We'll never see eye-to-eye because we're coming from fundamentally different starting points:
- you seem to believe profit is a bad thing; I don't - it's what creates jobs, feeds people, pays for people's retirement, improves standards of living, etc. etc. etc.;
- you further seem to feel subsidizing less profitable (and therefore less economically efficient) enterprises by punishing (read: taxing) more profitable (therefore more efficient) companies is a good thing; I most certainly don't - you don't reward failure and you don't give out ribbons for participation;
- you seem to be of the view that all companies having identical profit margins is a desirable outcome of governmental policy. That's just nuts, and is in effect a subsidy on inefficiency. Why shouldn't there be a reward for being more efficient, producing more goods at better value?
- if you think "new investors are unlikely to appear as startup companies tend to be less profitable", you haven't been paying attention to what's going on in Silicon Valley and other places;
- monopolies almost never occur in a free market with a level playing field - it's nearly impossible, except where government gets involved and creates a monopoly (see cable, electricity, water, roads etc in most jurisdictions). There are temporary exceptions (where "temporary" may mean decades until the market automatically smoothes things out). But show me some examples of a naturally occuring monopoly. Apple has astonishing profit margins and tons of cash on hand but they're nowhere near a monopoly, and they'll never be one - it's impossible. Look at other companies strong in their fields: Nike isn't a monopoly. Axa Insurance isn't a monoploy. That's not a function of the benevolent existence of corporate taxes; it's a function of monopolies being nearly impossible to come about in a free market - high margins attract competing capital greatly.
We'll never agree, fundamentally, though, about the merits of rewarding failure and punishing success. I'm opposed.
Are you suggesting profit isn't derived from revenue (which of course is simply the price of an item or service against the total number of sales of items or services)? Explain to me how you get profit without revenue.
Anyone arguing to eliminate corporate taxes is arguing to reduce taxes consumers pay, increase investment (and therefore jobs) etc etc etc, but that doesn't make me Mr Romney: I don't alter my positions in order to win popularity contests, and I'm most certainly not his brand of "soft socialist":)
It's legitimately debatable whether the existence of corporations is a net positive (ie whether trading off legal accountability by shareholders for the creation of vast pools of capital does more good than harm). Corporations aren't people. But corporations are certainly made of people (just like Soylent Green).
"To encourage corporations to actually invest back into their products instead of stockpiling money..."
Corporate taxes do nothing of the sort - if, as you're suggesting, the goal of a corporation, motivated by corporate tax rules, is to get income as close to zero as possible by reducing income via investment back into their products, such investment would presumably result in more income, which would simply exacerbate their "problem". Even if things worked as you imagine them to (they don't - see Apple, with its cash holdings of about $76bn, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc), the net effect would be to depress the share price, which in turn impacts, to a very great degree, the value of people's (including all sorts of middle class/union people) pensions. Not smart.
Consider this: there isn't a single dollar which can flow through a corporation (and that's all money does: flow through corporations) which isn't already taxed:
- money used by consumers to purchase a corporation's goods and/or services is always "after tax" dollars;
- in most jurisdictions, a sales tax is also applied at time of purchase;
- money the corporation distributes via dividends is subject to capital gains taxes;
- money paid to employees is subject to not only the corporation's share of social security and other taxes, but is then taxed via income tax applied to the employee's salary;
- any money stockpiled by the company is taxed on any income it generates as a result of being invested and drawing a return.
The distinction you make about corporate taxes being applied to net profits and not revenues isn't relevant, because the effect of the corporate tax is applied to revenues - a corporation pays its corporate tax via income, and income is derived from revenue, and revenue is a function of amount of products/services sold multiplied by the price of products/services sold. Imagine you own a banana stand, and you have incorporated. You sell a hundred bananas and, in so doing, generate $100 profit, however of that $100 you have to pay $50 in corporate taxes. Who do you think actually paid that $50 in taxes? Semantically you could say you did, out of your profits. But actually, each of your banana-loving customers paid for it - they paid $0.50 of each banana they purchased towards your corporate tax. Since, in the aggregate, downward forces are applied on margins to some equilibrium point in a free market, the net effect of eliminating that corporate tax would be a reduction in prices for your customers (ie to get the same $100 margin you would be able (and in fact would face market pressures) to reduce the price of your banana $0.50). When deciding if it's worth investing capital into a business, the decision is based upon an after tax return, not pre-tax: you don't create a business solely for the purposes of funding government spending! And the lower the after-tax return, the less likely capital gets invested, meaning the less likely jobs are created, etc etc etc.
I can clarify that for you later if you like - right now I need to go - sudden irresistable craving...must...find...banana...
