I suspect that if you think kicking Bill Gates out of the country and forbidding Microsoft from selling in the US is a good idea, very little can be done to help your understanding.
Regards,
Shodan
Why? Just because of the employment Microsoft provide?
Because apart from that, they have a near monopoly on the computer OS market, with a very expensive, inferior product. Obviously exiling Bill Gates is a bit over the top; but barring the jobs they provide and the taxes they (presumably) pay, what do Microsoft actually do for America?
On the other hand, with free Linux-based operating systems, surely the price of PCs would be reduced, leaving people with more cash in pocket, businesses with cheaper IT costs, and a whole lot less frustration when this happens.
If it really is inferior, how do they maintain their ‘near monopoly’?
Provide a product that obviously is in demand in the US and out?
The trouble with Linux (and depending on which flavor we are talking it’s far from ‘free’) is that it’s less of a turn key system with less support and needing a higher level of skill to use and operate. We use Linux (in a VMWare setting) for some of our server platforms, plus we have a number of thin clients running Linux and even some Ubuntu clients, but even though in some of those cases the OS was free, the support costs aren’t…and, mainly our users are using Windows 7 because it’s easier for the IT organization to support them, and the OS better suits their needs.
I’m all for open source and all, but I have no idea where people get the idea that Linux et al are ‘free’, or that they are better in all things and in all situations. Me, I run Ubuntu on my laptop…and have a Windows 7 partition to run some of the programs I have that won’t run under Ubuntu.
-XT
Providing jobs and paying taxes are what we are talking about.
So yeah - apart from the benefits they provide, they don’t provide any benefits.
:shrugs:
This is what passes for economic thinking on the Left.
Regards,
Shodan
Ireland is pretty much the least European country in Europe, well maybe the UK is less, but still, with regard to those things people claim are fantastic about “Europe”, other than scenery Ireland doesn’t have any of them.
The best part of being an economist is you’re always validated by external events. If you ask them, the recession bolstered the cases of the Keynesians, Austrians, the Chicago school, Marxists, Goldbugs, Neoliberals, and probably the Mercantilists too, if any of them were still around.
Nah, they sold out years ago.
Reforming medical care is the most important thing. Since we spend 17% of GDP on health care vs the 8-11% most OECD nations spend, if our health care was as efficient as theirs it would result in tons of savings.
Personally I’d support a universal public plan that offered the most efficient, low cost, high quality care possible. Care that gives 90% of the positive results for 50% of the price. It would likely involve bulk purchases and negotiations, generic prescriptions, outsourcing of major surgery, less heroic end of life measures, etc. And people can buy private insurance on top of it for the extra 10% of quality/quantity of care. The vast majority of the US’s long term deficits are due to health care.
After that, reforming energy policy by encouraging investments in R&D so energy costs go down over time since production costs will go down while usage needs will go down too due to higher efficiency. Wind and solar power keep going down in price while efficiency of automobiles and appliances keeps going up. Maintain that trend.
Ending the Iraq war, which will save money. And avoiding unnecessary wars in the future.
Obama found several trillion to cut from the federal budget.
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/02/24/2-trillion-in-budget-cuts-identified-obama-says/
So those are all ideas. Plus increase taxes on the well off and when necessary on everyone else too. The fact that Obama keeps bragging that he cut taxes on the middle class is bothersome to me. I know that most Americans are struggling and have been for years, but we are deep in debt and we want high spending and low taxes. But it isn’t possible to get both.
But the main goals should be to improve the efficiency of health care and energy to lower costs, not going to war unless necessary, cut spending if/where you can and tax hikes.
Before this recession the deficit wasn’t that bad. It was only $240 billion or so, not the 1.3 trillion we have now. Once the recession is over, employment is back, people are paying taxes rather than using necessary services, etc. the deficit should go down again.
Well, in 2004 they were found guilty of abusing their dominant market position.
That is in demand because it is standard, and people buy what they know. It became the standard through illegal anti-competitive practises.
