The Private Sector: A Bad Return on Investment

The Private Sector: A Bad Return on Investment

 

The U-6 rate, also known as the underemployment rate, declined to 10.7% from 11.1%. It is often thought of as a more inclusive measure of unemployment than the headline figure because it also accounts for those who stopped looking for a job because they were discouraged about their prospects and those working part-time but desiring a full workweek.

 

 

-       Job Growth in U.S. Topped 900,000 in March as Hiring Broadened - Bloomberg

 

By JM Hamilton (4-3-2021)

 

One of the key investment ratios of finance -- so as to determine whether or not an investment is producing a reasonable return, vis a vis, competing or alternative investments -- is the return on investment ratio (or ROI).  Adjusted for inflation or the time value of money, financial types might look at a real return on investment ratio or net present value analysis. 

 

JMH brings this up because it crossed my mind recently, who is looking out for the taxpayers’ ROI?  It’s a very serious question, because since the 2008 financial crisis, and going back to 9-11… the US taxpayer has dumped trillions into Forever Wars and Wall Street bailouts.  More recently, Congress passed $4.4 trillion in Wall Street welfare, under the CARES Act, March 2020. 

 

So what exactly have Americans received with the trillions they’ve invested in Endless War, Wall Street crises, corporate welfare, and tax cuts for the rich?  The simple answer is: not a hell of a lot.  In fact, such welfare has been highly detrimental to the nation, national security, the economy, and American labor/consumer.  By way of example, has US national security been made any more durable by dumping trillions into the Middle East and Afghanistan, or our global empire?  The simple answer is assuredly not. 

                                                                                                            

Has Wall Street in any manner become less dangerous, any less leveraged, as a result of the 'no strings attached,' taxpayer funded welfare, showered upon banks, financiers, insurance companies, and hedge/mutual funds?  

 

Again, no. 

 

Tax cuts, worth trillions, showered upon billionaires and multinationals?  Did the recipients create more jobs, more opportunity, enhance the US economy, give their employees a long overdue raise … again, the answer is no. 

 

So what did Americans receive for the trillions wasted on the wealthy… well, they received: catastrophic national debt; debt, which is in turn, used by hypocritical & manipulative members of congress to withhold social spending directed at the public, in the name of austerity & budget control; we’ve seen gross wage and wealthy inequality… and wage stagnation; Americans have seen one in five children living in poverty; a decaying infrastructure; and the bottom half of American society living at a sustenance level of existence. 

 

Instead, the wealthy spent government/taxpayer largesse on: financial engineering; M&A/consolidation; stock buybacks; and feathering their own gilded nests. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reform?  Forget about it.  Wall Street is still neck deep in gambling with trillions and trillions in swap and derivatives; and there’s no sign that war profiteers need to worry one iota about POTUS Biden pulling out of Afghanistan or the Middle East. 

 

And, perhaps more detrimental…. Americans have to bribe monopolies with taxpayer dollars, the very companies often minting billions in profits, to do the right thing.  Whether its state aid to bribe Big Pharma into manufacturing taxpayer funded, vital vaccines, or a backdoor bailout for the airline industry, under the guise of saving jobs. Obamacare – not living up to medical cost containment expectations?  That’s okay, Congress will bailout failure and rapacious healthcare insurance companies, under the smokescreen of helping the uninsured buy healthcare coverage from the same unsavory US healthcare insurers. 

 

Despite endless failure, endless bailouts & corporate welfare, notice that nobody in power ever addresses, or questions, the failed neocon/neoliberal/globalist paradigm.  

 

It’s a racket, and many Americans have grown numb to it, because we’ve come to expect that the private sector is on welfare.  Americans expect that the wealthy are looting the Federal government, and that nobody in government – especially our elected leaders - is watching the government till on behalf of the disenfranchised voter.  Americans have come to expect that multinationals – who are the beneficiaries of the crony-economy & massive theft – are also exporting jobs and the US economy offshore.  American Private Equity destroys the economy, jobs, indeed, entire industries... is that a good return on tax dollars used to bailout the industry, under the CARES Act?

 

The private sector has become so lethargic, concentrated, greed based, & myopic … that it’s just assumed that the FED’s printing presses will be switched on, automatically, at the first hint of trouble, so as to spend trillions on Wall Street & C-suite robber barons, and in order to finance America’s Forever Wars.  Meanwhile, Americans receive a fourteen-hundred dollar check. 

 

But if we are truly honest, it’s time for Americans to realize that the trillions they are dumping on the private sector is an exceptionally bad investment… an investment that is bankrupting the nation, rewarding failure, encourages the private sector's shakedown of the public, and yields an extraordinarily poor rate of return for this and future generations.

 

The assumption that the private sector is a good public sector investment … has been crushed by the pandemic & climate change. 

 

Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2021