The better question is, "why do corporations pay tax at all?", since every cent of that tax is ultimately paid by consumers - it's simply built into the price you pay. So it's just effectively a VAT in different clothing.
What you're saying is that the notion of a "true value" of labor, which differs from the "market assigned value", is not arbitrary because it can be calculated by taking the "market assigned value" of a product produced by that labor and then from that deduct the "market assigned value" of the labor. In all cases, it comes back to the market determining the price/value.
That doesn't result in a "true value" of the labor at all. It is simply the market determining the value of the labor. Consider this: if the price the widget sells for fluctuates, does that mean the "true value" of the labor also fluctuates? If the price of the product changes after it has been produced, does the "true value" of the labor change retroactively? If the worker produces 10 widgets, and some sell for $50 and some sell for $30, is the "true value" of the labor different for the $50 widgets vs the $30 widgets? What you are describing, quite correctly, is how the market determines the price (read: "value") of labor.
I think what Marx had in mind was an intrinsic value of labor, which doesn't exist, except in fantasy: the value of anything, labor included, is relative. The value of a dollar is measured by what someone will give you for it. The value of labor is likewise measured by what someone will give you for it. Any other measure is subjective and really nothing more than utopian daydreaming.
The fundamental flaws are in assuming there is some "true value" of their labor and that "true value" is necessarily greater than the market price for their labor. Any notion of the "true value" of their labor is arbitrary.
Yes, really. You stated, "Every country that's ever privatised its water has suffered a minimum of ten-fold increase in charges" and then you backed that up with a single example of a country where the prices didn't even go up 2 fold! I'll await your citations on England, Chile, Philippines, etc. (hint: no country that privatized water saw a "ten-fold increase in charges").
Your comments about Boliva are off the mark too: the involvement of the World Bank (which I'll agree is a corrupt organization) ended in 1997 ("Despite this, in the view of the public the World Bank remains inseparably linked to the Cochabamba privatization." - Wikipedia). Note too that a country awarding a monopoly to a private company is obviously not competition or a free market - it is the outsourcing of a monopoly, pure and simple, and typically has none of the benefits and all of the down side (and then some) of government management. You notably omit that after protests resulted in returning the water monopoly to government, "under public management half of the 600,000 people of Cochabamba remain without piped water and those with it continue to receive intermittent service." (Wikipedia). Gee, that really sounds like a win to me!
Here's some other info you omitted in your haste to make grandoise statements, absent an iota of truth, on the wonders of socialized water:
- England: In the six years after privatization the companies invested £17 billion, compared to £9.3 billion in the six years before privatization. It also brought about compliance with stringent drinking water standards and led to a higher quality of river water. According to data from OFWAT, the economic regulator of water and sewer companies in England and Wales, from the early 1990s until 2010, network pressure has improved substantially, supply interruptions have become less frequent, the responsiveness to complaints has improved and leakage has been reduced;
- Philippines: The share of the population with access to piped water in Western Manila increased from 67% in 1997 to 86% in 2006 and the share of customers that enjoys 24-hour water supply increased from 32% in 2007 to 71% in early 2011;
- Columbia: There was a significant increase in access under private contracts. For example, in Cartagena water supply coverage increased from 74 percent to almost universal coverage, while sewer coverage went up from 62 percent to 79 percent between 1996 and 2006. Half a million people gained access and 60 percent of the new connections benefited families in the poorest income quintile;
Further, here's what it says about the price of water under privatization in general (note particularly what it says about subsidization, ie where prices increased, the price previously being charged was below the cost of water recovery, which of course means the people were paying more for water previously anyway, it just showed up on their tax bill rather than their water bill - I've bolded that section for you):
Impact on tariffs
In almost all cases, water tariffs increased in the long run under privatization. In some cases, such as in Buenos Aires and in Manila, tariffs first declined, but then increased above their initial level. In other cases, such as in Cochabamba or in Guyana, tariffs were increased at the time of privatization. In some cases in Sub-Saharan Africa, where much of the investments are funded through development aid, tariffs did not increase over a long period. For example, in real terms tariffs remained stable in Senegal, while in Gabun they declined by 50% in five years (2001–2006) and by 30% in ten years in Côte d'Ivoire (1990 to 2000).[63] These exceptions notwithstanding, tariff increases are the rule over the long term. However, initial tariffs have been well below cost recovery levels in almost all cases, sometimes covering only a fraction of the cost of service provision. Tariff increases would thus have been necessary under public management as well, if the government wa
What level of people directly employed by government do you consider optimal? Currently, in the US, it is 1 in 7 and moving to 1 in 6. That does not count people as employed if their income depends on government programs such as welfare, etc. You could count those people as employed by the government too, only they're specifically paid for not producing anything. So 6 in 7 people work to pay the salary of the other 1 in 7 who are employed directly by government. Do you think the optimal ratio is 1 in 2 people directly working for government, on the backs of the other 1 in 2? How about 1 in 100? I'm genuinely curious what you consider optimal, because I sure don't consider 1 in 7 people employed by government as anywhere close to optimal (in some states like Wyoming and Alaska it's around 1 in 5).
