Actually your example is incorrect, here is how it really goes:
1. Savings are generated by underconsumption.
2. Savings are used to invest and start (or expand) a business.
3. Expansion of business through investment leads to more productivity (SSDs for example, after all this is the story about SSDs and I can relate to it rather than to Bill Gates, I don't buy MS stuff).
4. Expensive SSDs hit the market.
5. Early adopters and businesses buy (maybe, or they do not, then the business loses the investment).
6. If there are sales, the company takes the money as both, a return and as a proof of a valid business mode. The money is invested into more tech and management and sales, more efficiencies are found, prices can be taken down to access wider markets.
7. Cheaper SSDs eventually hit the market (like in this story).
That's the REAL path of the trickle down, the other path is actually a side effect of the first path.
Here it is:
1. Money is invested, business generates revenue and profits.
Well, if your conclusion is that the productive people need to be taxed more to give unproductive people more money to spend, then clearly "this economic thing" is not a breeze. How do you derive your conclusion?
The people at the top spend only as much as they need out of their earnings, the rest is obviously invested. By taxing them you do not take away from their spending, that would make no sense for them, they will keep their spending at the same exact level as they need. You tax their investments. There is such a thing as 'economy of scale', so when you remove money from investments that are used by economies of scale, you reduce economic activity much more than if in fact you taxed somebody who is in a much lower bracket, where the productivity is much less efficient.
Note, that I am not advocating for any income taxes at all, AFAIC there is no more destructive tax than income tax. If somebody wanted to come up with a tax, on purpose, that would hurt economy in the most profound way, they could not have designed a tax more insidious than an income tax for this purpose.
Building new roads, picking up litter, all of this is good for the economy that has enough excess capacity that it can waste it, because that's a wasted effort. It is only marginally better than offensive wars, because while effort is wasted in either case, at least when people pick up trash there is less trash laying around. However neither of those activities (trash, wars, roads) improves the balance of trade.
It does not matter how much trash is picked up. Unless your importers are happy to be paid in trash that you pick up, this trash (and the fact that it is picked up) only does one thing: it requires reduction in real economic activity (via taxes) and requires the money, that otherwise can be spent on real economic activity (productive activity) to be given to people who are at that point not part of the legitimate economy.
Actually that is where there is the true multiplier effect (not the nonsense that the Keynesians like to talk about). The productive investments are reduced, to there is less economic activity. The people are moved into the public sector, so government grows and all the activities grow that depend on the taxes. The people are moved from the productive private sector into the public sector, so that there are fewer resources in the private sector, this may have an effect of raising prices in an inefficient manner. The people are paid money from the taxes and end up buying goods produced elsewhere, thus the trade imbalance grows bigger rather than getting smaller.
What you call 'stimulating economy' in fact is the exact opposite, it's chocking the economy. That's the reason the economy is where it is in the first place. This economics thing is a breeze.
Talking points have to be something that other people use on daily basis when asked about stuff to avoid critical thinking, it's a predetermined response to some external stimuli, designed to minimize the effort, needed to bring their idea across.
You still missed the point. If you look at the comments that I leave, they are not something that you would hear as talking points. I gave you links to my comments, you looked at the first one and you thought that comment represents a talking point?
So tell me, whose talking point is:
"real austerity is not supposed to be about increasing taxes on people, but it is supposed to be cutting government spending because government cannot be afforded" - is that exactly what is used as a talking point? The talking points on austerity today are something like this: "austerity cannot be afforded during economic downturn" or: "people are against austerity measures, such as increasing taxes".
Another part of that comment was that Greece does not necessarily have a claim to foreign earnings, USA or Canada taxes foreign earnings. Does Greece? Well, I checked, until 2007 it didn't. Starting from 2007 it taxes foreign earnings of its domestic corporations, but not individuals.
You see that as a talking point that people use?
Let's look at the second comment, I am describing what the Rule of Law is, explaining that socialism requires discriminative treatment of different people to achieve the same economic outcome, and this is contrary to formal law.
So you hear this often?
Third comment: I explain that if a tax or a fine is handed out as a percentage of earnings, then a person of moderate income is taxed on his consumption money, the person of high income does not see any decrease in his consumption pattern, because if his income is taxed or fined as a percentage of his earnings, then he has to dip into his investment pool.
A person earning 10,000USD is fined 1%, that's 100 bucks. This comes out of his consumption.
