91–100 of 125 posts
The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.
Here's a radical idea: get rid of the stock market and public ownership of stock. The only way to become an owner of a company is by being an employee. Essentially, all companies become co-ops. Investment of capital would happen through long-term relationships with banks, not through selling pieces of the company off to creeps who want outrageous returns at the expense of the employees/customers. Instead of short-ter…
Taxes should be lower for the poor who would thus spend more and keep the economic engine running and create jobs.
Taxes should be much higher for the rich so that that money is used by Govt to do infrastructure work (create jobs) or pay down debt (and thus provide services and create jobs).
Lowering taxes for the rich just allows the rich to seek investments that will increase their own wealth, not necessary creating jobs (Some VCs are an abberation to this).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many of the facts you stated are relatively invariant to the strength of the economy. I do not have good sources to describe how they have changed over time, but I would assume that points 1,3,4, and 5 are true nearly all the time. Additionally, for point 2, real wages going down on a timespan of 1 year is essentially noise in the face of rising real wages by various measures by FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags…
If it's invariant then I find it even more disturbing.
#1 and #3 are both symptoms of a common cause- essentially zero savings rate for a wide swath of the American population. For the large fraction of people, failing to save is a behavioral phenomenon. For many people, doubling their income would still result in them living paycheck to paycheck.
For #5, 17% of canadian children are living in poverty, 1 in 5 French children live in poverty, and poverty affects more than one in four children in the UK today (https://globalnews.ca/news/3739960/canadian-census-children-...) (http://www.france24.com/en/20150609-unicef-report-france-chi...) (http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/child-poverty-facts-and-figur...). Of course, each country sets its own poverty line to represent a socially-empathetic income level, resulting in pretty-even levels of nominal poverty across countries. It is not that surprising that expanding the scope of headline-worthy impoverishness to be "low-income or in poverty" would result in headline #4.
The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying…
I'm not super convinced that the economic hardships many Americans experience is mainly because of what major they chose in college. I would think a larger factor is that many people can't afford a degree at all. Most Americans never get one. And a lot of people that do go to college start their adult life with tons of student debt. Shouldn't we focus on those things rather than potentially regulating what major peop…
I'd like to go back to a system where we look at what the job actually requires, and set the level there. Then educate people to that level. In this way we aren't allowing colleges to tell us what level we need to educate people to, but instead letting it become a hybrid.
The required education for your basic job should be free. But I also don't want to write a blank check for people to go to college for the college experience. I don't think that's necessary.
The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying…
The solution is to cut K-12 to K-8, and teach modern college courses in 9-12 instead of wasting time there to "prepare." Dual-track 9-12 so that one track is the equivalent of full college, and another is the equivalent of vocational school/community college. College can be what graduate school is now, and graduate school can go back to being genuinely faculty-track.
“When he first started working iron, Hartnett was making about $43.90 in today’s dollars. On his last project, he made $16.93.”
The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying…
> Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field? Stop providing loan guarantees for all students regardless of the marketability of the degree they've chosen?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Consumption" is just something that does not produce an income. It's not about some excessive consumption. I mean, if you buy your 100" TV with debt, it's that not great, but if you buy your daily bread with debt, you're in a big trouble.
> but if you buy your daily bread with debt, you're in a big trouble. That's the problem. People are funding survival on credit. How do you fix that? Raise wages. How do you raise wages outside of macro supply/demand factors (interest rates, employment slack)? Politics.
Raise (net real) incomes on the bottom end. Doesn't have to be wage increases.
But, yes, politics.
What is paradoxical is that American voters keep voting to reduce taxes for the rich, who don't do anything with that saved money to increase businesses. Taxes should be lower for the poor who would thus spend more and keep the economic engine running and create jobs. Taxes should be much higher for the rich so that that money is used by Govt to do infrastructure work (create jobs) or pay down debt (and thus provide…
Some of it's just failings of a two party system. You vote for the one you like better, but given a binary choice it's a fairly non-specific vote.