A Quote by Michael Hudson

Today, people are having to spend so much of their money, to acquire a house and to get an education that they don't have enough to spend on goods and services, except by running into yet more debt on their credit cards and other borrowings.
So we are in for years of debt deflation. That means that people have to pay so much debt service for mortgages, credit cards, student loans, bank loans and other obligations that they have less to spend on goods and services. So markets shrink. New investment and employment fall off, and the economy is falls into a downward spiral.
If you want to spend more money in restaurants, use credit cards more than cash. If you want to spend less, use cash more than credit cards. But in general, we can think about how to use the pain of paying and how much of it do we want. And I think we have like a range. Credit cards have very little pain of paying, debit cards have a little bit more because you feel like today, at least it is coming out of your checking account, and cash has much more.
All three [of my grandkids] earn money around the house, and all three spend their own money. Now I've noticed that when they have to spend their own money on birthday cards, they have decided that homemade cards are so much nicer.
More and more money is being extracted from of the production and consumption economy to pay the FIRE sector. That's what causes debt deflation and shrinks markets. If you pay the banks, you have less to spend on goods and services.
The people who have more money and goods than any people in the history of the world spend most of their time worrying about not having enough.
Debt deflation is when there's less money that people have to spend out of their paychecks on goods and services, because they're paying the FIRE sector. Oil going down is a function of the supply and demand of oil in the market. It's a separate phenomenon.
When you put more money in the pockets of working families, they spend it on groceries, gas, school supplies, and other goods and services. And that helps businesses grow and create jobs.
It's a little hard to go out there and spend your money on a home, car, or goods and services if your wages are being garnished to make debt collectors rich.
What do the 5%, or the 1% actually use their money for? They lend it back to the economy at large, they load it down with debt. They make their money by lending to the bottom 95%, or the bottom 99%. When you give them more after-tax income, it enables them to buy even more control of government, even more control of election campaigns. They're not going to spend this money back into the goods-and-services economy.
The world is a puzzling place today. All these banks sending us credit cards, with our names on them. Well, we didn't order any credit cards! We don't spend what we don't have. So we just cut them in half and throw them out, just as soon as we open them in the mail. Imagine a bank sending credit cards to two ladies over a hundred years old! What are those folks thinking?
These debt obligations will simply erode America's standard of living in the future. Money spent to service the debt is money that we don't have to spend on consumption's goods, or on investment in our future.
I'm not a fan of debt consolidation. In my experience, many people "clear" credit cards and other debt to get the one payment and never change what they need to change to prevent getting into debt again.
Once people know that you can spend the money and that you're willing to spend the money and that you're set up to spend the money in politics, then your threat to spend the money is as convincing as actually spending it.
People have to pay so much money to the banks that they don't have enough money to buy the goods and services they produce. So there's not much new investment, there's not new employment (except minimum-wage "service" jobs), markets are shrinking, and people are defaulting. So many companies can't pay their banks.
When the government takes more money out of the pockets of middle class Americans, entrepreneurs, and businesses, it lessens the available cash flow for people to spend on goods and services, less money to start businesses, and less money for businesses to expand - i.e. creating new jobs and hiring people.
When you put more money in the pockets of working families, they spend it on groceries, gas, school supplies, and other goods and services. And that helps businesses grow and create jobs. So many forward-looking employers, large and small, understand this.
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