You're really losing me here. I'm not sure where most of your comment came from. It's clear that I stepped on some kind of personal sensitivity for you, and I think I can see that you have some particular socio-economic ideologies of your own -- usually the kind I hear from big-L libertarians. So, I doubt I'll be able to change your mind on any of this, and I'm not sure why we're even having this discussion. I'll keep my final reply short and sweet.
> If they don't have enough money to spend, what's with all of the money that's circulating every day?
The amount of money in circulation has very little to do with how it's distributed or where it's circulating.
> Why don't we take it a step further back, and consider whether and when it's appropriate and efficacious to design and implement any top-down strategies for what fundamentally amount to other people's lives. That's what economies are, after all, no matter how many layers of abstraction and aggregation you pile on top of your understanding.
This is particularly ironic given that not much further down in my previous comment, I said exactly the same thing -- that economies amount to people's lives -- and I gave my own life as an example, and you didn't understand my point. You are very much lecturing to the choir here.
> You've got it in your head that economies are somehow predictable systems that conform to well-understood models, and which can be managed via carefully-calculated planning.
1. Please point out where I said that.
2. "Managing" -- really, influencing -- economies is in fact one of the roles of government, by definition.
3. Only a couple of short paragraphs above, you said: "If the money supply remains constant but the real economy expands, then each dollar is worth more; i.e. if what you were saying is true, we'd see deflation." This is a rule. If it is true, then we have a system of rules, and, while it may not be absolutely predictable, it is still a system which is subject to predictable behavior. You can't have it both ways. You can't say in one breath that you can use a constant money supply and an expanding economy to predict deflation, and then in the next breath say that the system isn't predictable. So, if someone like me comes along and says, "I don't think that continuing supply-side policies are leading to a healthy economy" -- which, again, was the only point of all of this -- then perhaps instead of saying, "you're wrong because it's unpredictable", you might point out which rules are being broken.
> The problem is that taxes provide revenue to the government, and what those taxes are spent on is almost invariably destructive. Tax 'the wealthy' so we can have more foreign wars...
Why are you bringing this into the discussion? I never once even brushed past the Federal budget, or how taxes are being spent. If you could set aside your own prejudices for just a moment, I think you'd find that you and I would agree on a lot of points here. But, that's not what we were talking about.
The most charitable reading I can give your comment here is that you're suggesting we throw the baby out with the bathwater. That, because taxes are sometimes, even often, used for evil things, that they are inherently evil. I think it is sufficient to say that I disagree with that.
> ...anything really, that prevents taxes from funding the grandiose ambitions of people who want to remake society and people's lives from the top down, and especially those who prefer for everyone to outsource their happiness and security to outside institutions and abstract 'systems'.
And this is when I knew we couldn't continue to have a discussion.
This all started from a video and some brief commentary on it. To summarize the points: tax policy in the U.S. has in recent years favored large corporations and wealthy individuals; those favors have been justified by an ideological belief that those businesses and individuals will use their advantages to create more wealth; and that empirically does not seem to be happening as we are seeing falling savings, widening income gaps, continued unemployment and underemployment, continued stagnant consumer spending, weak investment markets, and an overall sluggish and stubborn economy.
How did we get from those points to "funding the grandiose ambitions of people who want to remake society and people's lives from the top down"??