That Northern Ireland/Ireland border is not an EU border - and I would presume that England and Scotland would prefer the goods could move freely just as they do now. The EU imposes certain tariffs on everything entering the EU, and all countries in the EU have to impose them (eg, 12% on plums, 8.8% on knitted gloves, 7.6% on non-knitted gloves, etc. to the level of your worst bureaucratic nightmare.). If there's an EU border between England and Scotland then that means either a dispute with the EU, or border posts, paperwork and tariff payments for probably both sides. Think of the effect on supply chains, too.
Which leads to an interesting possibility: an EU border (with EU tariffs) between England and Scotland, followed by the Scots joining the EU and the rUK leaving so that the border reverses. But at least it might give rUK voters a foretaste of what leaving the EU would mean to help inform their votes...
Without risk there wouldn't BE an insurance industry. Suppose there was a test which could determine exactly all of your future medical care costs and when you were going to die. There would be no financial risk at all. Health insurance would become, essentially, a savings plan. There'd be no profit any more.
This is also why a pure insurance model is always likely to be unacceptable in places like the UK. People here - and, I would guess, in most of the world - don't want just a way to make future healthcare costs predictable by pooling risk (and if you can predict that you'll die through being unable to fund it then that's exactly what happens). They want a way to provide an adequate level of healthcare to the whole population, whatever their income.
That's not necessarily true. There are many high-income professions which are male dominated.
I think that there's a great deal of interrelationship between the way men and women treat each other, and the way people treat each other at work and outside it. And one of aspect of that that I think is not looked at often enough is the way people make their sexual choices. Women can feel under pressure to be thin and beautiful with large chests because of men's preferences, but men come under pressure, too - under pressure to have high status jobs earning a lot of money (or, at least, to be higher status and higher earning than their prospective partner - one ex-partner told me that she wouldn't have considered me if I had earnt less than her). Inevitably, this will push more men than women in to making the sacrifices to their personal well-being to gain those things. In doing so, they make the labour market and working environment more competitive, political and hostile, and so less attractive to everyone. But that disproportionately puts off women, who don't need to deal with that to find the 'best' partners.
The impact of the working environment doesn't just come from hostility, though. Take an organization - or any social group, really - and you're going to find it shaped by and for the people who are actually in it. If it's stuffed full of 22 year old men then you're going to find social expectations that you go out and get drunk with colleagues, and sympathy for people who turn up in the morning with a hangover. If it's stuffed full of 35 year old women you're more likely to find company provided childcare and sympathy for people who have to stay at home with sick children. There may be no hostility or different treatment of men and women whatsoever, and it's hard to say it's anyone's fault, but that doesn't make it go away.
I don't believe this can explain the whole of gender imbalances across industries, possibly not even a large part of it. There are no doubt many reasons. However, it is one of those causes that can be attacked using positive discrimination (though I don't agree with that, personally...I think that if you want equal treatment for each gender on principle, then you need to stick to that principle).
I'd hazard a guess that Rolls Royce might make engines which require less maintenance than usual, or maintenance which can be carried out quickly at each port, and so have come up with this idea because it would help turn that in to a competitive advantage. I also notice they mention the Baltic as a first place to try something, which I assume implies quite short voyages.
Because this sort of politics is not based on using rational understanding of the world to make good governmental decisions to achieve some goal, it's based on group dynamics. Look at how the US and 'saboteurs' are blamed for everything, and how people are prepared to attack others for mere membership or association with the other group. It's about orchestrating an us and a them, creating insiders to fight and to hate for you to defend your tribe, so the powerful can keep themselves there.
It seems like some people can't see politics or government any other way. Look at the partisan hatred in the US, or those who respond to climate change arguments by ignoring the science and concentrating on defining 'scientists' as a group and questioning their motivation. It's everywhere, from more benign forms to the extreme, from biology teaching in schools to traditional religious wars to nazism and the soviets, and extreme politicians always make it their weapon.
1) The victim is whoever absorbed the assets of the company at its closing. They've lost the value of the tape.
Not sure how it works in the US, but there's another option: The victim is whoever is owed money by the company when it closes, because the liquidators appointed to close it will bill many hours of accountants' time at huge rates to the company for handling this, far exceeding any amount they'll ever recover for creditors.
