Article: President's economic adviser slammed for calling workers human capital stock

[bdamomma]

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-the-trump-white-house-sees-you-presidents-economic-adviser-slammed-for-calling-workers-human-capital-stock/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4626

snip of article:

In a remark critics characterized as further evidence that the Trump administration views workers as nothing more than disposable tools of economic growth and corporate profit, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett on Sunday nonchalantly referred to laid-off employees as “human capital stock” as he pushed people to return to their jobs amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

Voicing optimism about the potential for a speedy economic recovery even as U.S. unemployment surges to levels not seen since the Great Depression, Hassett told CNN Sunday that “our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so that there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises.”


Rolling Stone‘s Peter Wade wrote Monday that “the way Hassett used the term so casually lines up with the lack of empathy shown to the victims of the coronavirus by Trump’s administration and Republicans since the crisis began months ago.”

Not asked to explain his use of the dehumanizing label, Hassett went on to say that an expansion of federal nutrition benefits and another round of direct stimulus payments may not be necessary because “the economy’s picking up at a very rapid rate”—a claim belied by ongoing mass layoffs and surging hunger across the United States.

Instead of relief for the tens of millions of people who are newly out of work and struggling to afford basic necessities, Hassett said the White House could “potentially move on to other things that the president has mentioned, like the payroll tax cut and potentially even a capital gains holiday.”

Advocacy groups have repeatedly warned that a payroll tax cut represents a sneak-attack on Social Security and Medicare that would do nothing for the unemployed. The latter idea Hassett floated would be a massive boon for rich investors, as the Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell noted in a column Monday.


The degrading of the American people never stops. These thugs who say these horrible things need what is coming to them.

[I_UndergroundPanther]

1. They believe in neoliberal bullshit

That's why they see people as stock. Free markets is a huge disgusting lie. Along with trickle down crap.

Neoliberalism is a belief system that excuses sociopathy and greed.

[RKP5637]

2. "The degrading of the American people never stops." Yet they vote those types in. Often

I wonder if Americans are ill-informed, or really, basically stupid.

[DBoon]

3. Amazing how the right wing sounds like a cynical Marxists these days.

"Human Capital Stock" sounds like something out of Das Capital, meant to highlight the degradation of workers under capitalism and rally them to overthrow it.

[bdamomma]

4. thus the

categorization of "essential" workers, what is everyone else????

[keithbvadu2]

5. GOP Human Capital Stock

GOP Human Capital Stock