What will Kamalanomics look like?

[Vēritās]

No fresh gold had been mined

Suppose an asteroid appeared within reach and it was filled with rare metals, including gold. If what I read a while back was right, a total of about 4 Olympic swimming pools have ever been mined on earth. An asteroid could hold quite a lot. What would happen to the world economy? Is gold a good or a bad?

Gold is valuable due to scarcity. If we increased the world supply by a factor of x10 because of asteroid mining it would effectively make gold worthless.

[ajax18]

Thank you for explaining this. I honestly didn't know the details.

If you learned at least something, then you can return the favor by recommending a dry-eye medication (or other fix). Not for me, but someone I'm responsible for. Steroids work wonders and then its good for quite a while. The longer-term less risky treatment stop working altogether and seem to make the problem worse. Obviously, every situation is different, but if you've heard of something that in general works better for people than other things, it's worth looking into.

Perhaps it will be something tried or something that will not work, but I'm just interested in further options to read about, and you never know. Yes, doctors have been consulted and prescriptions filled, but you know how it is, by the numbers, and without much else to go by.

My last CE I went to the lecturer basically said you got to have steroids. The problem is that 20% of the population are steroid responders and there is a risk of ocular hypertensive crisis with prolonged use. How many of us can afford and office visit every week to check our intraocular pressure indefinitely. I'd say Eyesuvis combined with Xiidra is a good combination. Eyesuvis is an ester based steroid that has less risk of causing increased intraocular pressure. But it's not something I get to prescribe much at my medicaid/medicare HMO mill. I'm likely going to a different job and planning to start doing real eye care. I never did it before because it always meant a paycut. But I'm looking forward to being able to see working people again. I haven't done that since externships back in OD school.

If you can safely say you're not a steroid responder or have a family history of glaucoma, I'd say good old dexmethasone is cheap and as strong as it gets. And you know you can get steroid drops in Mexico without a prescription. There is, some risk of early cataract. But cataract surgery is so perfected nowadays that I recommend it to most patients over 50 in lieu of LASIK.

[Physics Guy]

Big fresh supplies of precious metals have been injected into money economies several times in history, with unsurprising results. The people who first obtained the new gold or silver were suddenly able to outbid other customers and get more stuff than they could have afforded before, but the higher payments that they offered, to make things come to them that used to go to other people, automatically became the new prices of those things. So prices went up.

That process didn't stop with those first transactions, moreover. The merchants who got all that extra gold for their goods could now themselves get more stuff than before, by outbidding competitors, and thereby raising more prices. And so it went on, until Aztec gold brought to Spain, or silver from a new mine in the Alps, was raising the price of fish in remote corners of Europe. Whoever was closest to the dispersing stream of bullion was initially rich, but inflation came as a backlash.

Even without any fresh bullion, governments have tried for millennia to create more money to finance public works or pay armies. In Ancient Rome, emperor after emperor tried the obvious trick of melting down all the denarii in the treasury, diluting the silver with copper or lead, then re-minting more denarii than there had been originally and hoping that the new coins would still buy just as much as before. Once again this might make some people rich for a while, but inflation always wiped out the gains disappointingly quickly. In societies that accepted paper money, like the thirteen American colonies in the American Revolution or the Confederacy in the US Civil War, governments did simply print out a lot more dollar bills. There was wild inflation, but the government was always a bit ahead in the game, being the source of the new money. Without printing money wildly like that, none of those rebel governments would have been able to sustain their armies as long as they did.

It's fine to say that adding more gold, or debasing the coinage or printing more money, doesn't change anything in the long run, because it will always be balanced out by inflation. That might be true, but as Keynes pointed out, in the long run, we're dead. Economics isn't just about the long run. If I can't buy food in the short run, the long run won't matter; if I can get rich in the short run, conversely, I'll be able to cope with the long run just fine. The short-term change in how much money people have, and what they do with it, can really make a big difference, in spite of the fact that inflation and deflation always tend to re-balance the real amount of purchasing power that exists.