Obviously, I have no idea if this is the case here. But people who close companies can have an incentive to investigate every little thing in order to inflate their own fees.
The US is not going to war with China or Russia any time soon.
Umm, I wouldn't wish to bet on that. And definitely not on the US needing to deter their militaries, especially China's. Think of Taiwan, the Japan/China disputes and Russia's tendency to invade states it thinks it ought to still own when they don't do what they're told.
Indeed it can be argued - but there still needs to be a law saying they can. A law subject to democratic (well, ish) and judicial oversight, a law that everyone can see and argue over.
This is why independent central banks are such a good idea: it stops politicians cutting rates in time for the election, but not so early that inflation becomes obvious by then. It's a pity there isn't an equivalent for the deficit.
To make it even more fun, statistics are always delayed and the media report the first figures released, not usually the revisions.
That's a good demonstration of 'assuming the worst': you've just treated 'sex offenders registry' as a 'child sex offenders registry', with no logical or factual reason for doing that. Someone who put his hand somewhere he shouldn't in a nightclub aged 21 and was unlucky enough to get prosecuted is someone who once did something rather unpleasant, but not a danger to your children because of it, nor someone to ostracise for 20 years. And someone who engaged in under-age sexual activity as a teenager is not a danger to your children because of it, either, and that would presumably appear as a rather serious offence on the register.
Even if you take the trouble to find out that someone comes in to those categories, you may be in a place where you really don't want to be the only person in your community seen talking to the sex offender.
It's a terrible way to manage offenders after release. It's vindictive and arbitrary, with no regard for facts. It's just not fit for any sort of useful purpose. A proper probation service and probation officers are the way to do it.
It's not just about what one person thinks about another being on the register. It's also that everyone else knows that you know, and so you're expected to behave 'appropriately' in response to that. Even informally there could be some taint attached to you for not shunning someone on the register, but think about an employer.
Suppose you employ someone on the register (or anyone with any sort of past conviction). That person may have no more risk of committing an offence than anyone else - or no more raised risk than is suggested by being in one of those groups we're not supposed to make any assumptions of, like racial, gender and age groups. Then that person commits an offence - maybe just one person, out of hundreds of thousands of employees. If that person was not on the register then you can say you had no way to know. If he was, even if it was for urinating in the street or kissing a similarly aged teenager, you're going to get as much blame as an employer as anyone can make stick.
If auto-Google-stalking becomes commonplace expect that to apply to anything anyone has ever done that it supposed to be disliked in the place he happens to be. Consider a gay person in Russia or an atheist or an adulterer in Saudi Arabia. Or, for that matter, a tory in Liverpool.
Probably, though I can't help thinking that if they can be sorted out (a private Google Docs server, or equivalent?) there could be some serious advantage through staff being able to just get on with using it without begging for licences/install disks.
I was at an NHS hospital recently, arranging a second appointment. They couldn't give me the appointment because they'd run out of pages in their (paper) appointment book, and the Keeper Of Additional Pages wasn't answering the phone. The appointment book even covered appointments for three hospitals in three different cities/towns - I've no idea how the data moved around, possibly in a consultant's car. They had to sort it out later and post the appointment to me. This is stupid, and I'm sure the people involved know it is and would be perfectly capable of setting up their own ad-hoc system with Google Docs to replace their ad-hoc system with paper. But I suspect it doesn't happen just because the only way anything IT related happens is through someone many levels up with no connection to what's going on rolling out some custom monolithic IT project that costs a fortune.
IMO, simply making it easy for staff to make little improvements by being able to use stuff like Google Docs without begging someone else to be allowed to/to buy licences/to install software could have quite a cumulative effect.
AIUI, and a quick Googling seems to confirm it, there are physiological responses to noise that don't go away with habituation (though you do get habituated at a conscious level). It seems to have been looked at most with aircraft noise (eg http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - higher stress in schoolchildren from aircraft noise - and http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - poorer long term memory and reading). So maybe you should blame the noise rather than lack of space.
It encourages interaction. Whether it encourages collaboration or not is a related but different thing. Collaboration is about the coordinated work of several people achieving a particular goal. You need to interact to collaborate, but not all interaction is collaboration and you need to work effectively as individuals, too. I wish collaboration-worshiping managers (who, I suspect, are mostly extroverts and work in areas that don't require in-depth individual work) would recognize the difference.
