When I go to city government offices I don’t see the level of activity that I see in the private sector which translates into overstaffing. I also see a higher level of expense in regards to office equipment.
It’s not a function of providing a useful service, it’s a function of the level of efficiency involved.
Oh wow! Bullshit, you say! I guess I had better take you pretty seriously!
Uh, actually, yes it does. If you’re not enforcing regulations, then you’re not really regulating anything.
Apparently not to create house-of-cards credit derivatives that are too complicated for anybody to understand, though.
Debate that if you want, even though it’s wrong, but don’t pretend like a financial crisis didn’t occur because of lack of oversight.
You remind me of city government officials who spend millions on junkets, build stadiums and convention halls and renovate their offices and give themselves gold-plated pension programs, and then respond to any request for budget cuts by claiming they’ll have to cut police and school teachers - the most popular government programs. But the 20 million dollar ‘sister city’ project with Milan that requires council members to fly to Italy once a year? Let’s not mention that.
If we’re talking regulatory reform, let’s leave out food inspectors and clean water regs for a moment. Instead, let’s talk about things like the recent Lead Free Toys Act, which was passed with lobbying pressure from big toy companies, and which resulted in the destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars of used toys and children’s books, purchased primarily by poor families. This law is so bad it’s not even being supported by the Consumer Products Safety Commission.
We can talk about the numerous regulations that have been passed at the behest of trade unions which have the effect of shutting out pre-manufactured products in favor of on-site work (for example, regulations demanding threaded fasteners instead of press-fit fasteners, so that a tradesman has to be in the mix to assemble piping and such).
Cap and Trade would fit in this category as well. It would have huge and unknown unintended consequences, wouldn’t do a damned thing for global warming, and the fact that it’s still being debated is adding to business uncertainty.
Some regulations examined by themselves seem defensible, but when added up with other regulations present large burdens to job creation and business formation. Zoning laws and environmental impact studies and other local regulations all need oversight and approval, which takes time and money. If a business requires six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to get a permit to open an office in a city, it’ll find a city that doesn’t have those requirements. Or it just won’t open, and the jobs won’t be created.
And of course, it’s totally impossible to just freeze their salaries, huh? No one has to be fired. But when the recession hit, private industry pretty much froze compensation for a couple of years. My company (with hundreds of thousands of employees) instituted a one-year pay freeze and a travel ban and other austerity measures. In the meantime, public servants were getting 3-5% pay increases anyway, even though the cost of living is not going up. How about a 5% rollback in pay for federal employees? Or a two-year pay freeze?
These people on average make almost double the average income anyway, and so have a lower than average marginal propensity to consume. How can you justify giving them raises when people who make half as much are cutting back?
How about suspending the Davis-Bacon act, allowing lower-income people to compete for government contract work? Shifting money from union workers to people with lower incomes would increase the multiplier effect of the money and save the government money at the same time. Win-win, except for the union guys. But why should they be exempt from the pain felt by everyone else?
Oh I’m sorry. I guess you were under the assumption that all conversation in this thread was directed to you? :dubious:
I don’t have a problem with borrowing when our economy was in the toilet and we have 2 wars to pay off.
No. And neither would my contention be that the ones with the smallest governments and lowest taxes be the worst.
I would say that given the size of our country, we need a healthy tax rate that the current one simply isn’t sufficient. We need more regulation to stop businesses from exploiting people and resources. And we need a strong government to enforce laws and punish corporations.
When a company makes a record amount of revenue like Exxon Mobile even in the midst of a recession, something is wrong. I don’t know what their tax rate is, but whatever it is, I’m for doubling it at least
Some do, some don’t. When the government has money, you know that’s going to be spent. Why prefer people to spend it over the government? After all, the government’s just going to spend it on other people. I have no problems with the tax rate in this country except that it is too low on the rich and possibly too much on the poor.
Benefitting the wealthy, the aristocrats, the corporations, etc. Yes, I know what your version of prosperity looks like: the economy circa early 1900’s, where unions were busted up with strikebreakers and workers had no protection, children could be employed instead of going to school, and an average salary wasn’t enough to guarantee a living
I disagree. Admittedly I’m an exec for a gov contractor, and so I have a different view of things than you do, but the A-76 program (pdf) is highly rigged for retaining government jobs. Although this administration has a stated goal of increasing federal employment and reducing contracting (probably as a sop to the unions who helped get them elected), the re-badging hasn’t gone completely as planned - they have a hard time getting the talent to jump (you can make so much more in the private sector, notwithstanding your GS locality plus-ups). Most of my friends considering such a thing are doing it almost exclusively because they are former military and they’d get their 20 or whatever in so they can get full retirement. This would obviously be a long term drain on the country’s finances, making what’s now a bad situation even worse, once the treasury/bond markets start to think we look too much like Greece.
I couldn’t agree more. Lots of ricebowl issues though, and lots of congressmen looking to save jobs. (If you are in DC area you have certainly heard all the commercials for the ‘alternative F35 engine’, etc).
I’d say that if you really REALLY want to reduce gov expenditures, you have to do it through entitlement reform. Unfortunately we just pissed that opportunity away by using those ‘savings’ for universal heatlhcare. Like a family highly in debt who finds 5 grand laying in the street and decides to take a vacation to Europe with the money.
That ignores so many factors as to be ludicrous. Bush cut taxes and the .COM bubble burst, 9/11 happened, Enron imploded, etc. Of course the result was negative, except there was no correlation. Roosevelt raised taxes and hired on Americans to build roads to nowhere and statues everyplace, which is just hiding the unemployment rate by giving make-work to the unemployed.
