Yes, what's happening with the Farm Bill in the House of Representative is a moral disaster. A $9 billion new subsidy that is paid for by cutting two million families off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? In the middle of an ongoing recession and with eight percent unemployment? Anybody who votes for this and insists on still calling themselves a Christian should be stoned. But, morality aside, which is pretty much the way we're running the economy as a whole these days, this doesn't even make a lick of pragmatic sense. Keep people fed and you keep people employed. The money from the SNAP program doesn't go into a vault in the Caymans; practically all of it goes right back into the economy, where it helps keep people employed in grocery stores and sundry shops.
As I said, the blog is not an economist, but it will hazard a guess that this notion that you can run an economy without demand took hold when we handed the entire financial world over to people who don't actually sell anything except debt, and risk, and other people's money, and their own arrogant genius, and a lot of other intangible things like that. I hear an awful lot from The Business Community about how politicians don't understand or appreciate their true unleavened genius. Is there any economist propounding this balderdash who's ever actually had a job selling anything more substantial than his own bullshit? You can't run a business if nobody can afford to be your customers.
Charles Pierce
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