When people "save" money, what they are actually doing is investing it in businesses. Those businesses use that money to buy equipment in order to do something productive with it. When government takes that money instead and gives it to people who will use it for consumption, the consumer goods they buy with it won't be used to produce anything new. So your idea that taxing and then transferring the money to poor people is good for the economy is wrong.
When people save money they can be doing quite a lot of things. They may be buying assets, like shares or houses, which is a transfer and doesn't represent any economic activity (except for commissions, etc). Or they may be saving it in a bank account. In a bank account most of the money will be lent out again, although much of it will be to governments and consumers as loans, not businesses, and in the process more money will be created and spent. Whilst this is true, it doesn't help.
Let's take a very simplified example situation. Suppose that everyone who borrows immediately spends the money, and that everyone they spend it with simply saves it in a bank account. And suppose that banks must keep 10% of their deposits as reserves, that $100 is created and put in a bank and that no-one keeps any cash. If you know the money multiplier you'll know what happens: We start with $100 in existence. $90 is lent to someone else, who spends it and it becomes $90 of new bank deposits. $81 is lent to someone, who spends it and it becomes $81 of bank deposits. Etc. We end up with $1000 of bank deposits and no new movements of money. Economic activity ceases because no new money can be lent (the bank is right up to its reserve requirement) and everyone is sitting on their savings.
Back in the real-ish world, suppose that 10% of all the money is cash and the rest in deposits. The amount lent by banks depends on the size of their deposits (and loans from central banks, etc), and on things like their reserve ratios, capital requirements and so on. If you receive your salary as a bank deposit it doesn't matter whether you spend it (thus putting it in someone else's account) or save it, as long as you don't draw more out as cash than you'd normally have and put it under the mattress it the amount of deposits available to banks to lend stays the same. In other words, your saving does not increase the amount available for banks to lend to businesses. Only the 10% of money as cash changes - lets say everyone keeps half as much cash around - will your decisions make any difference.
What matters is how often this money, including bank deposits, changes hands. Saving it means reducing that frequency - that's what saving is, the moving of your right to spend it from one time to another. That's why taxing it and spending it, or taxing it and giving it to people who spend it, can increase economic activity.
But it's not money crossing borders that's so much the problem,
Did anybody say it was? Why are you putting up straw men?
Yes, TheRaven64 did.
For that reason, a government borrowing heavily in a country with a low savings rate, as in the US, can cause problems for that country's exporters.
Well, gee, you just wanted to tax people who save, thereby discouraging from saving. Now that causes problems for the country's exporters. Can't make up your mind?
I didn't just say I wanted to tax people who save. I didn't say anything at all about what I wanted to do. In fact, I think that the right response to the recession (beyond increasing the money supply, which is obvious) is extremely difficult to know precisely because of the tension between these two problems. However, one thing should be obvious: sooner or later the US is going to have to get over its allergy to tax and, at the very least, start taxing income from capital and to wealthy people at least as much as it taxes everyone else. And it needs to use that to reduce its deficit.
This is a big part of the reason why countries try to give companies tax breaks: even if none of the money is paid directly in taxes, it's better to have it circulate locally than to be sent elsewhere.
In well functioning economies, "circulating money" is a sign of lots of useful economic activity. Such useful activity happens when companies make things people want.
But you're confused about cause and effect: you can't make an economy function well by forcing money to circulate. You and I can play ping pong with our wallets and circulate money between us all day long and nobody is going to benefit. If you tax that activity, the money will disappear entirely.
That's the reason why economists distinguish between transfers and actual spending. Transfers don't count in GDP and, indeed, do not represent production. You give money to someone: transfer. Government taxes your money and gives it to a benefits recipient person: transfer. But it's not true that you can't force money to circulate or that money somehow disappears when you tax it (where do you think it goes, exactly?). Government taxes and spends it on infrastructure: infrastructure spending is not a transfer and IS money being made to circulate. Government taxes well off people who save more and gives it to poorer people: a transfer, but money in the hands of poorer people tends to circulate more.
if its infrastructure and employees are all based in the EU then that's money circulating in the EU,
Because in Economics 101, we all learn that if we force goods (and hence money) to circulate within a country and to stop them from crossing borders, everybody is so much better off than if we let them engage in trade! Protectionism, yeah! It's worked so well!