A person earning 10,000,000USD is fined 1%, that's 100,000USD. If he generally spends 2% of his earnings a year on himself and reinvests the rest, 100,000USD represents 50% of his spending, thus he must go to his investments and use them to pay the fine, and this reduces the economic activity, because investments create economic activity, jobs all the stuff that creates products and services in the economy.
Is that a talking point you hear too often?
The next comment explains that collectivism is as repulsive as murder of a hundred million newborns, and this is even less disgusting than the truth, because in reality many hundreds of millions were killed by collectivists of all types just in the 20th century. I guess you hear that as a 'talking point'.
Well, I do not hear any of this, I do not listen to American news media, that's not where I live or why I came to the conclusions that I hold.
more subsidies for the rich and more taxes for the poor will benefit the poor
- that's a loaded statement. The rich pay more taxes than ever and poor get more subsidies than ever, beyond that, the poor get cheaper products than ever. The capitalists are the actual friends of the poor, though the poor may not recognize it, even when they go shopping and get all the products and services at ridiculously low prices. The actual enemy of the poor is the government, which works hard, every day, to raise prices for the poor by creating fake money, by propping up silly credit bubbles, by running costly wars, by running anti-productive welfare state, which pushes the savings out of the country, by running the police state.
Taxes on the wealthy capitalists in USA have been at confiscatory levels since about the thirties of the last century. The masses have been brainwashed to believe that these high taxes were the reason for the economic boom of the fifties and sixties, of-course nothing is further from the truth. The actual economic boom in USA happened before 1913, when the corporate and income taxes were introduced and when the Fed was established. Of-course it became worse in 1917, when the Fed's mandate was changed to allow it to monetize Treasury debt with fake money.
The real tax that the poor pay is the tax of inflation. That tax is created by the fake money flowing from the fake credit that the Fed 'creates' and that tax pushes businesses, capitalists into other countries, eventually leaving USA without any productive capacity beyond the military contractors, that again, the government props up.
The rich that did get preferential treatment are the ones who are well connected to the government institution, they became the government. This only became possible as the government sold the masses on the idea that they should get something for nothing by taxing those, who actually produce everything.
There is an old saying: those who live by the sword die by the sword, it's quite applicable in this case. Those who decided to confiscate private property from individuals based on the threat of government violence (via income taxes, which are just confiscation of private property, they are not a legitimate tax for legitimate government) they will die by the threat of government violence (destruction of the economy by the taxes, regulations, inflation, and thus abolishment of capitalism, wars, police state, collapse of the living standard due to all of the above.).
Trickle down is simply a misnomer for the supply side economics and the only real economics is supply side economics, and you can easily observe it by looking at who is working, who is supplying and who is consuming.
The ones that are supplying have all the wealth, all the machines, all the tools, all the real management and knowledge, all the productivity.
The ones that are consuming have the printing presses.
Eventually the ones who are supplying will stop giving away their productivity for the paper that comes off the printing presses, because people do not trade for fake currency, they trade to exchange their productivity for productivity of other people, who also must produce, create, in order to have legitimate money.
As opposed to all the other times, when/. moderators mode something as a troll, they clearly do not understand the concept of what a troll is, which is clear now, since this one is not moderated accordingly.
Why is it a troll? Because it is contrary to the most obvious fact that there were and there are and there will be plenty of people who use their own savings (capital and private property) to start a business by arranging scarce resources (by managing capital, land an labor) in order to achieve profit by providing customers with some product or service that they would pay for voluntarily.
It is obvious that the above poster understands and knows this simple fact, yet he chooses to post a comment that is contrary to the facts, that is what a legitimate troll comment looks like.
It is not cheaper than Intel's offers from 1 and 2 years ago?
Actually 3 years ago I bought a couple of X-25Ms, 160GB, they were 639USD each.
This one is 240GB at 180USD.
That is not cheaper? Obviously it is 'trickle down' or normal economics, that's how it works. A company sees profits from its product, works on the product more to sell it to a wider market, more people get the product at lower prices.
I see a company giving me a better offer in a positive light, so why are you so upset? You don't like better cheaper deals?
Of course, many people will characterize the line of argument I have just given as the 'trickle-down' theory. There is nothing trickle-down about it. There is only the fact that capital accumulation and economic progress depend on saving and innovation and that these in turn depend on the freedom to make high profits and accumulate great wealth. The only alternative to improvement for all, through economic progress, achieved in this way, is the futile attempt of some men to gain at the expense of others by means of looting and plundering. This, the loot-and-plunder theory, is the alternative advocated by the critics of the misnamed trickle-down theory.
