So why are business contracting now? They’re still benefiting from the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and even Obama (pop quiz: do you think he’s increased taxes or lowered them?) tax cuts. Why aren’t they expanding?
If we cut their taxes to 2%, and they expanded for a bit, but in 10 years started to contract again like they are now, do we have to lower their taxes to 1% to get them to expand again? Why are the effects of lowered taxes transient? Do we just have to keep cutting them until they’re zero, because the effects of those cuts vanish?
What change in the tax code in 2008 screwed up the whole economy?
Really? Now for some taxes this can make sense - if there’s a widget component tax, the company buying the widget components to build widgets will have to charge more for the widgets they ultimately produced. But what about personal income tax? Does the head of a company just say “well, with the new taxes, I’ve decided my take-home income is too little, so I’m just going to jack up prices”?
Isn’t that what the free market works to prevent? Businesses can’t just arbitrarily decide to make more profit, or a competitor will undercut them. But if we raise personal income tax rates, this particular nature of the free market no longer applies, or what?
And who’s helped by it? The guys who build the roads the tax money pays for. The people and businesses that use the roads to increase their commerce. It’s not like the money dissapears into a pit never to be seen again.
And since money is fungible, future taxpayers will be helped by having less federal debt to pay down. I’m old enough to have voted for Republicans who said this was a good thing.
Well, any money spent by government essentially might as well be thrown into a pit… They manage to eff up just about anything they get their hands on.
Yeah, I’ve seen those guys who build roads, who pretty much close off a whole section of road for a year, while five of them stand around and watch one guy work. Money well spent.
Ok. Did businesses contract or not in the post-2008 period? Why? What was the tax policy that made them change? If the thing that drives business size and growth is tax policy, why didn’t the reagan/clinton/bush/obama tax cuts continue to provide growth in the post-2008 period? Why do we need additional tax cuts? Are the effects of the tax cuts transient? If we cut taxes now, will businesses stagnate and shrink in a few years, requiring another tax cut injection? And on and on, until there are eventually no taxes?
Thus the bonanza of private roads now crisscrossing the country, to take advantage of the market niche left open by those inefficient government-run roads.
Wait, those cross-country private roads don’t exist? Whyever not? There’s bound to be a lot of profit in them, if the government roads are as inefficient as you say.
You’re like a conventional wisdom generator. Press a button, get a talking point. Do you have, oh, I dunno, any cites to back up these outlandish claims?
Get it straight: Just because a lot of people in the South believe something, doesn’t make it true. Government, in fact, has a very useful track record. Here’s a few of government’s greatest hits:[ul]
[li] Interstate highway system[/li][li] The Hoover Damn [/li][li] The Lincoln Tunnel[/li][li] Rural electrification [/li][li] The Clean Water Act[/li][li] The Clean Air Act[/li][li] The Glass-Steagal Act[/li][li] NASA[/li][li] CDC[/li][li] Civil Rights Act[/li][li] Human Genome Project[/li][li] The G.I. Bill[/li][li] The National Academy of Sciences[/li][li] The National Park System[/li][li] Public Libraries[/li][li] Oh yeah, and the most powerful army the world has ever seen. [/ul][/li]
To name, in all seriousness, but a few. Those were the first programs which sprang to mind. I’m sure that if I took just a few minutes to compile a proper list I could come up with plenty more. Am I saying that the Government is perfect, or even nearly perfect? Of course not! But to say that “any money spent by government essentially might as well be thrown into a pit” is just a bullshit right wing talking point. It’s lazy, easy, “conventional wisdom” of the sort commonly bandied about at those loose conventions of neurotic boomers commonly known as “Tea Party Rallys”. Contrary to Reagan’s cretinous aphorism that “Government is not the solution, government is the problem”, a cursory glance at America’s legislative history shows that all too often, the government provides effective, lasting solutions to national problems.
Who do you think you’re scoring points with by saying “The One”? Certainly no one on these boards has never said anything like that seriously. It’s a completely fabricated idea that right wingers made up to explain the widespread support for Obama, that he’d somehow tricked us with his celebrity voodoo.
If you say it to us here, you just look like an idiot. So why don’t you save it for when you’re amongst your own kind and you can snicker about how clever you are? Because it’s not helping you any.
Anyway, quit dodging my question. You seem to fail to acknowledge completely the lack of demand on business in accordance with a huge worldwide recession, feeling that clearly tax cuts are the only way out of it. So if a lack of demand isn’t what’s causing problems now, and it’s the tax burden on business that’s holding them back, what tax policy changed in 2008 to cause the massive economic contraction?
Let’s see now, you give a list of government agencies that work, leaving out that a lot of them aren’t really all that. Most of them are things the private sector won’t do because there’s no profit in it. I’ll grant that. Most of those things should be done by government. Unfortunately, the government does them badly.
I was in the US Army for 11 years. (reserve and active) Frankly, if you want to cite the military as an example of efficiency, I’d have to wonder if you ever served in it. Huge amounts of inefficiencies. Bases that are kept open not because the military still needs them, but because they need the jobs in that state. High tech peices of equipment that have components built in dozens of different places so they can spread out the jobs.
The highway department builds bridges to nowhere. NASA builds space shuttles that were supposed to be cheap satellite delivery systems, but they were almost never used for that.
GOvernment is a parasite that has grown so large the body can no longer carry it.
This bickering makes exactly the point that big government doesn’t unify the people - it separates them and turns them on each other.
Here we have a situation where the big man with the guns (the federal government) says, “Okay all you people, fight amongst yourselves to see who should get everyone’s money. Then we’ll take a head count every two or four years, and we’ll use our guns to go take money from everyone and give it to the side who wins.”
That’s the nature of democracy in a welfare state. Everyone feels entitled to a piece of the pie. Every decision about allocation of resources becomes political and partisan. People choose sides, and declare the other side the enemy. You gain political power by constantly appealing to people’s sense of victimization to convince them to join you for ‘justice’. Anger is the currency of the political system.
In comparison, in the private market people work together, because they’re all working for their own self-interest. Jews sell products to Muslims, who then sell them to Christians. Cars made by rednecks in Louisiana are purchased by latte’ drinking preppies in San Fransisco. No one cares about your religious beliefs, or whether you’re gay, or whether you’re Republican or Conservative. All they care about is getting the best value for their own dollar.
The fighting and squabbling over the spoils of government that are increasing around the world are exactly what’s wrong with giving control over the distribution of the population’s assets to politicians.
In the worst-case scenario, you get riots and strikes and firebombings, such as what’s going on in countries in Europe today.
Big government doesn’t turn people against each other. The right wing corporate media turns people against the government, because otherwise they realize they have power and can use it. This also turns them against anyone who isn’t similarly gulled.
Or at least, that’s the exaggerated trope to counter yours.
I think you have missed the disconnect between causation and correlation.
Workers fighting corporate goons for a decent wages, health insurance, halfway acceptable retirement benefits, and reasonable work schedules, all amidst record-breaking profits by the corporation that have NOT “tickled down” to the workers, is caused by the government somehow?
I think not.
The government might be in a position to do something about it, but government didn’t create the problem.
Well, I just proved you wrong, because I’ve worked in the private market my entire life. Small and large businesses, self-employed, wage serf, you name it. I’ve never gone near a public sector job.
The fact is, in the end the market forces people to cooperate for their own self interest.