Trade is good, in general, yes, with some downsides. But it's not money crossing borders that's so much the problem, except possibly within the Eurozone. Money doesn't cross borders that much, instead one currency is swapped for another. For an EU citizen to buy stuff from Google (or for Google to repatriate profits) he finds someone with dollars who wants to swap them for his own currency. Sometimes this person might be a central bank or US citizen wanting to leave them in a bank account. But most of the time this is someone wanting to buy something in the EU. Goods, promises (ie, loans), asset ownership and similar are exchanged across borders, but often not money. When a country gets problems with its trade balance that means that lots of goods are coming in but are being exchanged for asset ownership or loan claims going out (or vice versa for surplus countries). For that reason, a government borrowing heavily in a country with a low savings rate, as in the US, can cause problems for that country's exporters. And a government saving heavily in a country with a high savings rate, as in China, does the opposite. Both of these effects are seen in the exchange rate, of course.
I'd agree that Java UIs are not as good as native ones. But, in the niches where you typically see Java clients such as enterprise apps, what do you do? You can write web applications, which are often not better if they're anything more than a simple or one-off interaction. You could use Flash/Adobe AIR, which is also not better in UI terms. (My favourite gripe is that neither handle keyboard interaction well, but it's far from the only one). Or you could encourage your IT department to write a native application and get something of similar quality and for Windows only.
What's happening with mobile devices is leaving an interesting situation here because the OS makers seem to be rather discouraging non-native apps. That might water down the advantage of (standard) Java. But I think there's still always going to be high demand from 'enterprise' software developers for a way of writing one client they can run across many devices. I very much suspect that the alternative will be to shove everything in a web app instead.
The problem with that is that it imposes huge costs (on the driver, on the drivers family, friends, employer, etc, and on the state) whilst being totally ineffective. Nobody except a handful of murderers (who should be prosecuted as such) drives a car if they believe they're likely to or going to kill someone. Adding a criminal sentence on top doesn't change that.
If you actually want to achieve something instead of just spreading the misery then you need to make sure that drink-driving is punished with as high a probability as possible, whether anyone is harmed or not. Pouring your tax revenue in to that instead of large-scale imprisonment is a much better idea.
Indeed. People are more likely to buy stuff priced at x.99, despite knowing it's a trick, they care more about the opinions of attractive people, they spend more if they go round a US supermarket anti-clockwise, they guess higher numbers for the proportion of UN countries which are African if you spin a wheel of fortune which gives a high number first and generally behave in lots of damn stupid ways. (And, by the way, all this still works even once you know about it). Assuming it's all because of stupidity is just lazy.
Emigrating is really not an easy (or cheap) thing to do - new culture, long distances to visit family, new languages, new laws, cutting of social ties etc - and UK benefits are really not that generous or easy to access (~£70/$115 per week, plus low quality housing (which must be shared if you're under 35)). It'd hardly be a big surprise if most people who can be bothered to do it are doing it for work, not laziness.
So, I should correct one thing: 34% (actualy 33.9%) is for EEA migrants (the EU plus a bit) arriving between 2001 and 2011. This is the period when large numbers Poles (and other eastern European new EU members) arrived, who seem to spark the most concern. Taking all EEA migrants it's much lower (4.5%), but still higher than the -10.6% for natives. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if a lot of taxes came from EEA migrants moving to work in British banks.
The methodology they use seems to be to assign all public expenditure to the UK/EEA/non-EEA groups, taking in to account what's known about benefits they receive whilst assigning average costs for things like defence. So, yes, it includes in-work benefits.
I've seen this rather sad situation described as an immigration two-for-one offer for the government. The government publishes, talks about and targets net migration figures, not immigration figures. Kicking out UK citizens like this is a double-win for them - one off the figures for one immigrant not let in, another off the figures for a UK citizen leaving. I wouldn't even be surprised if that was deliberately targeted.
Slashdot Mirror
That Northern Ireland/Ireland border is not an EU border - and I would presume that England and Scotland would prefer the goods could move freely just as they do now. The EU imposes certain tariffs on everything entering the EU, and all countries in the EU have to impose them (eg, 12% on plums, 8.8% on knitted gloves, 7.6% on non-knitted gloves, etc. to the level of your worst bureaucratic nightmare.). If there's an EU border between England and Scotland then that means either a dispute with the EU, or border posts, paperwork and tariff payments for probably both sides. Think of the effect on supply chains, too.
