Louisiana Hornets, perhaps?
As for replacing our economic structure with one that actually works, the first step is to vote for representatives who actually care about…oh wait, never mind. :rolleyes:
What is so complicated about giving tax breaks and regulatory exemptions to microbusinesses? As long as we have any type of organization, we are going to have myriad record-keeping requirements. And I don’t see any radical changes to central planning - all governments - democratic, communist, socialist, monarchist - have promoted certain organizations over others. I am arguing that policies which promote larger enterprises will not lead to the increase in job creation we need. We need a balance of promoting job creation at all levels, especially at the bottom which I think has greater potential than focusing at the top.
Trader markets - call them swap meets on steroids if you want - are one way of promotion.
Generally, I do not like using tax schemes to promote any social policy. I would be happy with a straight flat tax (25% of all income - minus standard deduction for living expenses + annual levy to cover any deficit.) But until then, it is still a valid policy tool. And even with a flat tax, we would still provide regulatory relief and other incentives for different categories of organizations.
[QUOTE=Nathan E. Zephyr]
As for replacing our economic structure with one that actually works, the first step is to vote for representatives who actually care about…oh wait, never mind. :rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
I am sure they will get to job creation eventually - that is what they campaigned on, right? And such paragons of virtue would never use such subterfuge as false promises to get into office and then promote policies which kill jobs.
(Yeah, I can’t keep a straight face on that one either.)
Trickle down was first proposed and implement by Reagan. It has been in place to, varying degrees since. Bush pushed it way to the top.
It has been proven not to work. It does not create jobs and it makes a huge income disparity.
Prosperity is enhanced by an increasing demand for products. Taking money out of the consumers pockets has been destructive to the country. Demand is the factor in the economic equation that creates hiring.
What gets me is the wealthy don’t seem to understand this.
I have cited studies in the past that showed even when the rich were taxed more heavily they made as much or more money.
At the end of the day people need money to buy an iPod to make Steve Jobs rich. Take their money away and people are only buying food and other necessities.
I guess it is a take the money and run philosophy the rich have. Supposedly they deserve the money because they worked for it. Fine…then work for it. Make a better product at a better price. I’m all for that.
Look, what’s so complicated? The working class thrusts its bottom up, and the ruling class lets the wealth trickle down.
The sad fact is the rich don’t care about America. They see short term profits, jamming money into their bank accounts, is all that matters. They do not believe they owe anything to America. They will move their jobs abroad in a heartbeat. They will pretend they have a corporation in the Caimans to avoid taxes. they will evade taxes with the best accountants money can buy and exert huge pressure on the members of the house and senate to slip more tax breaks into legislation.
Patriotism is the a concept the poor embrace. The rich see America as just another market. The factor that does not matter, is the possible harm their business decisions will do to the rest of us.
It’s the freaking “promotion” that’s the damn problem. You set clear, uniform rules that apply to everyone equally, then get the hell out of the way. Small businesses have show time and again that they CAN compete with larger ones, especially if the government will refrain from helping the big businesses.
Your scheme has all sorts of regulatory complexities and invitations to game the systems.
Why does the whole slew of regulatory burdens kick in at once as you cross the poverty level? You’re strangling a small business just as it’s gaining steam, and creating a great incentive to make sure that business always stays just under the line – at least on paper. Are you going to hire investigators to make sure craftsmen aren’t making $35,000 instead of the $15,000 they claim? How do you handle partnerships? Can I list every member of my family as an independent operator, and divide my income by family size? What if I take payment in the form of barter from the artisan in the next stall – I swap my handmade hemp overalls for his hand-thrown pottery/farm-raised eggs/custom-built computers. Are you going to force us to assign some monetary value to that trade, so you can record it and know when we cross the poverty threshold? How would you even know?
And for that matter, why set it at the poverty threshold at all – you’re giving zero incentive for the vast majority of people who live above it. It might be a nice idea for someone unemployed or very poor, but it’s not an attractive deal for someone who already has a 9-5 job, even a pretty crappy one. Do you want to live on Medicaid and spend your days in a stall at a government-run flea market?
