Deep economics here.
https://keenlens.substack.com/p/the-election-is-not-about-who-pays
'The Election Is Not About Who Pays. It's About Why Wages Stopped Working.
'A Keen-Lens analytical brief on the 2026 election economic policies of the Greens and National — and the private credit engine neither party can see.'
'“The immediate cause of unemployment is the unwillingness of entrepreneurs to produce goods when they think they cannot sell them. And this unwillingness arises because workers, having been stripped of income, cannot buy.” — Michał Kalecki, Theory of Economic Dynamics, 1954. Kalecki died in 1970, before New Zealand’s wage share began its long compression — and before two major parties built their 2026 platforms on opposite ends of the same wrong question.'
'Michał Kalecki’s core observation is this: when labour’s share of national income falls relative to capital’s share, consumer spending contracts. Workers spend most of their income. Capital owners save most of theirs. A shift from wages to profits does not just create inequality — it removes purchasing power from the economy. ...
'The Minsky corollary is that when wages compress and workers need to maintain living standards, private credit fills the gap. Not savings — credit. Households borrow against housing equity to sustain consumption. This is not irresponsibility. It is a rational response to income inadequacy in an economy where the asset most households own keeps appreciating. Until it doesn’t.
'...Pay equity is, in its economic structure, a direct wage-share intervention. The workers being paid ... are workers whose wages have been systematically held below market value because their work was classified as low-skill, female-dominated, and therefore cheap. Restoring their wages is not charity. It is a correction of a wage-share distortion that has been depressing consumer demand ....
'A wealth tax and CGT, however well-designed, redistribute existing claims on real assets. They do not directly address the credit cycle...'
And much more
Lucire
Leslie Burns
Robin Forlonge Patterson
GrumpyOldFart