Which leads to an interesting possibility: an EU border (with EU tariffs) between England and Scotland, followed by the Scots joining the EU and the rUK leaving so that the border reverses. But at least it might give rUK voters a foretaste of what leaving the EU would mean to help inform their votes...
He's Portuguese. And, IIRC, he'll be gone before it matters.
Without risk there wouldn't BE an insurance industry. Suppose there was a test which could determine exactly all of your future medical care costs and when you were going to die. There would be no financial risk at all. Health insurance would become, essentially, a savings plan. There'd be no profit any more.
This is also why a pure insurance model is always likely to be unacceptable in places like the UK. People here - and, I would guess, in most of the world - don't want just a way to make future healthcare costs predictable by pooling risk (and if you can predict that you'll die through being unable to fund it then that's exactly what happens). They want a way to provide an adequate level of healthcare to the whole population, whatever their income.
That's not necessarily true. There are many high-income professions which are male dominated.
I think that there's a great deal of interrelationship between the way men and women treat each other, and the way people treat each other at work and outside it. And one of aspect of that that I think is not looked at often enough is the way people make their sexual choices. Women can feel under pressure to be thin and beautiful with large chests because of men's preferences, but men come under pressure, too - under pressure to have high status jobs earning a lot of money (or, at least, to be higher status and higher earning than their prospective partner - one ex-partner told me that she wouldn't have considered me if I had earnt less than her). Inevitably, this will push more men than women in to making the sacrifices to their personal well-being to gain those things. In doing so, they make the labour market and working environment more competitive, political and hostile, and so less attractive to everyone. But that disproportionately puts off women, who don't need to deal with that to find the 'best' partners.
The impact of the working environment doesn't just come from hostility, though. Take an organization - or any social group, really - and you're going to find it shaped by and for the people who are actually in it. If it's stuffed full of 22 year old men then you're going to find social expectations that you go out and get drunk with colleagues, and sympathy for people who turn up in the morning with a hangover. If it's stuffed full of 35 year old women you're more likely to find company provided childcare and sympathy for people who have to stay at home with sick children. There may be no hostility or different treatment of men and women whatsoever, and it's hard to say it's anyone's fault, but that doesn't make it go away.
I don't believe this can explain the whole of gender imbalances across industries, possibly not even a large part of it. There are no doubt many reasons. However, it is one of those causes that can be attacked using positive discrimination (though I don't agree with that, personally...I think that if you want equal treatment for each gender on principle, then you need to stick to that principle).
I'd hazard a guess that Rolls Royce might make engines which require less maintenance than usual, or maintenance which can be carried out quickly at each port, and so have come up with this idea because it would help turn that in to a competitive advantage. I also notice they mention the Baltic as a first place to try something, which I assume implies quite short voyages.
Because this sort of politics is not based on using rational understanding of the world to make good governmental decisions to achieve some goal, it's based on group dynamics. Look at how the US and 'saboteurs' are blamed for everything, and how people are prepared to attack others for mere membership or association with the other group. It's about orchestrating an us and a them, creating insiders to fight and to hate for you to defend your tribe, so the powerful can keep themselves there.
It seems like some people can't see politics or government any other way. Look at the partisan hatred in the US, or those who respond to climate change arguments by ignoring the science and concentrating on defining 'scientists' as a group and questioning their motivation. It's everywhere, from more benign forms to the extreme, from biology teaching in schools to traditional religious wars to nazism and the soviets, and extreme politicians always make it their weapon.
1) The victim is whoever absorbed the assets of the company at its closing. They've lost the value of the tape.
Not sure how it works in the US, but there's another option: The victim is whoever is owed money by the company when it closes, because the liquidators appointed to close it will bill many hours of accountants' time at huge rates to the company for handling this, far exceeding any amount they'll ever recover for creditors.
Obviously, I have no idea if this is the case here. But people who close companies can have an incentive to investigate every little thing in order to inflate their own fees.
The US is not going to war with China or Russia any time soon.
Umm, I wouldn't wish to bet on that. And definitely not on the US needing to deter their militaries, especially China's. Think of Taiwan, the Japan/China disputes and Russia's tendency to invade states it thinks it ought to still own when they don't do what they're told.