Wouldn’t a better analogy be that they spent it on that operation for mom that they’d been putting off?
Things happen, you can’t simply ignore that and say your economic model is based on everything being ok.
The Enron thing is arguably directly related to the conservative love of reducing regulation. That’s almost like the dotcom burst. 9/11 could have been prevented if Bush didn’t ignore clear warnings like a memo entitled “Terrorists planning on crashing planes into buildings” and cutting funds to anti-terror agencies.
Bush’s term had a lot of things go wrong that was his or his conservative forefather’s fault. Reagan’s deregulating lead to the sub-prime and housing mess. Conservatives’ love of war lead them to Iraq, which wasn’t even part of 9/11.
Plus, during unprecedented levels of spending for 2 wars, tax cuts for the rich, a beginning recession, and housing bust, I didn’t hear one peep from these supposed tax cut loving future tea baggers about how we can’t spend money, not even to save our economy or soldier’s lives or prop up our corporations with government contracts to steal oil from a foreign company. Now Obama needs to raise taxes to fix that mess or increase spending so that everyone can have health care and people are bitching? Sorry, I don’t buy it. I say let him spend. Give Obama a blank check to spend as much borrowed money as he needs to in order to give everyone health care, fix the economy, increase government oversight, and wind down the wars by propping up foreign governments
:dubious: “Giving make-work to the unemployed,” while it might be unwise for other reasons, is still and really a way of reducing the unemployment rate, not “hiding” it.
I am a teacher (you know, a government employee.) Just this week, a dozen excellent teachers from my school were let go due to budget cuts. Next year, we will have 35 students per class. That is how having fewer government employees is a bad thing.
Did they cut adminstrative, janitorial and other non-teaching personnel first?
Did they cut contributions to pensions and healthcare plans for existing and/or retired employees, or at least require them to contribute more to those plans, first?
Just curious.
Economic growth adds money to the economy.
Government spending does not take money out of the economy.
Lowering taxes does not take money out of the economy.
Borrowing money adds money to the economy.
Buying consumable products from other countries takes money out of the economy.
Selling consumable products to other countries adds money to the economy.
Government spending can increase economic growth.
Lowering taxes can increase economic growth.
Borrowing money for government spending can increase economic growth.
Borrowing money to lower taxes can increase economic growth.
Repaying loans takes money out of the economy.
Government spending can decrease economic growth.
Lowering taxes can decrease economic growth.
This argument is boring. It is based on ideology and not the actual relationship between government action (or inaction) and the effect on the economy. Any category of government action can be helpful or harmful. Perhaps in our current state of affairs with record low taxes, and record high deficits, neither government spending or lowering taxes will change the situation. Please don’t respond with some argument about regulations. You can continue the derivatives of the statements above by substitution of the terms.
Oh hell, I’m not running for office anyway, so I may as well suggest something crazy… Taking either a carrot or stick approach, we should discourage employers from sending jobs overseas. (full disclosure: I have serious doubts about the veracity of the 4% figure touted by the Heritage foundation.)
Stick approach: A stiff new import tax on all products manufactured anywhere but US soil, regardless of where the CEO claims to reside. The tax (oh, or to use Obamaspeak, maybe we should call it a fine instead) should be high enough that moving operations no longer is much of a bargin.
Carrot Approach: a generous tax break for manufacturers/companies that base production operations within the US. There would be no penalty for hiring from overseas, as long as the employees relocated to the US. This tax break will only be offered to companies that manufacture at least 90% of their goods on US soil. The closer the company gets to 100% of their employees being in the US, the lower their tax burden should be, up to and including a 100% tax break for some reasonable percentage of their profits.
Do you think there might be some part of the Republican base that might have a teensy problem with that? Think carefully.
You’re ignoring the fallacy of the broken window. Government or other uses of money might not diminish the total quantity of money in the economy, but that doesn’t mean that government or whoever will use that money in a way that grows the economy. Not growing the money base is, essentially, the same as removing money out of the economy when the baseline standard is growth, not status quo.
Thereby driving consumer prices through the roof and making American businesses uncompetitive on the world market. Bye bye, economy.
You might want to look up the Smoot-Hawley tariff, which helped kick off the Great Depression. Trade protectionism is immensely destructive to an economy. If the government did what you suggest, it would turn the recession into a depression.
Thereby incentivizing inefficient business practices. And where does this money come from?
Really, your ideas are a prescription for an economic melt-down.
Sam, the stated problem here is how to reduce the jobless rate in the U.S., and that problem is fairly obviously tied to the decline of manufacturing within our borders. Can’t we have a healthy economy, domestically producing with domestic labor for domestic consumption, without being “competitive in the world market”? That’s how it was for most of our history.
:rolleyes: You know, economic historians are deeply divided on that point. Not that you couldn’t make a case for it; but you don’t get to state it as if it were an established fact.
And you definitely don’t get to state that as an established fact. Protectionism was a cornerstone of Whig and Republican trade policy throughout the 19th Century, and it doesn’t seem to have harmed the American economy, quite the reverse. Check out Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang. Chang makes the case that protectionism, as opposed to free-trade neoliberalism, is often the best policy for a country with a developing economy – well, guess what? That’s what America is, now, once again, and will be until manufacturing is revived here.
In a word, bullshit. The US is the largest manufacturer in the world. Cite.
Regards,
Shodan
No, I don’t think so. The costs involved with providing the wages and benefits American workers are accustomed to would make the prices of those goods sky-high. So either the goods would not be produced, because any profit would be gone, or the retail cost would be far too high, driving the company out of business and/or making the product unattainable for most middle-class budgets.