***That’s ***your problem. If you want more small businesses, cut back on those costs by cutting back on those rules and stopping corporate welfare to larger businesses.
If people need welfare, we can give them welfare; but fucking with the market thinking we’re smarter than the laws of supply and demand just makes things worse for everyone.
Sorry to tell you this, but the ‘perfect ocean’ model of economics does not exist, never has existed, and never will exist. Everything else is never equal. General equilibrium will only be achieved when the sun goes nova. All firms are not equal. Labor and capital are not interchangeable, nor are they fungible in most cases. Your proposal for a set of ‘clear, uniform rules’ will create its own set of distortions. There will always be shocks to the system, either internal or external.
What is the point of all this? Throw enough straw men against the wall and see if one sticks? The poverty level was a suggestion, but the whole point of incentives to enable someone to reach a level where they no longer need them. Will some get addicted to carrots? Sure. But most recognize they can earn many more carrots on their own. As far as investigators, we already have them. cf. IRS and states’ Department of Revenue. (There is shortage of investigators but that is another thread.) And my proposal only applies to sole-proprietorships. We have regulations already to deal with your other straw men regarding family labor and bartering. But if you want the perfect to keep being the enemy of the good, go ahead and throw some more against the wall.
Again the poverty level is a suggestion, and it is a threshold for the NET profits. Raise it $25K, $50K, whatever makes you happy. But again the whole idea is to address the unemployed or very poor and make it easier for them to become self-employed. And I think most would rather run a stall (which is just one method of implementing this program, not the only method) than remain in their current condition.
And governments don’t need to run them, but I see no reason why they could not. The rent money would a be decent source of revenue that doesn’t rely on taxation. But zoning laws and permit requirements would have to change for most cities to set up permanent swap meets, farmer markets or any other kind of bazaar.
The whole point of studying the ‘laws’ of economics is so we can ‘fuck’ with them. The same reason we study the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. We learn how the processes work so we can adjust their effects to suit our needs. There is no natural level of supply and demand for anything. There will always be distortions, from corporate welfare to tax laws to the level of technology and education down to basic geography. The object is not to remove distortions, but to create those that work in our favor, and not against them. Policies that shift as many as possible from the labor side to the employer side does that.
Side note, we study physics so we understand the universe and can work within those laws. Physics is easy*, observe, come up with a theory that explains the observations, make predictions and test. Lather, rinse, repeat.
When it comes to economics however, it isn’t so easy. Changing laws changes the environment of economics and the results are rarely understood before hand. There is no way to test the effects of a change before hand.
You claim ‘The object is not to remove distortions, but to create those that work in our favor…’ but economics is not physics and your little claim has all kinds of implied but not explicit assumptions. Who is ‘our’? Whose favor is your plan going to work for? How do you know what *all *the effects of your changes are going to be?
The answer is you don’t. You are making random guesses to what you think would make the economy run in a way that fits your political leanings. Your idea isn’t based upon any economic idea, but rather on political ideas and those rarely work. There are too many unintended consequences. The road to economic hell is paved with good political intentions.
Slee
*For various values of easy
This just further shows that economics is not a science, but a social discipline like politics (they need to drop the ‘science’ part of that discipline also), law, education and every other human endeavor. While scientific methods are useful, they cannot create grand universal theories such as the hard sciences do, and they ignore the behavioral and cultural aspects that create results (for better or worse) more than any ‘scientific’ policies do.
As far as testing the effects, the problem there is that we generate far more data than we can sift through, but we can isolate effects of specific policies on smaller areas. We currently have 200+ countries and a magnitude more of smaller jurisdictions were we can observe the effects. Another part of the problem is that is it still a very young discipline and has been plagued by ideological and political assumptions from the beginning to the present. And since those are part and parcel of being human, it is ridiculous to try to remove them. All we can do is recognize them and adjust accordingly. Economics is not a positive discipline. Friedman was horribly wrong in that claim. It is and always will be subject to normative factors. The laws of physics do not care about your personal beliefs. Economics does and always will.