Still, it's obviously not the only threat.
Indeed it can be argued - but there still needs to be a law saying they can. A law subject to democratic (well, ish) and judicial oversight, a law that everyone can see and argue over.
This is why independent central banks are such a good idea: it stops politicians cutting rates in time for the election, but not so early that inflation becomes obvious by then. It's a pity there isn't an equivalent for the deficit.
To make it even more fun, statistics are always delayed and the media report the first figures released, not usually the revisions.
That's a good demonstration of 'assuming the worst': you've just treated 'sex offenders registry' as a 'child sex offenders registry', with no logical or factual reason for doing that. Someone who put his hand somewhere he shouldn't in a nightclub aged 21 and was unlucky enough to get prosecuted is someone who once did something rather unpleasant, but not a danger to your children because of it, nor someone to ostracise for 20 years. And someone who engaged in under-age sexual activity as a teenager is not a danger to your children because of it, either, and that would presumably appear as a rather serious offence on the register.
Even if you take the trouble to find out that someone comes in to those categories, you may be in a place where you really don't want to be the only person in your community seen talking to the sex offender.
It's a terrible way to manage offenders after release. It's vindictive and arbitrary, with no regard for facts. It's just not fit for any sort of useful purpose. A proper probation service and probation officers are the way to do it.
It's not just about what one person thinks about another being on the register. It's also that everyone else knows that you know, and so you're expected to behave 'appropriately' in response to that. Even informally there could be some taint attached to you for not shunning someone on the register, but think about an employer.
Suppose you employ someone on the register (or anyone with any sort of past conviction). That person may have no more risk of committing an offence than anyone else - or no more raised risk than is suggested by being in one of those groups we're not supposed to make any assumptions of, like racial, gender and age groups. Then that person commits an offence - maybe just one person, out of hundreds of thousands of employees. If that person was not on the register then you can say you had no way to know. If he was, even if it was for urinating in the street or kissing a similarly aged teenager, you're going to get as much blame as an employer as anyone can make stick.
If auto-Google-stalking becomes commonplace expect that to apply to anything anyone has ever done that it supposed to be disliked in the place he happens to be. Consider a gay person in Russia or an atheist or an adulterer in Saudi Arabia. Or, for that matter, a tory in Liverpool.
Probably, though I can't help thinking that if they can be sorted out (a private Google Docs server, or equivalent?) there could be some serious advantage through staff being able to just get on with using it without begging for licences/install disks.
I was at an NHS hospital recently, arranging a second appointment. They couldn't give me the appointment because they'd run out of pages in their (paper) appointment book, and the Keeper Of Additional Pages wasn't answering the phone. The appointment book even covered appointments for three hospitals in three different cities/towns - I've no idea how the data moved around, possibly in a consultant's car. They had to sort it out later and post the appointment to me. This is stupid, and I'm sure the people involved know it is and would be perfectly capable of setting up their own ad-hoc system with Google Docs to replace their ad-hoc system with paper. But I suspect it doesn't happen just because the only way anything IT related happens is through someone many levels up with no connection to what's going on rolling out some custom monolithic IT project that costs a fortune.
IMO, simply making it easy for staff to make little improvements by being able to use stuff like Google Docs without begging someone else to be allowed to/to buy licences/to install software could have quite a cumulative effect.
AIUI, and a quick Googling seems to confirm it, there are physiological responses to noise that don't go away with habituation (though you do get habituated at a conscious level). It seems to have been looked at most with aircraft noise (eg http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - higher stress in schoolchildren from aircraft noise - and http://pss.sagepub.com/content... - poorer long term memory and reading). So maybe you should blame the noise rather than lack of space.
It encourages interaction. Whether it encourages collaboration or not is a related but different thing. Collaboration is about the coordinated work of several people achieving a particular goal. You need to interact to collaborate, but not all interaction is collaboration and you need to work effectively as individuals, too. I wish collaboration-worshiping managers (who, I suspect, are mostly extroverts and work in areas that don't require in-depth individual work) would recognize the difference.
When people "save" money, what they are actually doing is investing it in businesses. Those businesses use that money to buy equipment in order to do something productive with it. When government takes that money instead and gives it to people who will use it for consumption, the consumer goods they buy with it won't be used to produce anything new. So your idea that taxing and then transferring the money to poor people is good for the economy is wrong.