Also, the notion that government should be in the business of "creating jobs", directly or indirectly, is absurd. It is business, often despite government, which creates jobs (at least for the 6 in 7 who don't currently work directly for the government).
If you measure the level of debt that you consider ideal as that level that can be serviced via cash flow, you don't have a very sophisticated understanding of economics: would you personally consider your ideal situation to be one in which all your credit cards are maxed out, but that's ok because you have the cash flow to make the minimum payments each month? Most people would consider that state of affairs sub-optimal.
Note too that the US only "defaults" on its debt payments when it stops making payments on that debt. If the debt ceiling had not been raised, the US would be left with two options: cut out the debt payments or cut expenditures elsewhere such that debt payments can be serviced. Had the debt "ceiling" actually been a ceiling, the US could have avoided bankruptcy simply by reducing expenditures in an amount required to continue servicing their debt. It is confusing to me when you simultaneously argue that the US has "plenty of cash flow to service our debt" but simultaneously argue that the country would not have had adequate cash flow to service debt had the debt ceiling not been increased (particularly when expenditures exceed income by a significant and material factor). Many parts of the government are in a negative cash flow situation, such as Social Security (which previously held a surplus which was used by Clinton to claim the government budget was "balanced").
As to cutting military expenditures, wholeheartedly agree with you there - the US was never intended to have a standing army, and the overseas military adventures of Bush and Obama would be laughable if so many lives on all sides weren't being lost daily.
HP would be smart to analyze the prices they're selling for on ebay, find the average price and sell them at retail around that price - the market, via ebay, has signalled loudly and clearly what the "right" price is (ie > $99 and $500; somewhere around $270 last I checked).
Thanks for that link - best line, from Press Secretary Jody Powell:
“The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind."
A president with "limited experience with enraged rabbits"? Voters won't make that mistake twice!
Felt it here in Toronto on the 32nd floor - building started swaying a fair bit. Thought I had too much blood in my alcohol system for a second there...
I stopped reading Forbes when they started gushing repeatedly about facebook without disclosing in any of the articles that they are owned by Elevation Partners, which has a significant stake in facebook (1%+, if I recall). Fred Anderson, former Executive VP and CFO of Apple is a founding member of Elevation Partners, so I guess that explains the current gushing about iStuff...
You're quite right, of course: manufacturing employment peaked around 1979, tanked from '80 - '83, then held more or less steady until 2000, when it started a substantial decline which didn't let up until 2010 (see here for that citation I asked you for but which I should have just dug up myself: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet). At the same time, however, manufacturing output per worker increased by over 200% between 1970 to 2010, so it's no surprise that when one worker is able to produce the same number of widgets that used to require three people to make, two of those three people may not be long for their jobs. To those two people, I'm sure efficiency does seem to be the enemy.
Then again, it's transitional: the US economy is clearly changing, and the quicker people adapt/retrain/etc, the better off they'll be in the long run (as opposed to implementing protectionist policies such that those workers in a doomed sector delay their adaptation until it's too late). Much, much easier said than done, no doubt about that. But the sooner peopole wrap their mind around the notion that the subsidized wage levels that permitted dramatic wage growth are unsustainable and over for good, and that constantly rising wages are an anomoly, the better off the whole country will be. It's a horribly rude awakening, to be sure, but necessary.
At the end of the day, labor prices are like water: they find their own level. Various policies like immigration restrictions, price fixing (ie minimum wage; unions), trade restrictions, etc. may have tilted the bucket so most of the water flowed to US workers for a while (at the expense, notably, of workers elsewhere), but there is some equilibrium price for labor globally, and that price is substantially lower than Americans have grown accustomed to while simultaneously significantly higher than an order of magnitude of people elsewhere have been toiling under. Philosophically, I'm all in favor of that, because a hell of a lot more people around the world will be able to feed their families, and the trade off is a relatively fewer number of Americans will have to wait a few years before buying that new 3D TV or getting the third car. But it sure sucks if you're one of those American workers.
In all cases, your point was correct and mine was ill-considered - thanks for setting me straight.
Add in the effect of a highly litigious legal climate - it tacks on a lot to the price of things in the US because companies need to recover the cost of liablity insurance, workers compensation insurance, etc...
However, if you're arguing that automation and efficiencies are bad things, I'll respectfully disagree. Do you drive a bespoke, hand-made car? Are you willing and able to pay $2,000,000 for same?