Whatever your feelings are about Intel's products, this product is cheaper than a similar product 1 year or 2 years ago, it's better, it's faster, it's less power hungry, it has more capacity.
Clearly the investment into the original batch of SSDs paid off and Intel was able to use the profits it made on them to invest into better technology. That is economics (as I said, some call it 'trickle down' economics), but really all real economics is 'trickle down' economics. The more profitable a company becomes, the more it can invest into its products and the lower the prices will be eventually, because more profits brings in morecompetition.
This is an example of what is known as 'trickle down economics' in action, which means that the more productive a company becomes (by getting profits from its current sales and re-investing the profits into the business, creating more efficiencies, new technologies) the lower it can set the prices accessing bigger and bigger markets.
Those who are poor (compared to Intel for example, because they do not have their own factories to produces these SSDs) are gaining from the rich (Intel investors) and see their lives improve (if they need and buy this product at the lower prices).
That is what all economics is, not a centrally planned economy, aiming at equal outcomes for different people and thus destroying the society by creating discrimination, which requires destruction of individual freedoms. But this is just normal economics (some call it 'trickle down') in action. A company searching for more profit investing its profits and creating new products that end up improving people's lives, and it's done with only the free market feed back loop, signalling the company that it is on the right track with its products.
People should be able to take their money and instead of handing it over to any politician, to any union, to anybody, they should be able to take their kid and send him or her to a school of their choice and pay for it with the money that they would not have to pay in taxes for the pathetic level of 'education' their kids would be getting publicly.
I agree, however I do not have a problem with the concept of voluntary unions per se, only when the unions get special treatment by the government, only when unions get special laws that protect unions, give them automatic entitlements and put all the obligations upon the employer.
Of-course at the end, the unions sow the seeds of their own destruction, as eventually and almost inevitably they turn the company uncompetitive, similar to what a parasite does to its host, but as the host dies, so may the parasite (*it's unlikely he'll be able to jump to another host, especially if all other hosts are also dying off because of their own parasites*).
But people shouldn't be prevented from associating voluntarily as long as they cannot pressure others into it and as long as government is not giving them any special privileges. Because what ends up happening in that situation, is a monopoly on labour, because most people forget: labour is a product (or a service) itself, that employers buy.
Since an employer is just another person going to a store to pick up something (some labour in case of an employer), he should be able to choose based on his own criteria, including the price. He should be able to leave the store, so to speak, he should be able to go to another store.
He should be able to do what he needs to do to stay competitive and thus to stay alive as a business.
An employer may find it efficient to negotiate with a union under some situations, but an employer shouldn't be forced to negotiate with it and other current or potential employees shouldn't be forced to join that union.
Under those conditions everybody's wishes are satisfied and it's done voluntarily, nobody is forced into anything. Unions are not antithetical to free markets, just like joint ventures (partnerships) are not.
That's great, so let the administrators then pay for all the union wages and respond to all of their demands. Oh, wait, that's 'unfair', right? How come the 'administrators' get to do whatever you say they get to do, but the public gets the bill from the unions and the public gets the screw from the unions when the unions support another politician that will play ball with the union, and then the politician gives the unions what they want, but also the politician gets himself and his friends everything he and they want?
So where does the public come into all of this? Oh, I forgot, there always has to be a sheep at the table when 2 wolves decide what's for dinner.
These kids are going to be supporting you in your retirement
- that's where you are wrong.
The kids don't have money and don't have jobs to support anybody. The people who are getting the entitlements paid to them now (SS, Medicare), paid 1/10 to 1/3 of what they are getting out of that system and they were the people that supported the politicians that set that system up, which obviously was never sustainable. Now that's a mathematical certainty. Of-course the old folks, who are getting those benefits, are often the folks who have their own savings, have less to no debt, own their houses, they paid much lower taxes in both, absolute value and as a percentage of their earnings.
Those were the people who were getting paid in money that was much more valuable. Just in the last 40 years the paychecks lost 98% of their purchasing power due to inflation and that doesn't even take into account all the new taxes and all the debt that is now upon the young.