When people save money they can be doing quite a lot of things. They may be buying assets, like shares or houses, which is a transfer and doesn't represent any economic activity (except for commissions, etc). Or they may be saving it in a bank account. In a bank account most of the money will be lent out again, although much of it will be to governments and consumers as loans, not businesses, and in the process more money will be created and spent. Whilst this is true, it doesn't help.
Let's take a very simplified example situation. Suppose that everyone who borrows immediately spends the money, and that everyone they spend it with simply saves it in a bank account. And suppose that banks must keep 10% of their deposits as reserves, that $100 is created and put in a bank and that no-one keeps any cash. If you know the money multiplier you'll know what happens: We start with $100 in existence. $90 is lent to someone else, who spends it and it becomes $90 of new bank deposits. $81 is lent to someone, who spends it and it becomes $81 of bank deposits. Etc. We end up with $1000 of bank deposits and no new movements of money. Economic activity ceases because no new money can be lent (the bank is right up to its reserve requirement) and everyone is sitting on their savings.
Back in the real-ish world, suppose that 10% of all the money is cash and the rest in deposits. The amount lent by banks depends on the size of their deposits (and loans from central banks, etc), and on things like their reserve ratios, capital requirements and so on. If you receive your salary as a bank deposit it doesn't matter whether you spend it (thus putting it in someone else's account) or save it, as long as you don't draw more out as cash than you'd normally have and put it under the mattress it the amount of deposits available to banks to lend stays the same. In other words, your saving does not increase the amount available for banks to lend to businesses. Only the 10% of money as cash changes - lets say everyone keeps half as much cash around - will your decisions make any difference.
What matters is how often this money, including bank deposits, changes hands. Saving it means reducing that frequency - that's what saving is, the moving of your right to spend it from one time to another. That's why taxing it and spending it, or taxing it and giving it to people who spend it, can increase economic activity.
Did anybody say it was? Why are you putting up straw men?
Yes, TheRaven64 did.
Well, gee, you just wanted to tax people who save, thereby discouraging from saving. Now that causes problems for the country's exporters. Can't make up your mind?
I didn't just say I wanted to tax people who save. I didn't say anything at all about what I wanted to do. In fact, I think that the right response to the recession (beyond increasing the money supply, which is obvious) is extremely difficult to know precisely because of the tension between these two problems. However, one thing should be obvious: sooner or later the US is going to have to get over its allergy to tax and, at the very least, start taxing income from capital and to wealthy people at least as much as it taxes everyone else. And it needs to use that to reduce its deficit.
In well functioning economies, "circulating money" is a sign of lots of useful economic activity. Such useful activity happens when companies make things people want.
But you're confused about cause and effect: you can't make an economy function well by forcing money to circulate. You and I can play ping pong with our wallets and circulate money between us all day long and nobody is going to benefit. If you tax that activity, the money will disappear entirely.
That's the reason why economists distinguish between transfers and actual spending. Transfers don't count in GDP and, indeed, do not represent production. You give money to someone: transfer. Government taxes your money and gives it to a benefits recipient person: transfer. But it's not true that you can't force money to circulate or that money somehow disappears when you tax it (where do you think it goes, exactly?). Government taxes and spends it on infrastructure: infrastructure spending is not a transfer and IS money being made to circulate. Government taxes well off people who save more and gives it to poorer people: a transfer, but money in the hands of poorer people tends to circulate more.
Because in Economics 101, we all learn that if we force goods (and hence money) to circulate within a country and to stop them from crossing borders, everybody is so much better off than if we let them engage in trade! Protectionism, yeah! It's worked so well!
Trade is good, in general, yes, with some downsides. But it's not money crossing borders that's so much the problem, except possibly within the Eurozone. Money doesn't cross borders that much, instead one currency is swapped for another. For an EU citizen to buy stuff from Google (or for Google to repatriate profits) he finds someone with dollars who wants to swap them for his own currency. Sometimes this person might be a central bank or US citizen wanting to leave them in a bank account. But most of the time this is someone wanting to buy something in the EU. Goods, promises (ie, loans), asset ownership and similar are exchanged across borders, but often not money. When a country gets problems with its trade balance that means that lots of goods are coming in but are being exchanged for asset ownership or loan claims going out (or vice versa for surplus countries). For that reason, a government borrowing heavily in a country with a low savings rate, as in the US, can cause problems for that country's exporters. And a government saving heavily in a country with a high savings rate, as in China, does the opposite. Both of these effects are seen in the exchange rate, of course.