Note tho that I don't disagree with a lot of the post - there's a compelling argument that can be made that the concept of corporations, whereby owners (ie shareholders) get to abdicate legal responsiblity to a legal fiction called a "corporation" for the purposes of massively increasing the pool of available capital may be incredibly sub-optimal, and the "police state" comment is spot-on.
On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to design a web site and I'm looking for advice on a particular feature - what I'd like to include is a charming feature whereby visitors click on a comment box and are randomly transported somewhere else on the page. Somewhere far, far away from the comment box, such that the visitor can't even determine if the comment box is above or below them. And I want this to happen almost all the time. You know, just like slashdot. Any ideas?
As long as you, personally (and others who share your view), are unwilling to pay substantially more for the same (and possibly inferior, ie cars) product, for the purposes of subsidizing workers, simply because it is "Made in the USA", you're contributing to the system you are railing against. If approached by two people, one of whom (Bob) offers to sell you an item for $1 and another (Jim) offers the same item for $5, most people will buy the $1 item. The fact that when you scale the example up considerably to the point that Bob and Jim become China and USA doesn't much alter that: if someone can make something more efficiently, and therefore sell it at a cheaper price, that someone (or country) tends to win.
While I can understand the pain that leads to viewpoints like yours (who likes to see their hometown undergo serious changes for the worse?), the fundamental problem is that the US has become massively inefficient in many ways, most notably in labor costs. And while the solution involves a whole lot more pain still to come (in the form of continued reduction in pay and benefits in very many parts of the US economy), it's not a viable alternative to continue to subsidize labor costs via protectionism and other things which will cause even more pain in the long run, as the labor force continues to get more inefficient relative to other countries - that's just whistling past the graveyard on the way to your job at the horse and buggy factory.
I don't look at "trade" as "war"; I look at it as there simply being another guy trying to feed his family just like I am, and he is willing to work harder and for less money and benefits to feed them. The fact his name is Ping and he lives in China really isn't relevant - he might as well be Bob or Jim. The attitude of entitlement that says, "I am an American, therefore I deserve a certain standard of living" is what's going to kill the US unless it's replaced with, "Fuck it, I'll work harder and for less if that's what it takes to win!" That's what generations did that made the US. Hell, people risk their lives to get into the US and work their asses off just so they can send a few bucks home to feed their family, and they're doing the kind of jobs at the kind of pay virtually all Americans snicker at while they do important things - you know, listen to the latest Britney tunes and find out what Paris Hilton is up to and then go shopping for some $200 jeans and a new pair of Nikes (that some other guy worked his ass of for $2 a day to put together for you).
Every day, whether you like it or not, you're up against hundreds of millions of people willing to work harder, longer and for less than you, and their willingness to do so has been chipping away at the notion of Amercian divine right to a particular standard of living for a long time now. Forget the real estate bubble or the tech bubble or the currency bubble or any of the other bubbles - the biggest bubble of all is the US labor bubble. I don't relish that - it sucks for people who grew up believing labor prices always, and only, go up (you know, like house prices). But railing against "corporations" or "government" (insofar as you lament their unwillingness to add restrictions to the restrictions that go you in this hole) is to ignore the root of the problem.
The US was, at least until the end of 2010 (haven't checked the figures for a while) the world's largest manufaturer. I'll repeat that, because there's enormous propaganda about "all" the manufacturing having fled the US: the US is the world's largest manufacturer. Granted, China, with 6 times as many people and a labor cost factor a fraction of the US' is catching up quickly - they may have already overtaken the US - but that's why the things you buy at Wal-Mart are cheap. I get that the talking heads and the hysteria they peddle on the TV and elsewhere may be compelling to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean the party line about "no manufacturing left in the US" is correct.
But really, how relevant is manufacturing to the US when there are more people employed by government in the US than there are in manufacturing and construction combined (it's about 1 in 7 people that are employed by the various levels of government)?
As for the "Chinese Overlords", if the US collapses (which I don't disagree it will, altho we may differ on the time frame) they lose the value of the few trillion in US government bonds they hold, plus their major market for all those goods they're manufacturing. As such, I expect them to do their utmost to prop up the US to the bitter end - they're in too deep now to do otherwise.
This is amusing, because the folks at Chrome have been asked repeatedly to include an option for "search on type" (as available on Firefox) and have repeatedly refused to include this, on the grounds that "Ctrl+F" works just fine.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll never see eye-to-eye because we're coming from fundamentally different starting points:
- you seem to believe profit is a bad thing; I don't - it's what creates jobs, feeds people, pays for people's retirement, improves standards of living, etc. etc. etc.;
- you further seem to feel subsidizing less profitable (and therefore less economically efficient) enterprises by punishing (read: taxing) more profitable (therefore more efficient) companies is a good thing; I most certainly don't - you don't reward failure and you don't give out ribbons for participation;
- you seem to be of the view that all companies having identical profit margins is a desirable outcome of governmental policy. That's just nuts, and is in effect a subsidy on inefficiency. Why shouldn't there be a reward for being more efficient, producing more goods at better value?