The public funded debt, the unfunded liabilities, the 'insurance' of all kinds, be it to the bank account holders (FDIC) or to student loan creditors (gov't guaranteed student loans) or to mortgage creditors (FHA and F&F and now the Fed itself). More and more is piled up upon the young.
It's a huge wealth transfer from the young and the poor the old and the wealthy. The sad part is just how blind the young and the poor are not to understand it. But by the time they will get it, it will be so late...
I don't believe that the young will want or will be able to support the old in just 10 years time. The lucky ones will leave in search of a better life, just like their predecessors did when they came to America.
nonsense, the public unions are an abomination, they are not established to be on another side from an 'evil capitalist', there is no 'evil capitalist' on the other side. On the other side there is the public, isn't there? Actually the other side is not the public, that's the problem, the 'other side' consists of politicians. The public, the actual public that pays for all of the bills doesn't have a say in the deal between the politicians and the public union.
The politician gives the union whatever the union wants and the union votes for the politician, thus re-electing the politician, so the public is cut out of the decision how much money is spent on government and who is the politician in government, because the public union creates all that support for the politician that plays ball with the union.
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The side that gets screwed is not an 'evil capitalist', it's everybody whose pay is cut every time a public union gets a raise. The other side is the public, whose pay is cut every time a politician, supported by a public union gets his way and helps himself and his friends.
When you say: "jerks like you think it's fine to keep cutting pay year after year", you are talking about the people whose MONEY goes towards the government.
You are right, many people are TIRED of paying the government, year after year, more and more, that's right. Those are the people that have to WORK and their MONEY, their LIVES are being bled by the politicians and the public unions.
Yes, if the public wants to CUT money that goes towards government, the public must be able to do it! The public must be able TO FIRE politicians and TO FIRE ANY government worker, including and up to all teachers, that's right!
It's actually their absolute right, the right of the public to decide that they are not willing to pay for it and they are then not interested in that service.
If you hire a gardener, it's your right to fire the gardener. If you go to a store to buy food one day, it's your right to go to another store or not to go to a store, but to go to a village market somewhere or to grow your food yourself. Nobody is entitled to your money, including the politicians and the unions.
He was clear enough: public unions, which even FDR was against.
A public union is an absurd idea in the first place, who is supposedly 'oppressing' these teachers? They are working for the government, who is this 'evil capitalist' that is oppressing them?
Also who is paying their salaries, is it the politicians that they are negotiating with? NOPE. It's the tax payer and the tax payer is the one who is getting screwed on this deal, he is the sheep that 'participates' in the decision what's for dinner, except the other two sides at the table are 2 wolves (politicians and the public unions).
There are no savings. Your meager savings are irrelevant, especially given the fact that whatever you manage to save, your government manages to squander.
In USA just the official public debt is 53K per person. The real public debt is over a million USD per person. Given the 16 Trillion public debt, 222Trillion unfunded liabilities, all of the FDIC 'insurance', all of the mortgages (with FHA or F&F 'insurance') and now the Fed buying up mortgages, all of the implicit guarantees to bail out the banks again once they fail, all of the student debt, etc.
There are no savings, that's why businesses do not have access to business loans. Sure, they could get business loans but the interest rate would not allow any business to take up a loan like that.
t if there is any form of governance then you might as well give up all of your rights
- at least in USA government was established to achieve the opposite, to maintain and protect individual rights. Over time it got eroded and subverted, but the reason for government was actually protection of individual rights, which enabled the free market to produce all the economic wealth that made USA the world's largest manufacturer, exporter and creditor nation by the beginning of 20th century.
Stable and secure society can only be achieved with people who are interested in protecting individual rights, not with people who are opposing to individual rights. Do you think you can have a stable and secure society, where a large number of individuals are being oppressed?
I am an atheist, so I wasn't talking about abortion. I was trying to come up with an abhorrent example that would explain my degree of disgust and repulsion towards the idea of collectivism as a general principle, of-course taking that example literally is also useful, because the systems based on ideas of collectivism murdered more people that 100,000,000 in the last century alone. All of the socialist, attempted communist, fascist and nazist experiments (all collectivist, all anti-capitalist, all with technocrats pushing for central planning, all this stuff) imprisoned, tortured and murdered many more people than just 100 million, so the example works.
Everything is wrong with that 'rule'. That is not a rule, it's an arbitrary decision left to an executive in power. It necessarily requires destruction of privacy and its goal is 'equitable society' or 'social justice', which means the government takes it upon itself to ensure similar outcomes for different people, which requires different treatment or discrimination.