Fair point. However, the fact that everything is written for Windows is the only reason Windows is better than its competitors. And the only reason everything is written for Windows is because of its huge market share. Which it illegally obtained.
It’s a chicken and egg situation - if it wasn’t for Windows market share, programs would not be written solely for Windows. And if programs weren’t written solely for Windows, it wouldn’t have such a large market share.
I am not the Left’s economic spokesman. Or economic strategist.
But yeah - monetary benefits are of course the only possible benefit a company can provide to a society.
:shrugs:
This is what passes for economic thinking on the Right.
I think you need to look past sound bytes and platitudes, especially on this board.
I think it has been pretty well established that Federal employees are not overpaid at the higher end of the pay scale. I think it has also been pretty well established that the federal government has been outsourcing the lower end of the apy scale so taht most of what we have left in the federal government are at the high end of the pay scale.
I think the objection is that during the recent economic expansion, the rich have had tehir taxes cut and the rich got richer. When the economic collapse occurred, the rich got bailed out because they made a credible argument that the world economy would collapse if we didn’t bail them out. Now that it has come time to pay the bill for that bailout, we are doing it on the bakcs of the general populace.
That is pissing a lot of people off, but in Europe they blame the folks that got them in trouble in the first place, here we want to extend their tax cuts along with everyone else.
We are also going to have to increase taxes at some point as well. We can’t balance the budget with spending cuts alone, in fact the government is relatively lean compared to when Reagan first took office, not taht tehre isn’t any fat anywhere but right now the only really big programs that would make a difference are social security, medicare/medicaid and defense spending.
We can’t get there with tax increases alone (anything up to a 50% marginal federal income tax rate is fine but that won’t cover the deficit). Once the stimulus expires and we let the Bush tax cuts elapse, we are still behind the 8 ball largely because of the economy but even without it we dug such a deep hole that the interest payments will spiral out of control unless we pay down the debt. In short we have to cut defense, social security or Medicare/medicaid or some combination of the three. There simply isn’t enough meat in the rest of the budget to get us there.
YES… we should base our economy on exporting oil and lumber to the US and engage in race to the bottom tax policy.
Which is why we should tax them while they are generating their wealth here, before they expatriate to the Caymans…
I believe Bill Gates supports tax increases.
Smoot Hawley was general protectionism. I don’t think its a good idea but banning products from a specific company just eliminates one market participant.
Chase them away until nothing is left? That’s like selling parts off a milk cow.
His point, to the extent that he had one, was to chase “the rich” out of the US and then block them from selling to us. Essentially he wants to deal with a period of high unemployment by getting rid of those who create jobs.
An interesting concept, from which God spare us.
Your cite is from a year and a half ago, when Obama was riding high and had a large majority in Congress. How much of that $2 trillion has he cut so far?
Or is he waiting until he loses a majority in one or both houses of Congress before he actually does what he says he is going to?
Regards,
Shodan
Well, you know those rock groups who cruise their entire careers on their one hit song ? Some days I feel we’re kinda washed out like that (though the big demonstration ideal isn’t the Bastille anymore - it’s either the Popular Front of the 30s, or May '68).
Other days, the girls from the Communist Youth blue collar chic front put out, and it’s all good :).
The average federal employee now earns pay and benefits totaling $123,049, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (http://www.sunjournal.com/our-view/story/892291). The analysis by the Heritage Foundation shows that the federal government workers are still overpaid on average by 22%, even when controlling for things like the education level and the occupation (http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/07/Inflated-Federal-Pay-How-Americans-Are-Overtaxed-to-Overpay-the-Civil-Service; if you don’t like this cite, you can run the data yourself). This is confirmed by the fact that the federal workers very rarely quit compared to the private industry workers. In addition, they have much higher job security than the private industry workers. There is no question that there are some high-performing federal workers that are underpaid, but this is simply due to the idiotic seniority-based pay scale used by the government. Here is a blog post from payscale.com with some specific examples in the same occupations: http://blogs.payscale.com/salary_report_kris_cowan/2010/04/federal-employee-salaries.html. There is a new study comparing the wages being planned: http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0810/081210l1.htm.