If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because…
If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already miserly. /1
https://t.co/rcB8iVJ6Ks
Have Tweeted before about how the large 2021 outbreaks in Australia are mostly not due to some biological characteristic of Delta, and nearly everything to do with the refusal of the federal government to reinstate JobKeeper. People were forced to work and get infected. /2
The underlying belief here is that there’s only a finite amount of money we have to work with. We have to borrow money, place our children in debt etc. More slogans (the pandemic has been awash with slogans.) We fetishise money, we see it as a source of wealth. /3
It’s a medium of exchange, it has almost no intrinsic value. It’s bits of plastic and small amounts of cheap metal. Or it’s bytes in a computer. Society invented money to facilitate exchange between people. Exchange of goods, and services. /4
As the article I shared above shows, governments have been ‘printing’ money with abandon for years now, to keep economies afloat. They didn’t have to borrow it, they’re not households. They issue it. Trillions have been printed to save the Economy…/5
…with lots of positive effects, no rise in inflation as traditional money fetishists worry about (in fact deflation is the bigger risk, still). I won’t go into the arguments between Modern Monetary Theorists (MMT) and traditional economics, but the basic fact is, ‘printing’…/6
…money works. Nearly everybody has been so brainwashed by the Economy crowd that you ‘can’t just print money’, because they bizarrely think money has intrinsic value. Again, it has none at all. What we exchange using money has value - goods and services. /7
We’ve been printing it with abandon for years. In the pandemic we have as well, to rescue livelihoods. It doesn’t have to be ‘paid back’, the government doesn’t need to borrow it. It makes it. The same politicians and business people calling for cuts to Covid support…/8
…have happily sat back for years and watched money being printed to save their beloved Economy. Always look at the politics. They’re not actually bothered about fiscal rectitude, they just don’t support people not aligned with them getting the same support. /9
In a pandemic, social and ‘economic’ (just a subset of social) activity is dramatically curtailed. Those goods and services stop being exchanged, because money to do it dries up. Customers aren’t earning wages, companies aren’t getting sales from those wages. /10
The government can ‘print (actually they do it on computers) as much money as it likes, and flood the society with it, to fix this. It doesn’t have to pay it back, it printed it. Goods and services can then flow again, until the virus is defeated. /11
The government knows this, as above it’s already been doing it for years to bail out the people who tend to vote for them. Their theatre of fiscal responsibility now is bollocks, it’s politics. They’re happy to print money for mates, but not for ordinary working people. /12
Money is the best vaccine. Printing money could have ended this pandemic early in 2020, by paying everybody to stay home until the virus ran out of people to infect. Australia did that in 2020. In 2021 the ‘live with the virus’ economic folk decided ‘common-wealth’ was over. /end