• CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    Before Thatcher, the top tax rate for highest earners was 83%. If it was classed as ‘unearned income’ (eg capital gains), the tax could have a 15% surcharge, meaning the top tax rate for unearned income was 98%. (Under Thatcher, that went down to 60% - the top rate now is just 45%.)

    And people wonder why we suddenly don’t have money to fund public services anymore.

  • Andrzej3K [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    Worth noting though that such takes frame Thatcher as a revolutionary, when really what she did was bring the Tories home after their brief dalliance with Keynesianism; and that brief, anomalous period owed more to the apparent threat of world revolution than anything else

  • ceoofanarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    This dude and people like him are not “hard left” no reason to give them attention they need just because they don’t fit in with modern day “conservative” “orthodoxy”.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 month ago

      I think if you understand his statement is within the confines of electoralism it is fairly true. Outside electoralism you’re right.

  • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 month ago

    Um…60’s conservatives sound like leftists; has the Overton window since then been yanked that far right (I don’t know a thing about Keynesian economics, or at least I don’t remember it since I studied economics in uni over a decade ago)?

      • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        Keynes is one of the few capitalist thinkers I actually respect.

        Even chuds tacitly agree with him as they’re talking about how we should all put our blind faith in porky.

        “You see, when porky has all that money he will do the consuming for us! That creates jobs, stupid leftist!”

        ….sooooo, demand is driving growth?

    • GenderIsOpSec [she/her, kit/kit's]@hexbear.net
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      1 month ago

      Keynesian economics

      from my understanding it’s that the west gets some form of wellfare state and the global south stays fucked. Also increase in public spending to counter recessions instead of austerity.

      Im sure someone has a better answer though.

      • starkillerfish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 month ago

        yeah its basically that. in brief: government intervenes in the economy to do welfare and to take an economy out of a crisis (which Keynes considers to be both periods of high unemployment but also when GDP growth is too high). it was the dominant form of economic theory in the west until stagflation (which is when unemployment and recession are so bad that even the government cant fix it with keynesian mechanisms) and oil crises hit in the 1970s-80s, so governments had to sell national monopolies and defund all their social programs to stay afloat, which is where neoliberalism comes from.

        • FunkyStuff [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 month ago

          so governments had to sell national monopolies and defund all their social programs to stay afloat

          Had to? Or opportunistically started to treat government spending as if it worked like a checkbook with the explicit purpose of punishing the working class?

          • starkillerfish [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 month ago

            yeah i kind of oversimplified the story. the finance sector used its leverage at the time to force governments to pay out their debts. of course a more pro-worker government could choose not to do that, but in a bourgeois dictatorship the state and banks work in tandem more or less.