Let me explain something to you, that you obviously do not understand (and by the looks of it few people here do), if you earn 10,000 dollar a year and the law sets your fine as 1% of it, you'll pay 100 dollars.
However with that type of income, very few of it goes towards savings and investment in absolute numbers, so most of that income is consumed, thus we are looking at mostly a consumer income.
If you earn 10,000,000 dollars, 1% is100,000. If the person in question lives on 200,000 per year, you have just taken 50% of his living allowance.
You don't get it, do you? You think people who make 10,000,000 spend it? That money is invested except for a couple percent, none of that money is spent, it's saved. This means that the government is forcing the person paying the fine to tap into the SAVINGS, not into his spending, and in case of top earners this means tapping into investment.
This is what is wrong with it, again, you can read my comment in this thread on income taxes in general (and obviously 'progressive' income taxes are a special case of general income taxes and 'progressive' income taxes require an even more ridiculous type of 'law' to be applied, a person with higher income is paying more as a percentage of his income, this ends up hurting the economy much more than it hurts that person specifically, he'll just invest less, he won't spend less on himself, and it's immoral, because it's gov't working towards 'equal outcomes' rather than 'equal justice' or Rule of Law.)
People who earn more money than they spend per year drive the economy, so that's the economic reason not to engage in redistribution of wealth, the people who will suffer most from this type of redistribution are the poor, who will see less opportunities, because there is less investment (government spending is not investment, it never has to produce a sustainable profitable result, thus whatever gov't does ends once the subsidy ends, and the subsidy depends on taxing the productive people, who also can 'end' given enough government interference, that's what is observed in USA and most of Europe).
Obviously redistributive type of government is tyrannical, it assumes it can take anything from anybody and 'give' anything to anybody, obviously what it really does, it steals from those who produce and subsidizes those who do not, but those who are subsidized tend to be those, most connected to power. While the SS and Medicare checks keep the voters bought and happy (until the economy crashes), the real purpose of the stolen money is to pad the bank accounts of the politicians and their friends, whoever that is, whatever company that is.
It's all rotten in every way, from moral and practical point of view.
I am talking about the Rule of Law, where government in all its actions is supposed to be bound by rules that are fixed and announced beforehand, so that based on this knowledge individuals can rely to plan their personal affairs. Rule of Law requires that the discretion left to the executive organs is reduced to a minimum. This is at odds (is incompatible) with any activity of government that is deliberately aimed at material or substantive equality of different people. Any policy aiming at substantive ideal of distributive justice leads to destruction of Rule of Law, since to produce the same results for different people, they must be treated differently. Giving people similar objective opportunities is not giving them the same subjective chance. Rule of Law produces economic inequality, no question about it, but this inequality is not aimed at any specific people in any particular way.
People who expect government to provide 'social justice' will never be satisfied with only formal justice, because they object that law has no views on how well off any particular individual 'ought to be', these people expect 'socialization of law' and they will attack independent judges and will support politicians that undermine the Rule of Law to provide basically what amounts to equal outcomes.
So for people to be treated equally they have to be treated equally under law regardless of their personal circumstances, of their wealth for example. This works both ways, the justice system is supposed to be blind to your wealth or lack of wealth if you are judged for some crime, but this also means that the very concept of 'progressive tax' (for example) is unlawful (and I hope I said enough for everybody who is reading to understand why that is, because it's late here, I have to split).
You are mistaken in a major way, the banks are not loaning out savings, there are no savings. The banks are busy getting money from the Fed and making loans to the Treasury. Businesses do not have access to any real savings and thus real interest rates for businesses are enormous, that's why they can't get business loans.
The banks (which are part of government actually) are not part of a productive economy, they are now an instrument of economic destruction, gambling with fake money, proxies for propping up failed governments. This problem is near 100 years old now, but it had a number of boosts along the way, the FDIC and the default on the dollar (1971 gold shock) and Alan Greenspan's put and then Bernanke's 0% interest rates and then the bail outs, TARP all that stuff.
So you can talk about banks, but I am not talking about banks, I am talking about people who save their earnings and either invest them or keep them protected from inflation and from ever growing, power hungry political elites.
Too many trolls with moderation points nowadays, so I'll reply as an AC this time. I am not arguing for USA in my comment, where did you read that? In fact AFAIC USA today is not free at all (and if you care to understand what I mean, you can read this, I explain what freedom is).
