Could you please cite this? That is, a cite that shows that, in general and all other things being equal, Republicans oppose all spending to maintain US infrastructure.
Why then did you post them in the thread, which is about Sanders’ proposals?
Regards,
Shodan
Everybody agrees we NEED to do so, but we’re not actually DOING IT. When a quarter of the nation’s bridges are functionally obsolete or worse, we’re barely slapping fresh paint atop rotten wood. Sanders wants to actually spend the money required to maintain the structure and make sure it meets current code.
Here’s a good summary. (If you dare to say anything about a Daily Kos cite, simply the first hit on Google, I will remind you that you cited the Tax Foundation. If your objection is the word “all” that you interpolated and I didn’t say, make it to your mirror.)
Seriously? I posted them in response to a post in this very thread. Where was I supposed to post them, in a thread about the Oscars?
I asked for a cite to demonstrate that what you said was true, not the first hit on Google.
So then, a cite to show that Republicans are violently opposed to maintenance.
I was asking why you were posting things that had nothing to do with Sanders’ proposals in a thread about Sanders’ proposals.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes, since Milton died in 2006, it would be the biggest story in nearly two millennia.
BREAKING NEWS:
Milton Friedman is still dead.
:eek: Can I get a cite for that???
Your cite is a report from the American Society for Civil Engineers. If the US spent more money on infrastructure then most of that money would go to American civil engineers. That is like citing a report by defense contractors saying the US should spend more money on weapon systems.
However, even if the number made up by the group whose job it is to lobby for more government spending on infrastructure is true, then the lack of that infrastructure is costing the US economy $130 billion which is .78% of the economy. Under the rosiest scenario imagined by a industry lobby there would be an increase of less than 1% of GDP, yet this economist is estimating an increase of over 5% growth annually. That is just crazy.
The idea that the US does not spend enough on infrastructure is not true. As a percentage of GDP theUS spends twice what Germany spends and 10% more than the EU average.
If Sanders is serious about infrastructure improvements than there are ways to do it without spending more money. The US spends about twice what comparable countries spend to get the same amount of work done. For instance the Paris metro spent about 230 million dollars per kilometer for an extension and NYC spent 1.3 billion dollars per kilometer and that is much cheaper than New York usually does. This is because of public employee unions and environmental impact studies which drag projects out and create huge costs. Despite the horrible record of cost overruns the Sanders solution is the same as it is for every other problem, more money.
Man, if you sang “La la la, I’m not listening” any louder you’d get a noise violation from the local authorities.
IOW you got nothing.
Regards,
Shodan
That is not dead which can eternal lie . . .
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Friedman Cato Institute wgah’nagl fhtagn . . .
The Government Accountability Office, the audit arm of Congress, produces an annual list of the highest risk programs of the Federal government. Most of the list is screwed up military programs, but there’s also things like making the Postal Service financially sound.
GAO also reports:
I think GAO is pretty much the gold standard of impartiality, and I take their comments to mean that this is almost purely a money problem.
If you would like to review the data in the National Bridge Inventory yourself, have at it. The number of deficient bridges as compiled by state highway departments is around a quarter of all highway bridges in the U.S.
However, comparing the infrastructure requirements in Germany or the EU vs the US yields a different picture.
For example, the land area of the European Union comprises about 1.67 million square miles; Germany is about 138,000 sq. mi. Meanwhile, the contiguous 48 states and DC are about 3.1 million sq. mi., or very nearly twice the size of the entire EU. (Add in Alaska/Hawaii and the US swells to 3.8 million.) The miles of highway that connect our spread-out country don’t build and maintain themselves; in fact, we’ve got about 50% more miles of highway than the EU. Similarly, the EU has about 38,000 kilometers of oil pipelines; the US has about 280,000. Electric transmission lines, sewer collector pipes, flood control levees, railroad lines–pretty much any category of infrastructure you can name, we’ve got more, simply because there is more territory to cover.
You think Europe doesn’t have public employee unions!!!?! Seriously?
It’s unlikely that very many posters on this board earn enough to be subject to the top marginal tax rate, whether it’s 52% or 90%.
Of course not, since it’s not a particularly large part of the general population that earns more than $400k/year. But people get worked up about it anyway because they think it will discourage the “job producers”.
From the GAO report "The challenge of funding the Nation’s surface transportation system is magnified by the fact that spending for surface transportation programs has not commensurately improved system performance. Many programs have not effectively addressed key challenges—such as increasing congestion and freight demand—because federal goals and roles have been unclear, programs have lacked links to performance, and programs have not used the best tools and approaches to ensure effective investment decisions. "
This says to me that the problem is not a lack of money but the problem is government incompetence. The DOT has not even released 4 of the 9 new proposed rules for implementing funding reform for comment yet. The OMB report says that the current highway system funding structure is inefficient and yet the economist is trying to say that pouring billions into this broken system will make the economy grow by hundreds of billions.
So? Can’t have an opinion on the top rate unless you’re paying it?
This economist claims that Sanders will lead the economy to over 5% growth per year. Sanders has said his model for an economy is Denmark. During the last 50 years the Danish economy has grown over five percent in a year 3 times. The last time it did so was 21 years ago. During the same50 year period the US economy grew over 5% a year five times. During the last 20 years the Danish economy has grown faster than the US economy exactly one year. According to the world bank Danish GDP per capita is over 17% lower than it is in the US. Denmark also has greater wealth inequality than the US.
So this economist thinks the US can suddenly spike economic growth by copying the policies of a poorer country with slower economic growth. It makes no sense at all.
The poster I was responding to said that he’d be happy to pay the 52% rate. Which strikes me as an easy thing to say, if one is not actually subject to it.
