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Unemployment, that more or less well-calculated deregulation of a new market, new technologies, new worldwide competitiveness, would no doubt, like labor or production, deserve another name today. [...] The function of social inactivity, of non-work or of underemployment is entering into a new era. It calls for another politics. [...]
[...] Calling public money “taxpayer money” implicitly affirms that taxation is theft: If the money is taxpayers’ by right, what business does the government have using it for healthcare, jobs, or clean water? If we’re looking out for “taxpayers” and not the public as a whole, we are favoring wealthier groups over poorer ones—white people over Black people, men over women, U.S.-born people over immigrants, and so forth. We’re hiding how the economic order relies not merely on the sacrifices of “taxpayers,” but the contributions of debtors, tenants, workers, and countless other actors. [...]
Not only is the “taxpayer money” frame damaging, it doesn’t reflect how public spending actually works. A household or a business may have to stash or borrow money before it can spend any, but we are users of the currency. The U.S. government, which is the issuer of the currency, works differently: Congress votes to spend “new money” on something, then the Treasury and the Federal Reserve credit the relevant bank accounts, and...that’s it. The government has spent new money into existence. Later, Congress may tax “old money” back out of existence, but it isn’t collecting money in order to spend it. It’s “offsetting” earlier spending. It may also offset spending by bumping student loan rates, policing for profit, or various other activities. Although Congress taxes everyday people too heavily, calling public money “taxpayer money” makes as much sense as calling it “student debtor money” or “suspicious driver money.”
Look at a dollar bill, and you will see the signatures of its creators: not taxpayers, but the public officials who let the taxpayers hold it in the first place. Money doesn’t grow on rich people. We should heavily tax the billionaire class so we stop living in an oligarchy, but we don’t need private capital for public spending. The federal government doesn’t confiscate dollars and redistribute them. It uses its legal power to create and destroy them.
Margaret Thatcher’s mantra was backwards: There is no such thing as “taxpayer money,” only public money. Modern money is a creature of the public, and we should use it for public power. We are all the public, and we each deserve a clear, equal say in how our economy and society work, no matter how much we each pay in taxes. It’s time to claim our democratic rights.
Falling in love with C was not gradual. Falling in love with C was encompassing, consuming, life-expanding. It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth. In those early days, he was a man frying little disks of sausage on a hot plate in a Paris garret, asking me to marry him. Making me laugh so hard I slipped off our red couch. Loving the smoked tacos we got from a tiny shack just north of Morro Bay. Pointing out backyard chickens from the garage we rented behind a surfer’s bachelor pad. Putting his hand on my thigh while I drank contrast fluid that tasted like bitter Gatorade, before a CT scan to find my burst ovarian cyst. Playing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on a road trip, putting a cinnamon bear on our rental car dashboard because it was our mascot, our trusty guide. Our thing. We had a thousand things, like everyone. But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now?
In those early days, he was a man ordering room-service steak at the Golden Nugget after we said our vows in a Vegas wedding chapel at midnight. He was a man curled beside me watching our favorite obstacle-course program on TV, a man getting my face tattooed on his biceps, a man whispering in my ear at a crowded party.
He is still that man. I am still that woman. We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.
My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.
Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.
She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.
i like this
When I met C, I was thirty years old. I wasn’t a child. But there was so much I didn’t know. I’d never made a choice I couldn’t take back. I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.
C loved basketball sneakers and bodega snacks, drank soda rather than coffee. He was easily affronted and absolutely forthright. He was not afraid of hard work or a crisis; he was consolidated by difficulty. He always rooted for the underdog. He loved Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from Say Anything: the kickboxer wooing the beautiful valedictorian, standing beneath her window in a baggy beige blazer and a Clash T-shirt, hoisting his boombox high above his head.
The first time C and I talked about my eating disorder, a few weeks into our relationship, he asked me how much I’d weighed when I was sick. Partway through my response, he broke in to tell me how little his wife had weighed by the end of her life. The memory was so painful it cut through him, like a splinter breaking through the surface of his skin. He had no choice but to say it out loud. In that moment, and many others, everything I’d lived seemed trivial in relation to everything he’d survived.
Still, some part of me had wanted to finish my sentence.
Another part of me thought that making this man happy would be more meaningful than anything else I’d ever done. From early on, he said, “You are giving me another life.” Every time I felt a flicker of doubt, it seemed like a betrayal of this hope.
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This was life under the shadow of the question mark. I spent long, agonizing hours on the phone with my mother, explaining my uncertainty to her, hoping she could help me decide. She asked, “What is your gut telling you?” But the question didn’t help, because my gut told me conflicting things at once—that we were soulmates, and that we were doomed—and my gut wasn’t a voice to be trusted, anyway. Recovery had taught me this. My gut wanted to drink and drink and drink. My gut didn’t realize that no matter how much I drank, I’d still be thirsty.
By the time I met C, I was sick of listening to my gut. I was ready to bring in upper management. Upper management said I was done with waffling, done with going back and forth. Upper management told me not to listen to my doubts. They were only coaxing me back into a prior version of myself.
lol
Lying in bed, under the sloping roof of our Paris garret, C said we should get married. I said yes, because I was in love with him, and because I wanted my whole self to want something, no questions asked. I wanted that consolidation. I wanted to believe in love as a conscious decision more than an act of surrender. I’d spent years surrendering myself to feelings and I was tired of it. Surrender was just an excuse. You could bend emotion to your will instead.
This firmness would help me escape what one ex had called my “terrible, fickle heart.” Maybe not escape that heart, but discipline it.
very relatable lol