John Kerry has no idea how economics works, on either a micro or a macro basis.
His “vision” is a job-killling machine.
Care to back up that wildly stated opinion with a fact or two? Maybe a cite, or example?
Even John Fitzgerald Kennedy realized that reducing taxes on the “wealthy” encouraged investment resulting in job creation.
Kerry’s proposed rollback of tax relief for the “wealthy” (which in the SF Bay Area is a fireman married to a teacher) would crater the tenuous employment recovery we are now seeing.
So any plan, regardless of quality, is better than no plan? Good grief.
ROFLMAO.
Yep - a bad plan that would achieve the opposite of the stated objective is better than no plan.
Not.
My apologies, treis. I will only make this last statement as to Sam Stone’s efforts to carry the flag of calumny for Bush. See the debunking of these assertions regarding Kerry at The O’Franken Factor, (midway down the page) where he provides support by citing and referencing and such things.
treis, as to your OP, well, sorry, but your analysis seems pretty much to be: “Kerry Point X: well this is a good idea, but it won’t work.” To paraphrase you, I went through every point of your OP and was less than impressed.
Just for the sake of example, although js_africanus already touched on this one a little bit:
You are confusing two arguments here: whether efforts in renewable energies are “profitable” and whether they would create jobs. Isn’t the point of developing new technologies to eventually make them profitable? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile to create the incentives to both have jobs in renewable technologies now that also propel those technologies towards affordability? For example, building the first DVD players took investment, created jobs, but was not profitable. On the other hand, it appears to be a pretty profitable venture at this point. You seem to presume that “renewable energy” will never be profitable, thus investments in the area will simply be lost. You present no support for this argument, however.
Right now, if I understood the NPR report I heard this afternoon correctly, Gov. Schwarzenegger is investing in hydrogen filling stations in California, which he intends to have every 20 miles by 2007. I disagree that this is the most effective method to move forward, but I like the idea of investing effort, time and resources toward the goal. It also creates jobs, and will be a valuable investment in infrastructure, assuming that other investments in hydrogen powered automobiles follow suit and are successful.
Frankly, you don’t seem very open to many of these ideas, but your arguments as to why are less than compelling.
[As an aside, my wife was watching Predator the other day as I walked through the room. I made a little joke about this being the Governor movie, referring to Arnold, and she remarked “Which one do you mean?”]
Hey, thanks for referencing JFK. I totally agree with you that we should set the tax rate for the wealthy at exactly the rate that JFK did! I think it is excellent that we can find this common ground and move forward with unanimity.
You mean the long lasting trend of one month?
I didn’t realize that a teacher and fireman made over $200,000 around here. O_o Goes to show what I know, I guess.
The job market, as I have shown, is affected much more by things other than taxes on the “wealthy.” An industry in recession or growth can easily trump the slight nudge that the taxes would have on the statistics. Of much more important note in regard to unemployment is how the Fed is managing the interest rates, and you’ll note that the Fed has remained as a holdover in the Bush Administration.
Don’t make the mistake of narrowing the complex field of economics down to one or two numbers. Tax on the wealthy and employment rate do not correlate as strongly in practice as they do in Republican theory. Of much greater effect is Keynesian government spending.
Maybe Kerry can get his buddy Al to re-invent the internet, and create another dotcom boom?
Hentor The Barbarian-
In my analysis I broke down Kerry’s proposals into four categories. Ones that I think will work, ones that I don’t think will work, ones that I think will work but won’t or can’t be implemented and ones that aren’t feasible. The smallest category is ones that I like but I don’t think will work.
I don’t believe your analogy to DVDs is apt. In the case of DVDs an existing similar technology (video and laserdisks) were replaced by a better and cheaper product. In the case of renewable energy sources we are much further away from four years for them to be a better and cheaper energy source. After all Kerry is claiming that this growth will happen in the next 4 fours. Investing in renewable energy sources may pay off in 20 years but that doesn’t count in this debate. In addition to this js_africanus touched on the fact that these will not be new jobs but merely jobs transferred from our current energy production.
Do you think that Kerry’s plan will cause job growth and if so why?
I don’t want to get off topic here but when people make silly and misinformed statements, they need to be immediately addressed or they become accepted knowledge.
I live in the Bay Area also and if your hypothetical couple are making north of 200k, then the teacher is working 2 jobs and the fireman is working an awful lot of overtime. Both careers pay between 40-60k depending on seniority and location.
But let’s accept your hypothesis that reducing taxes on the “wealthy” leads to more jobs. Please explain why this has not happened then? Where are all of the new jobs that we were supposed to be wallowing in by now? Where are all of the new businesses that are supposed to be providing jobs? Based on current experience, it would seem that your hypothesis is merely an old-wives tale!
Wind power generation is growing by leaps and bounds - we’re talking bigtime growth industry, here, and it’s obviously already competitive in the marketplace. Seems like a rather sensible thing to promote. Solar isn’t quite ready for the major leagues yet, though it’s already the technology of choice for a great many niche applications. A few more breakthroughs, and we may be roofing all our houses with solar tiles. Again, seems like a rather sensible thing to promote. Alternative energy is nowhere near as pie-in-the-sky as it was even a few years ago.
Gorsnak-
Your gonna have to clue me in on the obviousness of wind power being a competative viable alternative for providing a substantial portion of the energy for the country. You’re also going to have to explain how this will help create jobs in the next 4 years.