To me the very concept of collectivism is as repulsive as for example the idea of murdering 100,000,000 newborn by drowning them all in a tub filled with H2SO4. Do you know what I mean? And that is much fewer deaths and suffering than collectivism actually caused.
Obviously, I am just curious to hear from some Finn that is in that situation, either left or is living in Finland and dealing with it in a different manner.
Slashdot Mirror
A subsidised government project has elements of bureaucracy and corruption.
News at 11?
Actually your example is incorrect, here is how it really goes:
1. Savings are generated by underconsumption.
2. Savings are used to invest and start (or expand) a business.
3. Expansion of business through investment leads to more productivity (SSDs for example, after all this is the story about SSDs and I can relate to it rather than to Bill Gates, I don't buy MS stuff).
4. Expensive SSDs hit the market.
5. Early adopters and businesses buy (maybe, or they do not, then the business loses the investment).
6. If there are sales, the company takes the money as both, a return and as a proof of a valid business mode. The money is invested into more tech and management and sales, more efficiencies are found, prices can be taken down to access wider markets.
7. Cheaper SSDs eventually hit the market (like in this story).
That's the REAL path of the trickle down, the other path is actually a side effect of the first path.
Here it is:
1. Money is invested, business generates revenue and profits.
2. People are hired, salaries are paid.
3. Gov't racket also gets its cut.
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Well, if your conclusion is that the productive people need to be taxed more to give unproductive people more money to spend, then clearly "this economic thing" is not a breeze. How do you derive your conclusion?
The people at the top spend only as much as they need out of their earnings, the rest is obviously invested. By taxing them you do not take away from their spending, that would make no sense for them, they will keep their spending at the same exact level as they need. You tax their investments. There is such a thing as 'economy of scale', so when you remove money from investments that are used by economies of scale, you reduce economic activity much more than if in fact you taxed somebody who is in a much lower bracket, where the productivity is much less efficient.
Note, that I am not advocating for any income taxes at all, AFAIC there is no more destructive tax than income tax. If somebody wanted to come up with a tax, on purpose, that would hurt economy in the most profound way, they could not have designed a tax more insidious than an income tax for this purpose.
Building new roads, picking up litter, all of this is good for the economy that has enough excess capacity that it can waste it, because that's a wasted effort. It is only marginally better than offensive wars, because while effort is wasted in either case, at least when people pick up trash there is less trash laying around. However neither of those activities (trash, wars, roads) improves the balance of trade.
It does not matter how much trash is picked up. Unless your importers are happy to be paid in trash that you pick up, this trash (and the fact that it is picked up) only does one thing: it requires reduction in real economic activity (via taxes) and requires the money, that otherwise can be spent on real economic activity (productive activity) to be given to people who are at that point not part of the legitimate economy.
Actually that is where there is the true multiplier effect (not the nonsense that the Keynesians like to talk about). The productive investments are reduced, to there is less economic activity. The people are moved into the public sector, so government grows and all the activities grow that depend on the taxes. The people are moved from the productive private sector into the public sector, so that there are fewer resources in the private sector, this may have an effect of raising prices in an inefficient manner. The people are paid money from the taxes and end up buying goods produced elsewhere, thus the trade imbalance grows bigger rather than getting smaller.
What you call 'stimulating economy' in fact is the exact opposite, it's chocking the economy. That's the reason the economy is where it is in the first place. This economics thing is a breeze.
Talking points have to be something that other people use on daily basis when asked about stuff to avoid critical thinking, it's a predetermined response to some external stimuli, designed to minimize the effort, needed to bring their idea across.
You still missed the point. If you look at the comments that I leave, they are not something that you would hear as talking points. I gave you links to my comments, you looked at the first one and you thought that comment represents a talking point?
So tell me, whose talking point is:
"real austerity is not supposed to be about increasing taxes on people, but it is supposed to be cutting government spending because government cannot be afforded" - is that exactly what is used as a talking point? The talking points on austerity today are something like this: "austerity cannot be afforded during economic downturn" or: "people are against austerity measures, such as increasing taxes".
Another part of that comment was that Greece does not necessarily have a claim to foreign earnings, USA or Canada taxes foreign earnings. Does Greece? Well, I checked, until 2007 it didn't. Starting from 2007 it taxes foreign earnings of its domestic corporations, but not individuals.