- if you think "new investors are unlikely to appear as startup companies tend to be less profitable", you haven't been paying attention to what's going on in Silicon Valley and other places;
- monopolies almost never occur in a free market with a level playing field - it's nearly impossible, except where government gets involved and creates a monopoly (see cable, electricity, water, roads etc in most jurisdictions). There are temporary exceptions (where "temporary" may mean decades until the market automatically smoothes things out). But show me some examples of a naturally occuring monopoly. Apple has astonishing profit margins and tons of cash on hand but they're nowhere near a monopoly, and they'll never be one - it's impossible. Look at other companies strong in their fields: Nike isn't a monopoly. Axa Insurance isn't a monoploy. That's not a function of the benevolent existence of corporate taxes; it's a function of monopolies being nearly impossible to come about in a free market - high margins attract competing capital greatly.
We'll never agree, fundamentally, though, about the merits of rewarding failure and punishing success. I'm opposed.
Are you suggesting profit isn't derived from revenue (which of course is simply the price of an item or service against the total number of sales of items or services)? Explain to me how you get profit without revenue.
Anyone arguing to eliminate corporate taxes is arguing to reduce taxes consumers pay, increase investment (and therefore jobs) etc etc etc, but that doesn't make me Mr Romney: I don't alter my positions in order to win popularity contests, and I'm most certainly not his brand of "soft socialist" :)
It's legitimately debatable whether the existence of corporations is a net positive (ie whether trading off legal accountability by shareholders for the creation of vast pools of capital does more good than harm). Corporations aren't people. But corporations are certainly made of people (just like Soylent Green).
"To encourage corporations to actually invest back into their products instead of stockpiling money..."
Corporate taxes do nothing of the sort - if, as you're suggesting, the goal of a corporation, motivated by corporate tax rules, is to get income as close to zero as possible by reducing income via investment back into their products, such investment would presumably result in more income, which would simply exacerbate their "problem". Even if things worked as you imagine them to (they don't - see Apple, with its cash holdings of about $76bn, Google, Microsoft, etc etc etc), the net effect would be to depress the share price, which in turn impacts, to a very great degree, the value of people's (including all sorts of middle class/union people) pensions. Not smart.
Consider this: there isn't a single dollar which can flow through a corporation (and that's all money does: flow through corporations) which isn't already taxed:
- money used by consumers to purchase a corporation's goods and/or services is always "after tax" dollars;
- in most jurisdictions, a sales tax is also applied at time of purchase;
- money the corporation distributes via dividends is subject to capital gains taxes;
- money paid to employees is subject to not only the corporation's share of social security and other taxes, but is then taxed via income tax applied to the employee's salary;
- any money stockpiled by the company is taxed on any income it generates as a result of being invested and drawing a return.
The distinction you make about corporate taxes being applied to net profits and not revenues isn't relevant, because the effect of the corporate tax is applied to revenues - a corporation pays its corporate tax via income, and income is derived from revenue, and revenue is a function of amount of products/services sold multiplied by the price of products/services sold. Imagine you own a banana stand, and you have incorporated. You sell a hundred bananas and, in so doing, generate $100 profit, however of that $100 you have to pay $50 in corporate taxes. Who do you think actually paid that $50 in taxes? Semantically you could say you did, out of your profits. But actually, each of your banana-loving customers paid for it - they paid $0.50 of each banana they purchased towards your corporate tax. Since, in the aggregate, downward forces are applied on margins to some equilibrium point in a free market, the net effect of eliminating that corporate tax would be a reduction in prices for your customers (ie to get the same $100 margin you would be able (and in fact would face market pressures) to reduce the price of your banana $0.50). When deciding if it's worth investing capital into a business, the decision is based upon an after tax return, not pre-tax: you don't create a business solely for the purposes of funding government spending! And the lower the after-tax return, the less likely capital gets invested, meaning the less likely jobs are created, etc etc etc.
I can clarify that for you later if you like - right now I need to go - sudden irresistable craving...must...find...banana...
The better question is, "why do corporations pay tax at all?", since every cent of that tax is ultimately paid by consumers - it's simply built into the price you pay. So it's just effectively a VAT in different clothing.
No.
What you're saying is that the notion of a "true value" of labor, which differs from the "market assigned value", is not arbitrary because it can be calculated by taking the "market assigned value" of a product produced by that labor and then from that deduct the "market assigned value" of the labor. In all cases, it comes back to the market determining the price/value.
