Mattick Jnr. on Inflation

[alanjjohnstone]

Thanks to RobertS an economics article by Paul Mattick Jnr.

https://brooklynrail.org/2022/02/field-notes/Sticker-Shock

“…The money the government spends on all this comes almost entirely from taxation of and borrowing from the business entities making up the capitalist economy. If we think of wages as the amount of income workers actually receive, we see that taxes come from the money generated each year that could be appropriated by business owners, under such different names as profit, interest, and executive salaries…”

[alanjjohnstone]

As it relates to current events, i came across this 1935 article by his father on war.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/war-america.htm

[Anonymous]

Marxian theory of inflation

The Marxian Theory of Inflation

The article from the Brooklyn rail says that inflation has been low for a long period, I don’t think that it is true, I do remember when rent was $50.00 and a student boarding rent was $50.00 a month including three daily meals, tuition was $25.00 per semester, and by spending $100.00 in a supermarket you needed assistance to bring your grocery to the house and a car cost 1,500.00, gasoline was 0.25 cents, the telephone was $10.00 and electricity was 5.00 dollars, despite all that the real salary was very low

For 10 years, economists wondered: why is inflation so low? Suddenly, in the last few months, they wonder: why so high? In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “Economists are getting a dose of humility on forecasting inflation” as prices rise “well beyond the expectations of Wall Street and policymakers.”1 Politicians, economists, and the Man in the Street are used to blaming inflation on Big Government; as Ronald Reagan put it, “inflation results from all that deficit spending.”2 So the absence of inflation when government

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