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Which came first?
I think you will find I maintained my position for some time, and also joked about the rain.
Rather predictable for WC to sidetrack by claiming someone else sidetracked.
Which came first?
I think you will find I maintained my position for some time, and also joked about the rain.
You maintain a positon based on unsupported correlation?
This is joking about rain? Predictable.
You know I'm right, so you sidetrack the issue.
Unbelievable.
Don't you think it's a bit unfair to hand-wave away the evidence when it doesn't fit your theory, but point to every bit of data that DOES fit your theory as proof-positive that you're right?
Believe as you wish.
How does redistributing wealth improve the economy?
Don't you think we need to return good paying jobs to our shores instead of outsourcing them?
Just how are any of theses attempts to spend our way to prosperity suppose to work when it isn't returning jobs?
I have shown that tax revenue changes very little vs. tax rates in the long term. We need more people making good wages to be taxed. Not bigger taxes.
Obama really might have made it worse
http://blogs.reuters.com/james-petho...made-it-worse/
The Republican charge is a body shot aimed right at the belly of President Barack Obama’s re-election effort: He made it worse.
No, not that White House efforts at boosting the American economy and creating jobs and “winning the future” were merely inefficient or wasteful, which they certainly were. Even Obama finally seems to understand that. “Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” he joked lamely at a meeting of his jobs council.
Rather, that the product of all the administration’s stimulating and regulating is an economy that’s in significantly worse compe ive and productive shape than when Obama took the oath in January 2009. He was dealt a bad hand, to be sure – and then proceeded to play it badly. At least, that is what Republicans have been saying. “He didn’t cause the recession as we know,” presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in New Hampshire yesterday. “He didn’t make it better, he made things worse.”
Team Obama offers a different narrative, of course. As the president said in his State of the Union address earlier this year, “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again. … These steps we’ve taken over the last two years may have broken the back of this recession.” He somehow failed to insert his usual boilerplate about the economy losing 700,000 jobs a month when he took office.
But Obama is correct, to a degree. The economy is growing (slowly) now and adding jobs (modestly) whereas neither was happening back in early 2009. Of course, economies in recession will eventually recover even without government action. So the question is whether Obamanomics helped, hurt or was inconsequential.
The centerpiece of Obama’s plan to “push the car out of the ditch” was the trillion-dollar (including interest expense on the borrowed money) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A recent article in The Weekly Standard determined that it may have cost as much as $278,000 for each job created. But that’s generous. Respected Stanford economist John Taylor, perhaps the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, has analyzed the actual results of the ARRA. Not what the White House’s garbage-in, garbage-out models say happened, but what actually happened as gleaned from government statistics. Taylor, simply put, looked at whether consumers actually consumed and whether government actually spent in a way that produced real growth and jobs. His devastating conclusion:
Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.
Indeed, the results are horrifying. The two-year-old recovery’s terrible tale of the tape: A 9.1 percent unemployment rate that’s probably closer to 16 percent counting the discouraged and underemployed, the worst income growth and weakest GDP growth of any upturn since World War II, a still-weakening housing market. Oh, and a trillion bucks down the tube. Oh, and two-and-a-half years … and counting … wasted during which time the skills of unemployed workers continue to erode and the careers of younger Americans suffer long-term income damage. Losing the future.
Next, add in healthcare reform that Medicare’s chief actuary says will not slow the overall growth of healthcare spending. (Even its Obama administration godfather, Peter Orszag, warns that “more drastic measures may ultimately be needed.”) And toss in a financial reform plan that the outspoken and independent president of the Kansas City Fed says he “can’t imagine” working. “I don’t have faith in it all.” Indeed, markets continue to treat the biggest banks as if they are still too big to fail.
But wait there’s more. Obama created a debt commission that produced a reasonable though imperfect plan to deal with America’s long-term fiscal woes. But he stiffed it and then failed to supply a plan of his own, sowing the seeds for an impending debt ceiling crisis and making an eventual fiscal fix that much harder. One more step along the path not taken, along with pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that would have reduced policy and economic uncertainty and unleashed the private sector to invest, expand and create.
Elections have results. So do bad policies. Obama’s choices on taxing and spending and regulating, sorry to say, seem to have made things worse.
I'm not an economist; I don't know.
However, revenues were higher in the 50's and 60's when the tax rates were much greater.
If your theory is that lower tax rates = better economy, you can't just dismiss every historical instance in which that isn't the case.
Sure do. I don't know exactly how we could do that without removing the minimum wage, or greatly decreasing the standards of American living. Even if we charged a smaller amt on corporate taxes than other countries, if they can get people to work for pennies on the dollar, they will.
Why not both?
"He made it worse."
... which is a lie the Repugs are going to use, to blame their mismanaged ecoonomy handed to Barry, and then Repugs screamed like about the too-small stimulus as being too big (which should have been about $2T given the size of the Banksters' Great Depression). Now that the auto bailouts are hiring, and all honest evidence shows the stimulus was too small, but effective as far as it, the Repugs lie, lie, lie.