That doesn't result in a "true value" of the labor at all. It is simply the market determining the value of the labor. Consider this: if the price the widget sells for fluctuates, does that mean the "true value" of the labor also fluctuates? If the price of the product changes after it has been produced, does the "true value" of the labor change retroactively? If the worker produces 10 widgets, and some sell for $50 and some sell for $30, is the "true value" of the labor different for the $50 widgets vs the $30 widgets? What you are describing, quite correctly, is how the market determines the price (read: "value") of labor.
I think what Marx had in mind was an intrinsic value of labor, which doesn't exist, except in fantasy: the value of anything, labor included, is relative. The value of a dollar is measured by what someone will give you for it. The value of labor is likewise measured by what someone will give you for it. Any other measure is subjective and really nothing more than utopian daydreaming.
The fundamental flaws are in assuming there is some "true value" of their labor and that "true value" is necessarily greater than the market price for their labor. Any notion of the "true value" of their labor is arbitrary.
That was just a payoff to brother Billy...
Yes, really. You stated, "Every country that's ever privatised its water has suffered a minimum of ten-fold increase in charges" and then you backed that up with a single example of a country where the prices didn't even go up 2 fold! I'll await your citations on England, Chile, Philippines, etc. (hint: no country that privatized water saw a "ten-fold increase in charges").
Your comments about Boliva are off the mark too: the involvement of the World Bank (which I'll agree is a corrupt organization) ended in 1997 ("Despite this, in the view of the public the World Bank remains inseparably linked to the Cochabamba privatization." - Wikipedia). Note too that a country awarding a monopoly to a private company is obviously not competition or a free market - it is the outsourcing of a monopoly, pure and simple, and typically has none of the benefits and all of the down side (and then some) of government management. You notably omit that after protests resulted in returning the water monopoly to government, "under public management half of the 600,000 people of Cochabamba remain without piped water and those with it continue to receive intermittent service." (Wikipedia). Gee, that really sounds like a win to me!
Here's some other info you omitted in your haste to make grandoise statements, absent an iota of truth, on the wonders of socialized water:
- England: In the six years after privatization the companies invested £17 billion, compared to £9.3 billion in the six years before privatization. It also brought about compliance with stringent drinking water standards and led to a higher quality of river water. According to data from OFWAT, the economic regulator of water and sewer companies in England and Wales, from the early 1990s until 2010, network pressure has improved substantially, supply interruptions have become less frequent, the responsiveness to complaints has improved and leakage has been reduced;
- Philippines: The share of the population with access to piped water in Western Manila increased from 67% in 1997 to 86% in 2006 and the share of customers that enjoys 24-hour water supply increased from 32% in 2007 to 71% in early 2011;
- Columbia: There was a significant increase in access under private contracts. For example, in Cartagena water supply coverage increased from 74 percent to almost universal coverage, while sewer coverage went up from 62 percent to 79 percent between 1996 and 2006. Half a million people gained access and 60 percent of the new connections benefited families in the poorest income quintile;
Further, here's what it says about the price of water under privatization in general (note particularly what it says about subsidization, ie where prices increased, the price previously being charged was below the cost of water recovery, which of course means the people were paying more for water previously anyway, it just showed up on their tax bill rather than their water bill - I've bolded that section for you):
Impact on tariffs
In almost all cases, water tariffs increased in the long run under privatization. In some cases, such as in Buenos Aires and in Manila, tariffs first declined, but then increased above their initial level. In other cases, such as in Cochabamba or in Guyana, tariffs were increased at the time of privatization. In some cases in Sub-Saharan Africa, where much of the investments are funded through development aid, tariffs did not increase over a long period. For example, in real terms tariffs remained stable in Senegal, while in Gabun they declined by 50% in five years (2001–2006) and by 30% in ten years in Côte d'Ivoire (1990 to 2000).[63] These exceptions notwithstanding, tariff increases are the rule over the long term. However, initial tariffs have been well below cost recovery levels in almost all cases, sometimes covering only a fraction of the cost of service provision. Tariff increases would thus have been necessary under public management as well, if the government wa
The "summery" [sic] says "fatter" not "faster" - it's all part of helping the communications infrastructure keep up with rising obesity rates...
"Every country that's ever privatised its water has suffered a minimum of ten-fold increase in charges."
That's flat-out bullshit - citation please.