You see that as a talking point that people use?
Let's look at the second comment, I am describing what the Rule of Law is, explaining that socialism requires discriminative treatment of different people to achieve the same economic outcome, and this is contrary to formal law.
So you hear this often?
Third comment: I explain that if a tax or a fine is handed out as a percentage of earnings, then a person of moderate income is taxed on his consumption money, the person of high income does not see any decrease in his consumption pattern, because if his income is taxed or fined as a percentage of his earnings, then he has to dip into his investment pool.
A person earning 10,000USD is fined 1%, that's 100 bucks. This comes out of his consumption.
A person earning 10,000,000USD is fined 1%, that's 100,000USD. If he generally spends 2% of his earnings a year on himself and reinvests the rest, 100,000USD represents 50% of his spending, thus he must go to his investments and use them to pay the fine, and this reduces the economic activity, because investments create economic activity, jobs all the stuff that creates products and services in the economy.
Is that a talking point you hear too often?
The next comment explains that collectivism is as repulsive as murder of a hundred million newborns, and this is even less disgusting than the truth, because in reality many hundreds of millions were killed by collectivists of all types just in the 20th century. I guess you hear that as a 'talking point'.
Well, I do not hear any of this, I do not listen to American news media, that's not where I live or why I came to the conclusions that I hold.
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more subsidies for the rich and more taxes for the poor will benefit the poor
- that's a loaded statement. The rich pay more taxes than ever and poor get more subsidies than ever, beyond that, the poor get cheaper products than ever. The capitalists are the actual friends of the poor, though the poor may not recognize it, even when they go shopping and get all the products and services at ridiculously low prices. The actual enemy of the poor is the government, which works hard, every day, to raise prices for the poor by creating fake money, by propping up silly credit bubbles, by running costly wars, by running anti-productive welfare state, which pushes the savings out of the country, by running the police state.
Taxes on the wealthy capitalists in USA have been at confiscatory levels since about the thirties of the last century. The masses have been brainwashed to believe that these high taxes were the reason for the economic boom of the fifties and sixties, of-course nothing is further from the truth. The actual economic boom in USA happened before 1913, when the corporate and income taxes were introduced and when the Fed was established. Of-course it became worse in 1917, when the Fed's mandate was changed to allow it to monetize Treasury debt with fake money.
The real tax that the poor pay is the tax of inflation. That tax is created by the fake money flowing from the fake credit that the Fed 'creates' and that tax pushes businesses, capitalists into other countries, eventually leaving USA without any productive capacity beyond the military contractors, that again, the government props up.
The rich that did get preferential treatment are the ones who are well connected to the government institution, they became the government. This only became possible as the government sold the masses on the idea that they should get something for nothing by taxing those, who actually produce everything.
There is an old saying: those who live by the sword die by the sword, it's quite applicable in this case. Those who decided to confiscate private property from individuals based on the threat of government violence (via income taxes, which are just confiscation of private property, they are not a legitimate tax for legitimate government) they will die by the threat of government violence (destruction of the economy by the taxes, regulations, inflation, and thus abolishment of capitalism, wars, police state, collapse of the living standard due to all of the above.).
Trickle down is simply a misnomer for the supply side economics and the only real economics is supply side economics, and you can easily observe it by looking at who is working, who is supplying and who is consuming.
The ones that are supplying have all the wealth, all the machines, all the tools, all the real management and knowledge, all the productivity.
The ones that are consuming have the printing presses.
Eventually the ones who are supplying will stop giving away their productivity for the paper that comes off the printing presses, because people do not trade for fake currency, they trade to exchange their productivity for productivity of other people, who also must produce, create, in order to have legitimate money.
Now that is a troll.
As opposed to all the other times, when /. moderators mode something as a troll, they clearly do not understand the concept of what a troll is, which is clear now, since this one is not moderated accordingly.
Why is it a troll? Because it is contrary to the most obvious fact that there were and there are and there will be plenty of people who use their own savings (capital and private property) to start a business by arranging scarce resources (by managing capital, land an labor) in order to achieve profit by providing customers with some product or service that they would pay for voluntarily.
It is obvious that the above poster understands and knows this simple fact, yet he chooses to post a comment that is contrary to the facts, that is what a legitimate troll comment looks like.
It is not cheaper than Intel's offers from 1 and 2 years ago?