And in a similar way a bank loan really does work, in the short term, like an injection of newly mined gold, in spite of the fact that in the long run the loan is paid back. Conversely, every time somebody locks up some money in a long-term investment, so that that money stops being paid to people who use it to pay other people and so on, the short-term effect is like the sudden destruction of that sum of money, even though in the long term that invested money is going to come back with profit.

Money is weird and a lot of things about it are surprising. As individual buyers and sellers we think of money as an objective and absolute measure of value. We generally know that we can't get richer just by how we think or feel about the money we have. Ah, if only. No, the only way to get rich is to get more money. The possibility that the money we have might become less valuable is too horrible to contemplate.

And yet the basic wonder of market economy is that every time a dollar changes hands, value increases for both buyer and seller. The seller would rather have the dollar than the thing they sell, or they wouldn't sell; the buyer would rather have the thing than the dollar, or they wouldn't buy. Nobody loses. Both win. Total value always goes up, every time—or the deal wouldn't happen. And yet the total number of dollars neither goes up nor goes down, but stays exactly the same.

Not being the same as value is what money is all about, actually. So it shouldn't really be as surprising as it is, that economics is weird.

[ajax18]

That might be true, but as Keynes pointed out, in the long run, we're dead.

I'd rather be dead than live in debt slavery.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

That might be true, but as Keynes pointed out, in the long run, we're dead.

I'd rather be dead than live in debt slavery.

lol

[Moksha]

DementedDonaldomics is well outlined in his plan to dismantle America: Project 2025.

[canpakes]

Nicole Hannah-Jones says the quiet part out loud, the part that the Democratic socialist machine fears Kamala might let out before November 8, 2024. Hence her refusal to answer any questions about her future economic policy.

“You know what Covid taught me? That we have enough. For everybody. Overnight we printed $6 Trillion. We had universal health care. We had universal basic income. Covid proved it’s possible.” - Nikole Hannah-Jones

This is not an actual quote, but a paraphrase. It’s referring to reparations and black economic history, from a discussion with Hannah-Jones about the 1619 Project at the MLK Library some weeks back. It wouldn’t appear to be indicative of Harris’ general economic policy proposals any more so than Trump’s.

At the 30 minute mark:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_dVGFzvOKdQ

[Chap]

Nicole Hannah-Jones says the quiet part out loud, the part that the Democratic socialist machine fears Kamala might let out before November 8, 2024. Hence her refusal to answer any questions about her future economic policy.

“You know what Covid taught me? That we have enough. For everybody. Overnight we printed $6 Trillion. We had universal health care. We had universal basic income. Covid proved it’s possible.” - Nikole Hannah-Jones

This is not an actual quote, but a paraphrase. It’s referring to reparations and black economic history, from a discussion with Hannah-Jones about the 1619 Project at the MLK Library some weeks back. It wouldn’t appear to be indicative of Harris’ general economic policy proposals any more so than Trump’s.

At the 30 minute mark:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_dVGFzvOKdQ

I think that many Americans who have done the sums have concluded that for ordinary US citizens their health care costs would be considerably decreased, their financial stability reinforced and their anxiety about illness or accidents much reduced if they had a system where for-profit health insurance companies were not able to syphon out of the health system a high proportion of the money paid by non-rich people, and divert it for the benefit of their share-holders, as they do at present. America does not need to 'print money' to provide what would be very like universal health care.

Health insurance companies would, of course, go bust, but I am sure people could cope with that without undue stress.

[Doctor Steuss]

And why does the steak I used to buy for $20 now cost $50 in your opinion?

It's an interesting question, especially since we have access to what the wholesale cost of beef is on the open market.

The day Biden took office, the market price for beef was 288.50/15KG. The price today is 237.40. Since a brief spike in 2022, it has steadily declined.

So far this year alone, the price of beef has decreased almost 11%.

During Trump's presidency, the price of beef nearly doubled.

https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/beef

[Gadianton]

The problem is that 20%

That wasn't explained. And I don't know the answer. The present guy tries to avoid steroids altogether. But it's been a while since we've been back because right now it's "okay".

Xiidra

Yup, that's the one that worked great for over a year and then made it worse.

recommend it to most patients over 50 in lieu of LASIK.

I got the same recommendation a few weeks ago when I got my eye exam and new glasses.