Where did I say it would provide a “substantial portion” of energy needs? I said it was a growth industry. Growth industries create jobs. I said it is already competitive in the marketplace. If it weren’t competitive, it wouldn’t be growing at the rate that it is.
You’re the one saying that investing in an industry with a double-digit growth rate is a bad idea, and is unlikely to create any jobs.
According to this article job growth in wind power is supposed to grow by 1.9 million in new jobs world wide in the next 20 years. That averages out to 100,000 new jobs per year world wide. This article paints a similar rosy picture for other renewable energy sources. Looking through a few sites and searches it seems like renewable energy is a place where job growth will happen. Furthermore reneweable energy sources yield more jobs per unit cost of electricity. In other words transitioning from non-renewable energy to renewable energy will have a net creation of jobs. Investing in it will cause these jobs to be created faster. Kerry’s claim of 500,000 new jobs in that industry seems to be on the high end of feasibility but is possible.
With that being said there are still 9.5 million jobs that Kerry claims his economic plan will create. I am still highly skeptical of the feasibility and effectiveness of his plan but invite people to continue to prove me wrong.
Well, I don’t know enough to judge how many jobs might conceivably be created in alternative energy. Your earlier post seemed to suggest that it would only pay off 20 years down the road, though, and I thought that overly pessimistic. On the whole I’m not a huge fan of Kerry’s economic ideas either, though I don’t believe them to be any worse than those of the current administration.
You did? Well, you gave no indication of any such breakdown in your OP. In fact, here’s the reader’s digest version of your OP, containing only your evaluations point by point of Kerry’s plan:
There is absolutely no analyses of the type you suggest. Your entire review is a collection of “yes, buts” with nothing but your poorly formed opinion for the “but” part of it. You call yourself an armchair economist, but display no evidence of even that level of economic acuity in your rebuttals of the Kerry proposal.
I am not an economist of any type, armchair or otherwise. However, even a cursory review of the actual proposal Kerry describes reveals how [perhaps intentionally] selective you were in your “analysis.”
Okay, great. If you realized that Kerry’s proposal to actually cut the corporate tax rate by 5%, would you support it then? You do not even mention once the issues of repatriation of overseas investments by US multinationals. Kerry provides support for an assertion that there is $639 billion in profits by American companies that is kept overseas. Current tax structures provide an incentive for companies to keep jobs and investments out of America. Kerry proposes a one year tax holiday (at a 10% rate) for companies to bring back those investments to the US. He then suggests ending the incentives that keep them out in the first place. He cites the Enterprise Institute suggesting that American companies receive an $8 billion subsidy for investing abroad.
Elsewhere he discusses tax credits to cover employer’s payroll taxes for new jobs created in manufacturing and small business. He suggests that a small business owner making $500,000 who hires four additional workers making $50,000 would get a $2,969 tax cut. (BTW, he also gives other specific examples.)
So, essentially, it seems that you do not like the idea of removing the tax incentives that exist for companies to create jobs and invest overseas? Is this the “increase” in corporate taxes that you object to? I am all for increased global trade and integration of the world community, but I hope to do it in a way that is not overwhelmingly favorable to US multinationals at the expense of low and middle class Americans.
Given the gaping holes in the OP, it really seems to me that it is not a suitable starting point for an honest debate about the Kerry plan. I would very much like to see an actual discussion that actually starts with a complete summary of the components of Kerry’s plan. It strikes me that much of the confusion of the OP about the source of revenues for Kerry’s plan comes from a lack of consideration of the primary elements of the plan itself.
Yes, but.
There is also the possibility that as-yet-unknown techno breakthroughs could Change Everything for renewable energy. There are a lot of DIFFERENT breakthroughs that could do it … not just ways of getting more juice from solar, windpower, organic fuels, etc., but more efficient power storage and transfer mechanisms could make a big difference, too.
One example: the first laptop I ever head was Radio Shack model 100. It would run for 16 hours on 4AA renewables. I then went to an IBM portable I got at a garage sale, but dropped it because it’s rechargeable batteries last about 45 minutes per charge. The IBM had to run a hard disk and a floppy drive and all that good Windows stuff and it took forever to pull up a word processor (I use laptops mainly for generating text). The Radio Shack didn’t have a floppy drive or a hard drive, it just stored everything on chips, which is why its batteries lasted so much longer.
Now I use a Smartcom student laptop to generate text. Lasts 300 hours on two AA batteries. It’s pretty much the same as the Radio Shack Model 100 in that it doens’t have a hard disk or a floppy drive and is only good at generating text, but man, they have made some STRIDES in energy efficiency.
Point is, huge increases in energy efficiency and productivity do happen. Of course, we cant’ say for sure they’ll happen in the case of oil, or when, or how useful they’ll really be. But investing in them makes such gains more likely. And considering the oil situation, investing in them seems all kinds of smart. And not investing in them seems all kinds of stupid.
The number of people available for the workforce increases by approximately 140,000 - 150,000 each month. This number represents the difference between new workers available each month (young’uns, graduates, immigrants or whatever) and the number retiring or otherwise more or less permanently leaving the workforce. The economy has to create 140,000 - 150,000 new jobs each month just to break even in terms of the number of unemployed. Thus, Kerry’s promised 10 million jobs should actually only decrease the unemployed by about 3 million, giving that over a four year term (4 years *12 months *150000 people per month =) 7.2 million people will enter either the ranks of the employed or the ranks of the unemployed. So his projected job creation would only reduce unemployment by about 50-60,000 per month (which is respectable, but hardly Clintonian).