One business's income is another person's spending. In the aggregate, income = spending.
If spending falls, income falls. If income falls, businesses cut investment and costs and lay off workers.
Conservative economics has taught that we must reduce spending even more to grow income... Huh???
...all because of tragically mistaken concepts of how money works.
Such as the mistaken belief that governments only spend what they first take from the private sector. This has not been true since we left the gold standard and stopped having what was essentially a fixed exchange rate by tying our money supply to the availability of a somewhat rare commodity. That made as much sense as tying our drinking water supply to the amount of dinosaur fossils we could find.
Government spending is also simply another business's income. It is a net increase in private sector wealth. The government can buy and deploy otherwise unutilized resources. It can spend when sales/incomes are needed to avoid contraction.
It is essential whenever the economy lacks sufficient spending to purchase all the output of a fully employed society.
We need to rethink what we think we know.
Redefine what it means to be Conservative or Liberal based on a correct view of money, and a world of possibilities will open up to us.
A path to prosper while solving our nation's social, economic, and environmental challenges.
We can afford to put people back to work.
We can afford to shift our energy to a sustainable supply.
We can help other nations prosper without harming our own.
We don't need to go to war over resources.
We can afford to educate our children and working adults without burdensome debt.
We can afford to provide health care to all our citizens and help doctors return to a focus on patient care.
Greed (an apt word to describe Western capitalism) is not good, Gordon Gekko.
Selfishness does not provide a sound platform for economic prosperity and societal well-being.
Exponential growth through resource extraction at lowest cost is not a sustainable or just system.
Free trade for the poor and protectionism for the wealthy is not a righteous or sustainable global economic system.
Unemployment for the youth is not a solution to an economic crisis, nor will it bring nations back to prosperity and growth.
Reduced investment in public infrastructure, research, and education will not lead a nation forward to a prosperous future.
I met a fork in the road between Western capitalism and Marxist socialism, and I realized I was on the wrong road. The highway to sustainable prosperity is found on a different track entirely.
When presented with two false choices, the "lesser evil" is still just evil.
2015 is a year to learn hope-filled economics. It will take all of us to bring the changes we all desire, but they are there for the taking.