needs of our species with the earth, we face extinction.

Marx ignored that capitalists have a survival instinct in their own right. It's a consumer society or fascism.

[HealthyDebate]

Exactly.

The US is certainly finished now.

Either Trump was a Trojan horse who worked for the elites or was naive or was threatened with blackmail, torture, or murder to expand the police state, debt, and wars, but still Americans were sure Trump would beat feeble Deep State Biden who only drew small crowds.

All hope is lost.

Soon there will be mandatory virus testing and mandatory vaccines with microchip implants.

Guns will be banned. Cash will be outlawed.

Biden will likely resign or will die.

Harris will take over. Elections will be canceled. Congress will be abolished. Jury trials will become show trials.

Private property will be banned.

The globalists have destroyed the USA with wars, tyranny, debt, immorality, homosexuality, drugs, divorce, illegal immigration, refugees, offshoring, the Dot-com bubble, 9/11, 2008 banking crash, and a virus.

All the lines have been crossed.

Buy guns, gold, and food today.

There will be starvation and hyperinflation.

Concentration camps will open.

Soon protests will become civil disobedience and strikes. Americans will sabotage government property. Lone wolf attacks will evolve into militias and then become armies.

There will be secession and sanctuary cities.

Millions will die.

The future has become as clear as a bell.