I'd agree that Java UIs are not as good as native ones. But, in the niches where you typically see Java clients such as enterprise apps, what do you do? You can write web applications, which are often not better if they're anything more than a simple or one-off interaction. You could use Flash/Adobe AIR, which is also not better in UI terms. (My favourite gripe is that neither handle keyboard interaction well, but it's far from the only one). Or you could encourage your IT department to write a native application and get something of similar quality and for Windows only.
What's happening with mobile devices is leaving an interesting situation here because the OS makers seem to be rather discouraging non-native apps. That might water down the advantage of (standard) Java. But I think there's still always going to be high demand from 'enterprise' software developers for a way of writing one client they can run across many devices. I very much suspect that the alternative will be to shove everything in a web app instead.
The problem with that is that it imposes huge costs (on the driver, on the drivers family, friends, employer, etc, and on the state) whilst being totally ineffective. Nobody except a handful of murderers (who should be prosecuted as such) drives a car if they believe they're likely to or going to kill someone. Adding a criminal sentence on top doesn't change that.
If you actually want to achieve something instead of just spreading the misery then you need to make sure that drink-driving is punished with as high a probability as possible, whether anyone is harmed or not. Pouring your tax revenue in to that instead of large-scale imprisonment is a much better idea.
Indeed. People are more likely to buy stuff priced at x.99, despite knowing it's a trick, they care more about the opinions of attractive people, they spend more if they go round a US supermarket anti-clockwise, they guess higher numbers for the proportion of UN countries which are African if you spin a wheel of fortune which gives a high number first and generally behave in lots of damn stupid ways. (And, by the way, all this still works even once you know about it). Assuming it's all because of stupidity is just lazy.
"There's very little evidence of benefits tourism actually taking place within the EU"
With this relaxed immigration rules in the UK, you cannot make this statement.
Maybe you should have pointed to some of the evidence, then?
The EU had a look for some evidence and didn't find any, and the UK government didn't present any when asked for it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24522653 , http://ec.europa.eu/employment_social/empl_portal/facebook/20131014%20GHK%20study%20web_EU%20migration.pdf (page 163 onwards)). For working age benefits, 16.4% of working age UK citizens were claiming it compared to 6.7% of non-UK citizens: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/233032/nino-statistical-bulletin-aug-13.pdf . It looks like 2.3% of claimants are EU immigrants from that data....the best number I can find for EU nationals in the UK is 2.6% in 2009 (but that's the whole population not working age). Add to that the net fiscal contribution by EU migrants and, on the face of it, it looks like you can't just claim that it's 'obvious' and present no evidence.
Emigrating is really not an easy (or cheap) thing to do - new culture, long distances to visit family, new languages, new laws, cutting of social ties etc - and UK benefits are really not that generous or easy to access (~£70/$115 per week, plus low quality housing (which must be shared if you're under 35)). It'd hardly be a big surprise if most people who can be bothered to do it are doing it for work, not laziness.
Initially I took the figures from a BBC news article, which took them in turn from this: http://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_22_13.pdf Table 5, panel B on page 41.
So, I should correct one thing: 34% (actualy 33.9%) is for EEA migrants (the EU plus a bit) arriving between 2001 and 2011. This is the period when large numbers Poles (and other eastern European new EU members) arrived, who seem to spark the most concern. Taking all EEA migrants it's much lower (4.5%), but still higher than the -10.6% for natives. I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if a lot of taxes came from EEA migrants moving to work in British banks.
The methodology they use seems to be to assign all public expenditure to the UK/EEA/non-EEA groups, taking in to account what's known about benefits they receive whilst assigning average costs for things like defence. So, yes, it includes in-work benefits.
I've seen this rather sad situation described as an immigration two-for-one offer for the government. The government publishes, talks about and targets net migration figures, not immigration figures. Kicking out UK citizens like this is a double-win for them - one off the figures for one immigrant not let in, another off the figures for a UK citizen leaving. I wouldn't even be surprised if that was deliberately targeted.