Reply With QuoteOriginally Posted by Mackie
Except that one (defense) is necessary while the other (entitlements) is not. Comparing rent to flatscreens.
Everyone else is arguing symantecs, you hit the nail on the head.
I love how the attitude to taxing the rich is semi religous, that if somehow you anger the gods "something" bad will happen to everyone.
People should pay according to ability to pay, US is becoming more unequal society, so one way to address this is through altering tax.
Gov spending - like consumer spending - can be positive and negative. Is it taking money from the economy to build a bubble or build in efficiency to enable more wealth generation in the future? Are consumers buying Chinese or US goods, sending jobs abroad or keeping them in US?
Someone mentioned we moved from laissez faire ... have they looked at financial regulation? Have they looked at how Gov is allied to the financial industry?
Where are the new regulations (or even old glass steagle) to correct the problems? These problems are not here since 2006-7 crisis. This is just the manifestation of the results of a crisis of regulation and morality that began at least 30 years back. It's just been getting worse since, and where is "Big" gov to deal with it? Right here making it worse of course!
Organised wealth transfer to bring unequality to the masses.
What revolution in Politics? A change in perception by the plebs is not political revolution, it's just people copping on to the con. Does that change politics? Of course not, the Wagon of Sacred Big Gov and Vested interests whores keeps on rolling until people stop it. Most are afraid or embarrassed to interfere with their betters.
Except that one (defense) is necessary while the other (entitlements) is not. Comparing rent to flatscreens.
Anyone who thinks doing nothing is going to change anything is a fool.
Noone sane would argue that defence is unneccessary. Lots of sane people however would argue that the scale of US defence spending is.
Cutting entitlement's is a dangerous proposition when you have more unemployed Americans than there are job vacancies. While I'm all for stopping leeches and scroungers, it's pretty difficult to tell people they should be working without offering them some form of employment.
Ultimately not everyone on welfare can work right now. Not because they're disabled or anything, but because noones hiring. You create thousands of vacancies then we'll talk about cutting entitlements.
if the defence expenditure is
a) in a right portion to GDP and threats.
b) spended right
Well, if you go by number 1 then we're clearly under spending. We're spending a lower % of GDP than we have in sometime when you take away the wars. (And you have to take away the wars because we're talking about the cost to maintain our armed forces and the political exercise of blowing up another country is not maintaining our armed forces.) If you go by the second, "spended right" you'd have to ask the warfighter about that. Too often we see politicians force the military to buy things they say they do not need or want (extra C-17s for example) and then short change them on things they do say they need (F-22s for example). And more often than not, the politicians making those decisions know fvck-all about either war or manufacturing. All they know is "how many votes will it get me".
You're spending a lower % of GDP than you have in some time because you're no longer playing red button chicken with an idealogically opposed nuclear super power, while simultaneously fighting them in a series of proxy wars.
That's not limited to defence. That's politicians generally. Unfortunately those who wish to rule are often least suited for it.
Related to the GDP is insane. It's an index without a standard. And in the US it switched in the 70s. So you can't compare it anymore.
There are plenty of indicators showing that the US GDP index has lost any relation to the real economy.
And? We're still spending less, as a function of GDP, on defense than at many points in history yet still have fatally large deficit spending. Must mean we're spending much MORE on something else. And that something else is entitlements. People like Mackie won't be happy until there is 0% spent on defense and we're spending 150% on entitlements. And then they'll be the first to riot when the whole operation goes tlts-up from stupidity.
"a) in a right portion to GDP and threats."
ROFL! That was the fastest back-pedal I've seen in a while.
Jobs: lots of jobs are created by "small business". 27 or so yrs. ago 3 of my friends whom I had worked with for years got tired of working for someone else and went out on their own, opened their own company with both borrowed money and their own money. They hired me after about a year and the business is still going. I worked there for about 22 years (until I retired). The company started with three guys, one guys wife was the typist/secretary. Now the company has offices in two cities in Texas, and about 50 or 60 employees and makes money, and pays taxes. They dont' get "bailed out" by the Federal Govt. if their company fails (like banks and auto makers).
Other small companies, restaurants, donut shops, cleaners, video rentals, animal vets, trucking companies, school districts, taxi companies, water bottling companies, oil change shops, etc make up a good deal of the American economy and stand on their own feet, and employ tons of people and contribute to the countries economic base.
My fault:
a) in a right portion to the overall budget and threats.
Fully agree with you. But small companies don't ruin a whole area if they collapse. So it's sometimes worth to intervene.
It's bad if politicians rescue a company without a future just to gain votes.
We should repost Mein Teil's OP over again.
I really is a good piece. Now the thread wanders.
One point in the origional post (and follow on comment on the first page) is the point of "what is seen and unseen".
That is really important in economics today. Just as it was in 1848 when Bastiat wrote it.
"There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
1.3Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come...
As with the present, think of the stimulus as immediate consequence......but what is unseen....is the latter consequence.
/1848
//no free lunch
///'borrowed debt' spending is not more of 'what we need'
How has the national deficit affect your daily life? Republicans complain that Obama is spending to much but said nothing when the second Bush gave the rich tax cuts and fought two wars. Obama's mistake was not making the stimulus bigger and not setting up some national infrastructure fund. This is not the time to worry in the short time about deficit, this is the time to worry about jobs and the way we create jobs is through education and stimulus.
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