Amid the worst stretch of the global political panic over the coronavirus, the U.N.’s World Food Program estimated that 285 million of the world’s poorest were on a rapid path to starvation. To even partially vivify the previous truth, white flags were increasingly visible in El Salvador’s mass of hovels; the white flags a message of desperation related to food inside each hovel.
The obvious and not unreasonable comment about what you’ve just read is that lockdowns that were a policy manifestation of global political panic put a lot of people out of work who desperately needed to be working. It’s all true, but it only tells part of the story.
The much bigger story is that when the United States takes a break from reality as we did starting in March of 2020, the rest of the world suffers our abject stupidity most cruelly.
Still, the easily forgotten truth about manmade economic collapses such as the one from 2020, or the manmade ones that reveal themselves every so often as politicians blindly and illiterately “fight” healthy economic corrections, is that those who suffer the obnoxious conceit of the U.S. political class the most are people who don’t live in the United States.
For much of the world, their ability to eat is an effect of work done in the United States. You see, contra the various economic religions that tell us government spending (Keynesian), money creation (Monetarism), and central bank credit expansion (Austrian) stimulate “excess,” sometimes “inflationary” demand, the on-the-ground reality is very, very different. The only source of demand is production, and this truth becomes most apparent when production slows down in the U.S.
That’s because one of the biggest, if not the biggest drivers of consumption not in the United States is production that takes place in the United States. In other words, remittances from the productive in the U.S. feed, clothe, and house substantial numbers of humans around the world.
Looking back to 2020, when U.S. politicians chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy such that tens of millions of Americans were quickly rendered unemployed, the idle state of workers born of lockdowns resulted in hundreds of millions (and likely more) not eating. Say it repeatedly, when U.S. politicians err the hideous impact is felt globally.
It’s something misguided members of the political class will hopefully think about as they contemplate ways to “pay” for their so-called “megabill.” One of their ideas is to start taxing remittances from workers in the U.S. to relatives in some of the world’s poorest countries. What a sick idea.
Worse, what a sick idea bursting with hubris. Politicians think we’re so stupid as to take them seriously about “paying” for what they allot us? Shame on them. Lest they forget, we don’t work for them. In which case it’s not the job of U.S. workers, or their impoverished relatives outside the U.S., to help the political class achieve what’s nonsensical on its face: “budgetary balance.” It's not their money to "balance" any budget.
Too often lost in all the political posturing is that people are involved. In this case the world’s most vulnerable. A remittance tax might be the world’s cruelest.
