Forum Post: This Forum Should Have Sub-Categories! because...

Organize this stuff a little more, will ya? I know it can easily be done. I suggested doing something like this on another forum and I think this is reasonable since order makes material easier to interpret. Especially for a forum page with one hell of a lot of posts.

Here's how you do it: -Go though the cumbersome process of tagging each post, back logging all the previous stuff and retroactively adding tags if you have to. -Start making categories available now, and encouraging people to tag their own posts and post in the right category

Why am I'm saying this? Because I want to post a serious comment asking for real help and not have this idea lost in the sea of everything else. This feeling of being lost in the dust made me feel like that's probably on the minds of a number of other people, and some who have already posted. I think this would be good for all.

My question is about the economy. More specifically the the "macro-economy" and so fittingly, I would like to eventually be able to post a discussion thread under the category "macroeconomics" on this site and feel more assured I'm narrowing my field to concerned and passionate teachers and students on this issue.

Macroeconomics is what people in occupy would be talking about if the subject were demystified.. if people could talk in that language while making some of their points, such that they could quip back to accusations of occupy being a movement with no clear demands.

Macroeconomic policy implies some kind of demands in terms of objectives for a country, especially because those demands affect how much money to some extent we are carrying around in our pockets.

Education cuts, health care cuts.. selling off highways.. all these issues can seem disparate and isolated to their own terrible battles but there is some logic tying all these varied issues together and that is macroeconomics and things like budget proposals that reflect those sorts of economic perspectives.

I am going to stress that merely looking at the hazardous up close effects of budget cuts to schools will result in less educated students, or that cuts to old age security will result in grandma or grandpa struggling harder and how ugly a sight that might be -- that this kind of an solely emotional focus to these stories detracts somewhat from any logical narrative that although less focused on the gritty details of each budget cut, does actually augment the value of every one of these points by bringing them all together under an encompassing logical cross-countrywide criticism of what is going on. This nationwide criticism is also couched in the same language used by orthodox professionals and so it has a certain amount of validity up the ladder in the professional sense so to speak.

To get right into it, macroeconomics discusses GDP, and lots of rise over run graphs representing functions of GDP. Right off the bat perhaps this stuff can somewhat get a little more technical, but isn't this what we should all be doing anyways? The demands I've learned do have a professional voice, and although not offered up by those attacking Occupy, I think it fair to say that still nonetheless Occupy has represented some variation of Keynesian macroeconomics, perhaps more a neo-affixed to it. To get right on point, I think today this macroeconomic analysis has a lot more to do with a fiat currency application of Keynesian economics, which I think is wrapped up in the school of Modern Monetary Theory (or MMT for short).

I think a separate category is necessary to conjure up enough people from this massive forum into a few sub-categories, where one of them would be on GDP and stuff like that and would be called macroeconomics.

The circular flow of income and expenditure would be addressed. For those who don't know, it states that all expenditure equals income, and that expenditures can be sub-divided. It has a formula:

Y = C + I + G NX

such that, Y =incomes C= consumption I= Investments NX = exports minus imports

All this stuff is equal to the total income and this is said to equal GDP. So this might not all seem like much, but when GDP is represented differently in a graph, then these expenditures can be further broken down, and different narratives start to emerge. While not getting into the logic of other schools of thought, MMT says that government expenditure, when it spends, goes into debt and with that amount of debt there is an equally opposite spike in surplus profits to the private sector, representing an increase in household income. The reason for this is simple, the majority of government spending goes right back into the private sector, but today the problem is different. Today money goes increasingly into finance, and that the old adage of capitalists against workers as being the greatest struggle is no more, for today it is capitalists and labour against finance capital -- that is, today most money from GDP is getting shored up in financial activities.

I know a sectoral balances approach to looking at GDP helps visually illustrate how the public and private sector have historically worked together to create a strong economy, and that only recently in time has the financial sector emerged as the dominant sector profiting compared to any other component of the private sector.

I also know that I am over-simplifying macroeconomics a ton, and that is why I would like to encourage a more serious discussion of the matter, but nonetheless I think this is a good intro to an important topic so there is no need to over-complicate things on the first post.

Thanks!

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