311–320 of 412 posts
(The industrial the mentioned, GM may have $15bn in cash but it also has $73bn in current liabilities so it's not really rolling in vast excesses)
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And what good is a large population of people in their peak consumption years if they have no money with which to consume? So long as you have a low-paid workforce who have to save their money (either themselves or via insurance companies) in case they get an infected tooth or need to see a doctor for an antibiotic prescription, you'll have low consumption spending and low growth.
even medium to highly paid workforce members aren't entirely capable of spending en masse these days. I'd love to stop paying $3500/month in rent, but any property to buy around here has a median price of $1.2 million. Unless we all move to rural Indiana, housing + healthcare is designed to eat 100% of your after-tax income with no room for further growth. (of course, that's assuming you're just a putz serial employe…
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But obviously the '90s were not sustainable. What we are going through today is the payback period (with interest) for Greenspan's economic policies.
"But obviously the '90s were not sustainable." Sorry, it's not obvious to me at least. Can you explain why they weren't sustainable?
But basically the hypergrowth of the '90s was borrowed from the future. All policy was good if GDP grew. Greenspan noodled on the problem--"irrational exuberance"--but unfortunately became convinced the existing pyramid scheme was working. He's since publicly expressed regret over a ton of those decisions.
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I'm not suggesting taking money from "evil" corporations... only in that money made in a locality should be taxed in that locality... getting rid of corporate 'income' taxes in favor of tariffs/vat and money exports would allow for that, with less opportunity for subverting the system, so to speak... At the end of the year, a tax refund could be given if you're a person, and transferred less than 100k out of the coun…
What makes you think that taxes aren't already being paid in the foreign jurisdictions? This is a big part of the disconnect: if you (say, as Apple) sell a phone in Munich, you're paying the VAT tax in that country already. Generally speaking, when you take the profits from your German sales back to the USA, in many (most, save a few exception) cases, you're going to pay corporate taxes on those profits now that they…
I'm all for being able to make insane amounts of money, but there are limits to what is good for greater society and having underutilized holdings overseas for the simple purpose of tax avoidance isn't good for anyone. The money isn't being invested to earn more, and it isn't being spent to improve the economy. It's wasted in a corporate setting.. it should be re-invested, spent or dispersed to the share holders, who should then pay income taxes (baring a VAT/tariff system in place to replace it)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/21/business/apple-avoided-bil...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/apple-avoids-60-billion-in-...
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/apple-google-microso...
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One big issue is feasibility: It's much easier to track, meter, and tax income as it changes hands than it is to track/meter/tax accumulated wealth.
This is like a litmus test for the right answer. We immediately jump to feasibility. We know it'll work, it'll just be hard.
Uh, I don't see how that follows. Sometimes "it is not feasible" is first objection simply because it's the easiest to articulate and support.
I mean, not everything is equivalent to a proposal to, say, kill all the poor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owI7DOeO_yg
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One big issue is feasibility: It's much easier to track, meter, and tax income as it changes hands than it is to track/meter/tax accumulated wealth.
Feasibility is a valid concern. Here's what I think. Stocks are traded on public exchanges. Land and buildings stay in one place. Private jets need to land at airports and they each have a tail number. Most things to be sold efficiently are sold in public marketplaces. There are probably some assets that are hard to track, just like there is currently income that is hard to track. Some people are paid in cash and don…
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Of course there is. The point is, we've reached the stage of our advancement when, on aggregate, we produce more than we actually need. Our current issues are with distribution of what is being produced.
The poor would love to have newer cars, consume more services, have nicer homes, etc. So then how are we producing more than we need?
People regularly die from starvation, but the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone. It is a problem of distribution.
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One thing I don't understand about basic income is how to deal with children. If the parents get the basic income of a child, then that will incentivize some people to have more kids simply to get more money. If you don't give basic income for kids, then people with a lot of kids won't be able to live. Of course, you can adjust the amount between the too extremes of full basic income and no basic income for kids, but…
I've never bought the idea that welfare recipients would bear children strategically. Surely after the first child, they'd realize that this was a difficult way to increase their top-line income. Not sure where I'd look for data on this, but my gut feeling is that poor people who have a bunch of poorly-cared-for-children get pregnant because they're bad at planning ahead, not because they've been inventivized by a su…
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I'm all for higher taxes on capital, maybe with some exceptions on the amount of capital gains tax to pay on your first €10m. But honestly, a wealth tax is just demotivating. Not every wealthy person invests their new found riches. It makes sense only to tax gains from investments, but only gains. Not making money on your capital? No problem, you don't pay. If you are, you do pay extra tax. I don't even think it's a…
I think wealth is a very natural thing to tax. The state creates and guarantees to protect a property right in land/personal effects/corporate equity/etc. In return, it taxes you 1-2% of the value of that property right each year.
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Not sure that I would agree there. What if the "excess" production funds a cure for cancer? What if that cure requires additional resources? The world isn't static.
I'll try by best not to sound like a raging sociopath here. In pure economic terms, curing cancer has little benefit to society. Cancer is not any one specific disease. It's a class of diseases, of which there are thousands (or more) of variants. We may stumble on some amazingly technologically advanced cure to some forms of cancer but the more rare the form, the less likely there will ever be a treatment. Most peopl…
One counter to this argument is that as this process of overpopulation (relative to useful jobs) begins to happen, standard of living decreases.* As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children. So the imbalance is somewhat self-correcting, it's just that human lives are getting to be longer while the time between inventions that obviate the need for human labor seems to be getting shorter.
Longer average lifespans (with the same legal retirement age for social security, medical benefits) exacerbate this problem.
But there is always one industry that can be fueled by human lives and that looks great on an economic balance sheet - war. It decreases surplus labor, increases nationalism and social cohesion (if people generally see the necessity of the war), and injects a huge stimulus of demand into the economy through gov spending on all sorts of goods for the war effort, as well as investments in R&D that adds to the country's infrastructure base.
If the latency between idle/restless/poor/disenfranchised population and meaningful/useful jobs gets to be too large, then all it takes is a spark to start a protest, rebellion, or war as people have nothing else to really live for.
* I would use GDP/capita to have a more quantifiable benchmark, but I find GDP to be almost completely useless when accounting for things that matter to actual human beings such as quality of social cohesion, potential social mobility, amount of pollution, etc.