As for the ‘our’, I subscribe to the Rawlsian/utilitarian ideal - that which can bring the greatest benefit to the greatest number. I do not believe in social darwinism and Hobbesian rat races where only the ‘most fit’ are worthy of succeeding. You get born, you get a share as long as you do not intentionally harm others. Create incentives to enable everyone to contribute as much as possible to the common good. I support policies where everyone is in a boat when the tide rises. And I feel most people would be better off in a boat of their own making, not one provided and controlled by someone else - either corporations or governments.
I have no idea what any of this means. If you’re trying to convince me that free markets are imperfect, I don’t need persuading. If you’re trying to convince me that planned economies are superior, you’re going to need a *lot *more.
It was to show a few of the many, many problems with your idea. Change the plan, you’ll just have different problems.
sleestak has addressed the rest quite well.
In a meta sense, isn’t all economic activity in a capitalist society top-down? Fo any worker to receive a salary, it has to come from a company. a company that was funded with some degree of capital. You want more jobs? Better jobs? Spur more businesses to open.
So in other words, it creates demand. Whether they buy a mansion or invest in an ETF, that money goes somewhere to create wealth somehow. Unless it’s under a mattress.
We have that. It’s called eBay. Problem is, no one wants all that crap. Your plans and other poverty-solving plans always suffer from the same flaw- nobody wants what the poor have. They have no skills, no education, and no economic worth. It doesn’t matter if you set up incentives to start businesses or give them welfare. The problem is still that no one wants to give them (enough) money for whatever it is they’re doing, be it painting your house or making clay pots.
Your problem, as usual, is thinking that everyone deserves a minimum income or job in the first place. You should fix that.
So the rich aren’t American, is what you’re saying? Or that they don’t care about themselves? Please, please tell me why you’re so jealous of the rich. Please explain.
How can you say out of one side of your mouth that we’re all in this together and that we all need to be in the same boat when the tide rises, and then say out the other side that you’re against entities that seek to put us all in the same boat- corporations (a collection of people with a common economic interest) and governments (a collection of people with a common society and territory)?
This issue is not if planned economies are superior, but that they are they only ones that exist, or will exist. Every economy is ‘planned’, either explicitly under state socialism, or implicitly through industrial policies. Economics cannot be separated from politics. Each polity will pursue its economic goals using a variety of tools from public to private ownership to tax incentives and regulatory breaks.
Again, you can let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And we will continue to stumble from shock to shock, and waste more time picking up the pieces rather than establish policies which can be made effective and benefit the majority of the people.
The point of this thread is that economic policies that focus on established industries to create jobs, i.e. the standard top-down supply side policies which have been the main tool of conservatives and neoliberals in this country for the last thirty years, does not work. It does not create jobs at the rate we need to create them.
Small business policies and incentives are great for reaching the middle class that has the resources for starting small businesses. But they do not lead to sufficient job creation either, especially with capital access issues they face.
We have no comprehensive policy to support microbusinesses and help the lowest classes that do not have resources to become meaningfully self-employed, but rather hinder them by cracking down on the informal economies they do create. This would not be sufficient in itself to create enough jobs either.
But a combination of all of the above will be more likely to be successful than the status quo.
To say the promotion of these policies is causing the problem is ignoring how economics works in the real world, and economics as a discipline fails itself by continuing to create ‘perfect ocean’ models based on non-scientific ‘laws’ that do not reflect the true social, cultural and behavioral conditions in which economies operate. Fortunately, an increasing number of working economists have ignored Friedman and are going into public policy and administration that to try to take those conditions, which are wholly normative, into effect.
No, one cannot control for all effects, nor can engineers perfectly apply the laws of physics to real machinery, but we can learn enough of the effects to craft policies that enable us to ‘take flight’ even when we do not understand the total effects of the underlying ‘laws’.
If current promotions have failed, the solution is not to discard all of them, but to find additional policies to augment and fill the gaps where those failures occurred.