What level of people directly employed by government do you consider optimal? Currently, in the US, it is 1 in 7 and moving to 1 in 6. That does not count people as employed if their income depends on government programs such as welfare, etc. You could count those people as employed by the government too, only they're specifically paid for not producing anything. So 6 in 7 people work to pay the salary of the other 1 in 7 who are employed directly by government. Do you think the optimal ratio is 1 in 2 people directly working for government, on the backs of the other 1 in 2? How about 1 in 100? I'm genuinely curious what you consider optimal, because I sure don't consider 1 in 7 people employed by government as anywhere close to optimal (in some states like Wyoming and Alaska it's around 1 in 5).
Also, the notion that government should be in the business of "creating jobs", directly or indirectly, is absurd. It is business, often despite government, which creates jobs (at least for the 6 in 7 who don't currently work directly for the government).
If you measure the level of debt that you consider ideal as that level that can be serviced via cash flow, you don't have a very sophisticated understanding of economics: would you personally consider your ideal situation to be one in which all your credit cards are maxed out, but that's ok because you have the cash flow to make the minimum payments each month? Most people would consider that state of affairs sub-optimal.
Note too that the US only "defaults" on its debt payments when it stops making payments on that debt. If the debt ceiling had not been raised, the US would be left with two options: cut out the debt payments or cut expenditures elsewhere such that debt payments can be serviced. Had the debt "ceiling" actually been a ceiling, the US could have avoided bankruptcy simply by reducing expenditures in an amount required to continue servicing their debt. It is confusing to me when you simultaneously argue that the US has "plenty of cash flow to service our debt" but simultaneously argue that the country would not have had adequate cash flow to service debt had the debt ceiling not been increased (particularly when expenditures exceed income by a significant and material factor). Many parts of the government are in a negative cash flow situation, such as Social Security (which previously held a surplus which was used by Clinton to claim the government budget was "balanced").
As to cutting military expenditures, wholeheartedly agree with you there - the US was never intended to have a standing army, and the overseas military adventures of Bush and Obama would be laughable if so many lives on all sides weren't being lost daily.
Sorry, /. stripped out the "less than" sign that was supposed to be in front of that $500...
HP would be smart to analyze the prices they're selling for on ebay, find the average price and sell them at retail around that price - the market, via ebay, has signalled loudly and clearly what the "right" price is (ie > $99 and $500; somewhere around $270 last I checked).
Thanks for that link - best line, from Press Secretary Jody Powell:
“The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind."
A president with "limited experience with enraged rabbits"? Voters won't make that mistake twice!
Gthugl'ghulthahghfhgal is bullshit! It's original name was "Bigfuckingcanyon".
"Their business model is dead and they don't know it." FTFY.
Felt it here in Toronto on the 32nd floor - building started swaying a fair bit. Thought I had too much blood in my alcohol system for a second there...
I stopped reading Forbes when they started gushing repeatedly about facebook without disclosing in any of the articles that they are owned by Elevation Partners, which has a significant stake in facebook (1%+, if I recall). Fred Anderson, former Executive VP and CFO of Apple is a founding member of Elevation Partners, so I guess that explains the current gushing about iStuff...
You're quite right, of course: manufacturing employment peaked around 1979, tanked from '80 - '83, then held more or less steady until 2000, when it started a substantial decline which didn't let up until 2010 (see here for that citation I asked you for but which I should have just dug up myself: http://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet). At the same time, however, manufacturing output per worker increased by over 200% between 1970 to 2010, so it's no surprise that when one worker is able to produce the same number of widgets that used to require three people to make, two of those three people may not be long for their jobs. To those two people, I'm sure efficiency does seem to be the enemy.
Then again, it's transitional: the US economy is clearly changing, and the quicker people adapt/retrain/etc, the better off they'll be in the long run (as opposed to implementing protectionist policies such that those workers in a doomed sector delay their adaptation until it's too late). Much, much easier said than done, no doubt about that. But the sooner peopole wrap their mind around the notion that the subsidized wage levels that permitted dramatic wage growth are unsustainable and over for good, and that constantly rising wages are an anomoly, the better off the whole country will be. It's a horribly rude awakening, to be sure, but necessary.
At the end of the day, labor prices are like water: they find their own level. Various policies like immigration restrictions, price fixing (ie minimum wage; unions), trade restrictions, etc. may have tilted the bucket so most of the water flowed to US workers for a while (at the expense, notably, of workers elsewhere), but there is some equilibrium price for labor globally, and that price is substantially lower than Americans have grown accustomed to while simultaneously significantly higher than an order of magnitude of people elsewhere have been toiling under. Philosophically, I'm all in favor of that, because a hell of a lot more people around the world will be able to feed their families, and the trade off is a relatively fewer number of Americans will have to wait a few years before buying that new 3D TV or getting the third car. But it sure sucks if you're one of those American workers.
In all cases, your point was correct and mine was ill-considered - thanks for setting me straight.
Add in the effect of a highly litigious legal climate - it tacks on a lot to the price of things in the US because companies need to recover the cost of liablity insurance, workers compensation insurance, etc...