Note very carefully that the tea baggers and Repugs refuse to blame the depression on the financial sector, since they all work for and protect the financial sector.
Allah help us all if the Repugs sweep in 2012. They will continue to destroy the country at all levels, as we can easilty see now in the states the Repugs won in 2010.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-06-2011 at 06:46 PM.
I literally just explained this to you last night. Are you that dense? Redistributing wealth helps the economy by taking money from the rich (who don't spend it) gives it to the poor who spend every dime of it, which in turn increases demand. Demand goes up, those rich people make more money selling additional goods and services and hire more people. Everyone wins.
But the rich do either spend or invest which does also improve the economy. Again, we need to return jobs to America. That is the key. Without that, we are going nowhere fast.
No, they don't spend, at least not any significant portion of their overall wealth. They hoard. That why we've seen wealth being hyper-concentrated at the very top - a trend that began around 30 years ago when Reagan began his slash tax/deregulation mantra that has become the GOP creed. And while they do invest, that money is increasingly going overseas where there is a higher return. These people are not in it for American pride, the money goes to the place where it get's the highest return.
I have no problem increasing tariffs to bring back a little old fashion protectionism, but it's not going to bring our manufacturing jobs home dude. That ship has sailed.
I don't think that necessarily makes sense. Let's say we've got a hypothetical million dollars.
Scenario A: One person has a million dollars.
Scenario B: The million dollars is split, with $10,000 going to 100 different families with incomes under $50K a year.
In which scenario do you think more money will be "spent" as opposed to "saved"?
The rich invest where the biggest returns are. They DGAF about the economy or jobs.
There used to be a time when they used to invest long term in the stock market, and took some risks with their money. Nowadays, the bigger margins and lower risks are somewhere else. Things like the nano/micro second trades have boomed, which only indicate there's substantial money made there. That doesn't generate any long term investments or jobs. Hedging on the speculation of the futures markets, a completely intangible investment, is also where money has been. And it also only provides dividends, but no actual meaningful support for the economy or job creation.
The very rich are recession-proof, and don't help the economy at all. They just keep stockpiling for themselves. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but stop helping people that don't need help and don't want to help anybody else either.
It's not the amount, but how it was used that was really the problem. The government effectively just absorbed states and companies debts. Previous methods that showed actual results involved directly funding projects (and insuring they actually took place) which forcibly creates jobs and purchases to stimulate the economy.
Anyone with half a brain knew that just about every suggestion the Reps or Dems tossed out was going to have an immensely smaller effect than proclaimed. It was ridiculous to even go through with them. Especially the one right after Obama's inauguration when the economy was already showing signs of recovering.
"economy was already showing signs of recovering."
in Feb 09 the economy was recovering? and Barry killed it?
You know what. It doesn't matter as you aren't creating jobs.
Before that time frame. 2007 it was still recovering.
I'm talking about it dropping after the 2006 elections. Not 2008.
You really are this dense aren't you? This is really basic, but you don't seem to be able to grasp the concept.
If the 1 person who receives the $1M decides to take his windfall and buy a $100K boat and saves the rest, that will increase demand by $100k and may require the boat manufacturer to add staff (i.e. create Jobs).
If the 100 people making 50k a year spend 90% of their $10k on any number of goods and services, that's $900k dollars on goods and services driving up demand and creating jobs.
Prove to me your assumption the rich man doesn't spend that money. How do you know he doesn't have a fixed investment plan and spends the extra?
Your assumption is no better than mine. No matter how you slice it, you are advocating theft. You just want the law makers to make it legal.
It's not your money. Stop asking for it.
See, you argue one thing, then when countered, bring up another thing as if your original point never mattered.
Tell me WC, aren't jobs also created through demand? If that million dollars were distributed, then the families spending it would be supporting and creating job growth in the areas that they spend their money, right?
Oh my. It was just an example. This article by the New York Times explains explains that the top fifth makes 15 times more income than the bottom fifth. But when compared using consumption as the criteria of wealth the upper rich only consume four times that of the bottom fifth.
Again, if you want to increase demand, which you have already agreed is the core issue with the economy, you need to get more money in the hands of those who will spend it. My opinion is the best way to do that is through government transfers, which will in-turn increase demand and allow the economy to function at it's full capacity. This will ultimately benefit the rich as well.
Which assumption do you think is more likely? That the rich person will spend nearly all the million, or that the 100 families will spend all $10000?
Why? Is all taxation wrong now in your mind?
this Repug-campaign hit piece doesn't talk about the 10s of 1000s of state/county/municipal jobs saved by the stimulus funds.
Now the stimulus funds are stopped, we can expect those 10s of 1000s of public sector jobs to be lost. And along with those losses, reduced consumption, more credit and mortgages in default.
Barry's huge mistake was not going after the financial sector in 2009.
Financial sector gain is Human-Americans loss. An almost perfectly zero-sum game.
Rhetorically, totally wrong. Taxes bad, tax cuts good is the whole Republican doxology.
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