If we NEED homelessness in our economic system

[Dark Jaguar]

As I said, I've heard of the 'we need to increase jobless numbers in order to slow down inflation' argument, but I am pretty sure that their goal is not to increase homelessness much but instead to make people look for new jobs.  I don't get economics enough to remember offhand why they say that high employment is bad, but it clearly is something the Fed believes...

I agree with the goal of slowing down inflation, the rate of increase of basic good such as food and housing is horrible.  How do we do that?  I don't know.  "Let's hope more people get fired, that'd be good for the economy" seems like an odd way to reduce inflation, but I'm not good enough at economics to know if it'd work or not... but given that employment is generally probably more positive than negative it's not something they should try to cause, I would think.

Also, even though obviously much higher taxes on the rich are necessary, that's not something the Fed can do.  Only congress can change tax law and the Republicans in the House sure aren't going to do that.  Basically all the Fed can do is adjust the one lending rate they have control over and see what that does to the economy...

Well if that's your thought, I suppose we can start by firing you.  Sorry to be so harsh, but that's really all it comes down to.  If you think ANY section of society is worth throwing out for the good of the rest, you need to first consider yourself "the surplus".  If that stings, if it makes you angry to think of yourself being cast down for everyone else's sake, this argument stops right here.  No one deserves to be cast out.  Whether it would actually work is completely irrelevant.

And yes, they absolutely, unequivocally mean what they say they mean.  Don't try to put a lighter spin on this.  They want more joblessness, and in our society that means homelessness.  The homelessness is, in fact, the point.  THAT is the part that "stimulates the economy" in their model.  That's the argument they're making.  You are giving them too much credit because you don't want to think that perhaps there are cruel people making decisions in power, but that's the reality.  They want us to "take our medicine" (exact quote from Fox there) and they know it will be "painful but necessary".  It's just that they don't want to do the suffering themselves.  They don't want to be the ones losing their jobs.

This is stuff Dickens wrote about.  They're arguing that this would "decrease the surplus population" and of course it takes a ghost of Christmas presents to come along and point out that to many, THEY are the surplus population.