RE: Why inequality is growing so extreme and how Alaska points the way to the solution

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RE: Why inequality is growing so extreme and how Alaska points the way to the solution

scottsantens (62)in #basicincome • 7 years ago

Are you not aware that personal consumption expenditures have been on the decline this entire century so far? In fact one of the reasons retail is dying is not just Amazon, it's a lack of spending money. Wages have been stagnant for decades while the cost of basic needs have been going up. As a result people have less money to shop with, and subsequently economic growth has been slowing.

You should do some reading up on this. It's pretty much already the new consensus that inequality has grown to extreme and is holding back the economy. We are looking at a growing crisis of demand, not supply.

7 years ago in #basicincome by scottsantens (62)

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limnade (54) 7 years ago

Compare the prices of mobile phone 20 years ago and now and you will see that prices for electronics decline all the time.

Compare how your parents live and how you spend your time and you will understand that people are living better and better. In my childhood an automatical washing machine was a dream, we spent half saturday for washing almost manually since washing machine had to be taken care of all the time. To get any information we had to go to the library, to watch a movie we first had to find it on the TV program.

Maybe you think that change of life could be made for ordinary people by other poors but in fact not. All the R&D, all inventions now need plenty of money and to have those plenty of money for inventions we need those people judging what kind of island will suit them better. Those daddies should have real spare money to search for ways to live forever since this task is presumed to be never solved.

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sylph (39) 7 years ago (edited)

Government R&D is based on government income from tax, and everyone participates in that. That's not based on some rich people's whim.

The cellphones you just mentioned is largely the results of government funding. Government funding is based on the economic system, which would thrive more when the money circulates better between the people and the government in a more equal society.

"The technology used in smartphones is the culmination of decades of such research. The TRANSIT Navigation Satellite System, the precursor to the GPS, was created at Johns Hopkins University during the Cold War with funding from the Department of Defense and NASA. In 1946, the first electronic general purpose computer — which led to phones’ CPUs — was invented with funding from the U.S. Army at the University of Pennsylvania.
And the iconic touchscreen? It was initially developed in 1971 at the University of Kentucky, and improved at the University of Delaware with funding from the National Science Foundation. The research pair at the University of Delaware founded FingerWorks, which was acquired by Apple in 2005." ~ https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/14/university-research-cellphone_n_5983982.html

The internet, GPS, infant formulas, vaccines, touch screen, wind energy, etc are invented thanks to government funding.

"The Internet
Yes, you can again thank the DOD for being able to read this article right now (and, you know, anything else the Internet lets you do). In the 1960s, the military wanted to develop a communications system that was less vulnerable to attack than telephone operators’ rooms and began working on directly linking computers. The first network was called the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) – which was the basis for the modern Internet as we know it." ~ http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Media/Slideshow/2013/03/07/10-government-funded-inventions

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11358

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