Forum Post: The problems in the economy are NOT new, they are old problems!

Everyone on this forum should know of rising inequality since 1979 or so, and of course high unemployment now.

So it seems logical to blame the 1% since they've got the money and poor people don't. But the problems of poor people are the same as existed before the financial crisis, and even before inequality began rising in 1979.

These are that they don't have money and that they can't get a job. Either due to lack of skills, and there will always be people with less education than anyone else, or because of discrimination.

The government is normally able to manipulate the economy to create jobs. The reason it doesn't do this is because of inflation when unemployment becomes very low, which is described as the economy "overheating". So they just try to get unemployment to the "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment" which still leaves millions of poor people unemployed.

This is why so many people in poverty are independent instead of supporting the Democratic party.

So the reason that working less can do more than the government can is that when people choose to work less because they already have enough money, they still pay attention to prices and will punish stores that raise prices (which equals inflation) by shopping somewhere else. Same with college tuition and every other kind of inflation.

When people just keep working full-time despite already making $200k/year and not having much to spend it on, they don't even look at prices when they go to the store. Or when comparing colleges for their children. They just pick whatever has flashy packaging and mentions healthy buzzwords, or in the case of college has a high price tag. This causes sellers to raise prices because it's more profitable and their customers just accept it.

So this has the potential to help the poor in a way that has never before been possible.