[QUOTE=Chessic Sense]
How can you say out of one side of your mouth that we’re all in this together and that we all need to be in the same boat when the tide rises, and then say out the other side that you’re against entities that seek to put us all in the same boat- corporations (a collection of people with a common economic interest) and governments (a collection of people with a common society and territory)?
[/QUOTE]
I never said we should be in the sameboat. Just that everyone should be in a boat. There is a difference between a fleet or flotilla of independent ships which can agree which direction to sail, and a big boat that tells everyone on board which way they will go. I would rather have my own boat and sail with the fleet, than be stuck in steerage and not even be sure if we are moving and only get the leftovers from the upper decks.
Does that make sense?
The problem is that everyone does not think that. And I am trying to fix that. It is simple. You get born, you deserve a fair share. You want more, than work for that. But requiring the majority to rely on wage income, while the rich have no need to, living off of rent, dividends and interest, and then take obscene levels of wages themselves for the icing on their cake, that is the damn problem. The sooner conservatives recognize that and realize we need a transition to a better means of compensation, the better off we will all be. If they continue to force the status quo on everyone - well, the losers are going to greatly outnumber the winners and payback will be a bitch.
And the vast majority of the poor in the world do make and sell products that people want everyday, but it is mostly among themselves, and it is informal, not counted in the stats. Do you really think they live off only $1 a day? That is just the amount the government can track. Granted their real income is not much more, but they do not need more in terms of their material living. Their biggest burdens are the same ones we are facing - lack of access to affordable healthcare (which includes clean water to prevent most illnesses) and education. And public safety is provided more by gangs than LEOs. But that is another thread.
But one thing I have learned over the years it that the rich have never given enough credit to the poor. As to which side is ‘more fit’ and more deserving? I would, and do, bet my money on those that live in the slums and ghettos. The middle class and upper class would not survive a year in those conditions.
But all that is besides the point of job creation. Yes, we do have Ebay. I can only imagine what the unemployment and poverty rates would be if it did not exist.
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By whose standard? Who decided that being born entitled everyone to a ‘fair share’? Who decides what constitutes a ‘fair share’? What about those born elsewhere in the world? Do they deserve a ‘fair share’? If so, who decides what is ‘fair’? Who has to supply that ‘fair share’ to those who do not have it?
Ah, so here is the root of your ideology. Poor folks are strong and deserving, stronger in fact than anyone else. The middle class and the rich are holding them down. If we could only set up a system where the poor were rewarded for, well, something, then all the world would be fine.
Having lived in slums (well, by U.S. standards anyway) I know a little about it. Most of the people I lived with ended up staying their because of their own choices.
In other words, do it my way or else…
Lovely.
Slee
On the other hand, after initial capitalization businesses get money from the bottom up, from lots of people buying their products. Want more jobs and more profits? In the long run, make sure enough people have the money to buy them, since no businesses will open in a dead or shrinking market. No capitalist will invest in a business without this trickle upward - at least after pets.com folded.
Yes, but before that there has to be DEMAND.
You can have the best-funded company in the world, but if there’s no demand for what it’s selling, it will fail.
And if a strong demand exists, a company can start up with only a tiny amount of capital and quickly leverage itself into profitability and growth.
This is why trickledown economics is a stupid idea.
Credit to do what? Build legitimate businesses? Make good life choices?
If aggregate demand is below aggregate supply, all the State has to do is 1) reduce interest rates to turn more savings into investments and increase the velocity of money and/or 2) increase the quantity of money. The State can do either until aggregate demand is a few percentage points above aggregate supply.
I don’t see how the Fed lowering the interest rate or the gov’t increasing the quantity of money is inconsistent with Reaganomics.
Also, I’m not sure how you get that Reaganomics will result in insufficient aggregate demand. The rich consume too and investment also contributes to aggregate demand*. Again, if that still isn’t sufficient, the two means I laid out previously are sufficient to insure that aggregate demand stays above aggregate supply and that there is no liquidity trap.
*If I buy a computer to buy and consume porn, is it any less of a contribution to aggregate demand than if I buy the same computer to produce and sell porn?