What a load of nonsense all around.
Everyone who thinks economists are gurus who can fine-tune the economy and maximize growth, or who think that multi-year economic projections mean anything should read Nate Silver’s “The Signal and the Noise”. As he very ably points out in the book, the predictions of Macroeconomists are little more than modern Phrenology. They have absolutely no predictive track record at all. The CBO’s 10-year projections are no better than throwing darts at a dartboard. The annual survey of macroeconomists yields results no better than chance when you go out more than a couple of quarters.
No one knows how much effect the last stimulus had. The numbers the economists are putting out are generally derived from the same models they used to make the original predictions, just adjusted for how much money was actually spent vs how much they thought would be spent in the original studies. There’s no control economy we can use, no counter-factuals, etc. Everyone brings a giant grab-bag of priors to the party, which is why estimates vary so much among economists.
The headline on the Blinder and Zandi paper should read, “Keynesian economist uses Keynesian economic model to ‘prove’ that a Keynesian stimulus program based on Keynesian models worked.”
This is what passes for logic in that paper:
You can pick holes in that idiotic paragraph all day long. It’s the equivalent of saying, “Hey, we don’t need a proof or evidence! Just think about it! It’s crazy not to believe this!”
In fact, I can tell you a number of ways in which that paragraph could be completely wrong. For example, he’s not factoring in the crowding out effects of labor - almost 50% of the people hired for stimulus projects were people already employed elsewhere.
That’s not a job ‘created’ - it’s a job moved from the private sector to the public sector. Some Keynesians discount this by saying it just means the private sector has to replace the job, so a job is still created. But that is not necessarily true. The company may not be able to find another qualified worker - even in a recession some types of labor are scarce, and these particular jobs would be an example since the government had to hire from existing workers and not unemployed workers. Furthermore, if wages are ‘sticky’, then businesses may use the loss of a worker as an opportunity to cut costs by not rehiring and simply adding to the workload of the rest.
Another factor not considered is the market’s reaction to the extra $800 billion in debt, or the ongoing costs of debt service, or the cost to a private employer when a highly valued employee on a current project is lost and needs to be replaced. Lose a project manager to a ‘stimulus’ project, and the loss to the company in terms of project delays, overtime, and hiring costs could be many multiples of the salary of the job ‘created’. In any event, even if the company hires a new employee, the cost of HR, the productivity lost to local knowledge of the displaced worker, the low initial productivity and training costs of the new worker… None of that was ever considered in any model.
Then, bizarrely, after making all these strong claims about the stimulus, the Blinder and Zandi paper says this in the conclusion:
The questions go on and on. But despite that, let’s all pretend that this paper is evidence of what we really want to believe anyway, and that it trumps the arguments of anyone else who doesn’t agree with us.
As for Sanders proposals… They fail even as a Keynesian stimulus, because a Keynesian stimulus only ‘works’ when there is a severe shortfall of demand. The whole point is to put to work idle resources. But according to that economist, all this will happen in an environment of rapid GDP growth and very low unemployment. That’s just incoherent. If unemployment is low, then all the workers on the stimulus projects will be pulled from other jobs.
Sanders and his economist buddy also seem to think that you can make education free without causing tuition to rise accordingly in a world of constrained supply. He is also making the assumption that a degree in critical studies or Feminist history or communications or philosophy is an economic good, based on the specious logic that in the aggregate college grads make X% more than non-college grads . To the extent that that is true, it’s very debatable whether that’s because of signalling (i.e. college has become basically a credential that says, “I’m probably smarter than average and have the ability to stick to a long program of study for deferred gratification.”) If everyone goes to college, that signal vanishes.
The other possibility is that the people who went to college tend to be higher IQ or have higher work ethics, and therefore would have done just as well without the degree. When everyone goes to college, that stops being true as well.
To the extent that universal college damages the signalling value of a degree, sending more people to college who shouldn’t be there could actually harm the economy instead of helping it by destroying the information businesses use to find quality applicants. Or at least, the damage to the signal may partially counteract other benefits of a college degree.
Another cost of college, of course, is that people who go to college are losing four years of productive working life. That’s generally a good tradeoff if you spend those years learning something really valuable, but if college is free it becomes another social program, with many people there as an alternative to working instead of trying to build up a body of knowledge that will make them more productive. You can argue that college education makes you a better person or a better citizen, but those are not economic values.
We are acting as if increasing the number of people who give up 10% of their working life to increase their education is always good, regardless of what they are actually studying. We currently graduate about as many lawyers per year as there are lawyer jobs in total - something unsustainable. The most popular faculties in college also happen to be the ones with the worst employment prospects - communications, philosophy, performing arts, and various liberal arts ‘studies’ programs. If you push more people into college who wouldn’t have otherwise gone, do you think they’re going to succeed in engineering or physics? Or are they going to gravitate towards the easiest subjects they can find? How many of them will drop out and all that money will be pissed away?
As for his tax plan, there is no evidence that his high tax brackets will bring in the revenue he claims. Top marginal tax rates have been 90% before, and they’ve been 28%. Since the 1950’s government revenue from income taxes has fluctuated with recessions and boooms, and marginal tax rate changes have had almost no effect. Certainly not the kind of massive boost in revenue Sanders’ plan requires.
And even Keynesians would agree that tax increases are anti-stimulative, but Sanders seems to think you can have the biggest tax increases in history and it won’t have any effect on growth.
Fairy tales. If this crap worked, China wouldn’t be in trouble after their massive infrastructure spending, and Japan would be the economic collossus of the world. Britain should be in a great depression after its ‘austerity’ program, and the U.S. economy should have clobbered Canada’s, since our stimulus was much smaller as a percentage of GDP. None of that happened.