Citation neeed.
However, if you're arguing that automation and efficiencies are bad things, I'll respectfully disagree. Do you drive a bespoke, hand-made car? Are you willing and able to pay $2,000,000 for same?
Note tho that I don't disagree with a lot of the post - there's a compelling argument that can be made that the concept of corporations, whereby owners (ie shareholders) get to abdicate legal responsiblity to a legal fiction called a "corporation" for the purposes of massively increasing the pool of available capital may be incredibly sub-optimal, and the "police state" comment is spot-on.
On a completely unrelated note, I'd like to design a web site and I'm looking for advice on a particular feature - what I'd like to include is a charming feature whereby visitors click on a comment box and are randomly transported somewhere else on the page. Somewhere far, far away from the comment box, such that the visitor can't even determine if the comment box is above or below them. And I want this to happen almost all the time. You know, just like slashdot. Any ideas?
As long as you, personally (and others who share your view), are unwilling to pay substantially more for the same (and possibly inferior, ie cars) product, for the purposes of subsidizing workers, simply because it is "Made in the USA", you're contributing to the system you are railing against. If approached by two people, one of whom (Bob) offers to sell you an item for $1 and another (Jim) offers the same item for $5, most people will buy the $1 item. The fact that when you scale the example up considerably to the point that Bob and Jim become China and USA doesn't much alter that: if someone can make something more efficiently, and therefore sell it at a cheaper price, that someone (or country) tends to win.
While I can understand the pain that leads to viewpoints like yours (who likes to see their hometown undergo serious changes for the worse?), the fundamental problem is that the US has become massively inefficient in many ways, most notably in labor costs. And while the solution involves a whole lot more pain still to come (in the form of continued reduction in pay and benefits in very many parts of the US economy), it's not a viable alternative to continue to subsidize labor costs via protectionism and other things which will cause even more pain in the long run, as the labor force continues to get more inefficient relative to other countries - that's just whistling past the graveyard on the way to your job at the horse and buggy factory.
I don't look at "trade" as "war"; I look at it as there simply being another guy trying to feed his family just like I am, and he is willing to work harder and for less money and benefits to feed them. The fact his name is Ping and he lives in China really isn't relevant - he might as well be Bob or Jim. The attitude of entitlement that says, "I am an American, therefore I deserve a certain standard of living" is what's going to kill the US unless it's replaced with, "Fuck it, I'll work harder and for less if that's what it takes to win!" That's what generations did that made the US. Hell, people risk their lives to get into the US and work their asses off just so they can send a few bucks home to feed their family, and they're doing the kind of jobs at the kind of pay virtually all Americans snicker at while they do important things - you know, listen to the latest Britney tunes and find out what Paris Hilton is up to and then go shopping for some $200 jeans and a new pair of Nikes (that some other guy worked his ass of for $2 a day to put together for you).
Every day, whether you like it or not, you're up against hundreds of millions of people willing to work harder, longer and for less than you, and their willingness to do so has been chipping away at the notion of Amercian divine right to a particular standard of living for a long time now. Forget the real estate bubble or the tech bubble or the currency bubble or any of the other bubbles - the biggest bubble of all is the US labor bubble. I don't relish that - it sucks for people who grew up believing labor prices always, and only, go up (you know, like house prices). But railing against "corporations" or "government" (insofar as you lament their unwillingness to add restrictions to the restrictions that go you in this hole) is to ignore the root of the problem.
"...have gutted our entire industry"
The US was, at least until the end of 2010 (haven't checked the figures for a while) the world's largest manufaturer. I'll repeat that, because there's enormous propaganda about "all" the manufacturing having fled the US: the US is the world's largest manufacturer. Granted, China, with 6 times as many people and a labor cost factor a fraction of the US' is catching up quickly - they may have already overtaken the US - but that's why the things you buy at Wal-Mart are cheap. I get that the talking heads and the hysteria they peddle on the TV and elsewhere may be compelling to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean the party line about "no manufacturing left in the US" is correct.
But really, how relevant is manufacturing to the US when there are more people employed by government in the US than there are in manufacturing and construction combined (it's about 1 in 7 people that are employed by the various levels of government)?
As for the "Chinese Overlords", if the US collapses (which I don't disagree it will, altho we may differ on the time frame) they lose the value of the few trillion in US government bonds they hold, plus their major market for all those goods they're manufacturing. As such, I expect them to do their utmost to prop up the US to the bitter end - they're in too deep now to do otherwise.
This is amusing, because the folks at Chrome have been asked repeatedly to include an option for "search on type" (as available on Firefox) and have repeatedly refused to include this, on the grounds that "Ctrl+F" works just fine.