Actually 3 years ago I bought a couple of X-25Ms, 160GB, they were 639USD each.
This one is 240GB at 180USD.
That is not cheaper? Obviously it is 'trickle down' or normal economics, that's how it works. A company sees profits from its product, works on the product more to sell it to a wider market, more people get the product at lower prices.
I see a company giving me a better offer in a positive light, so why are you so upset? You don't like better cheaper deals?
I like George Reisman's quote on this
Of course, many people will characterize the line of argument I have just given as the 'trickle-down' theory. There is nothing trickle-down about it. There is only the fact that capital accumulation and economic progress depend on saving and innovation and that these in turn depend on the freedom to make high profits and accumulate great wealth. The only alternative to improvement for all, through economic progress, achieved in this way, is the futile attempt of some men to gain at the expense of others by means of looting and plundering. This, the loot-and-plunder theory, is the alternative advocated by the critics of the misnamed trickle-down theory.
Whatever your feelings are about Intel's products, this product is cheaper than a similar product 1 year or 2 years ago, it's better, it's faster, it's less power hungry, it has more capacity.
Clearly the investment into the original batch of SSDs paid off and Intel was able to use the profits it made on them to invest into better technology. That is economics (as I said, some call it 'trickle down' economics), but really all real economics is 'trickle down' economics. The more profitable a company becomes, the more it can invest into its products and the lower the prices will be eventually, because more profits brings in more competition.
This is an example of what is known as 'trickle down economics' in action, which means that the more productive a company becomes (by getting profits from its current sales and re-investing the profits into the business, creating more efficiencies, new technologies) the lower it can set the prices accessing bigger and bigger markets.
Those who are poor (compared to Intel for example, because they do not have their own factories to produces these SSDs) are gaining from the rich (Intel investors) and see their lives improve (if they need and buy this product at the lower prices).
That is what all economics is, not a centrally planned economy, aiming at equal outcomes for different people and thus destroying the society by creating discrimination, which requires destruction of individual freedoms. But this is just normal economics (some call it 'trickle down') in action. A company searching for more profit investing its profits and creating new products that end up improving people's lives, and it's done with only the free market feed back loop, signalling the company that it is on the right track with its products.
Near 40% of public school teachers send kids to private schools. I don't believe 40% of the rest of the public can afford to do that, since they are the ones that are paying the taxes that go towards public schools already, and once that money is taken from them, they can't afford to pay for a private school yet another time. But teachers, whose pay is higher than an average pay of a private worker, can afford to and does.
Maybe this has something to do with the fact that students are just not learning things in public schools.
People should be able to take their money and instead of handing it over to any politician, to any union, to anybody, they should be able to take their kid and send him or her to a school of their choice and pay for it with the money that they would not have to pay in taxes for the pathetic level of 'education' their kids would be getting publicly.
I agree, however I do not have a problem with the concept of voluntary unions per se, only when the unions get special treatment by the government, only when unions get special laws that protect unions, give them automatic entitlements and put all the obligations upon the employer.
Of-course at the end, the unions sow the seeds of their own destruction, as eventually and almost inevitably they turn the company uncompetitive, similar to what a parasite does to its host, but as the host dies, so may the parasite (*it's unlikely he'll be able to jump to another host, especially if all other hosts are also dying off because of their own parasites*).
But people shouldn't be prevented from associating voluntarily as long as they cannot pressure others into it and as long as government is not giving them any special privileges. Because what ends up happening in that situation, is a monopoly on labour, because most people forget: labour is a product (or a service) itself, that employers buy.
Since an employer is just another person going to a store to pick up something (some labour in case of an employer), he should be able to choose based on his own criteria, including the price. He should be able to leave the store, so to speak, he should be able to go to another store.
He should be able to do what he needs to do to stay competitive and thus to stay alive as a business.
An employer may find it efficient to negotiate with a union under some situations, but an employer shouldn't be forced to negotiate with it and other current or potential employees shouldn't be forced to join that union.
Under those conditions everybody's wishes are satisfied and it's done voluntarily, nobody is forced into anything. Unions are not antithetical to free markets, just like joint ventures (partnerships) are not.
That's great, so let the administrators then pay for all the union wages and respond to all of their demands. Oh, wait, that's 'unfair', right? How come the 'administrators' get to do whatever you say they get to do, but the public gets the bill from the unions and the public gets the screw from the unions when the unions support another politician that will play ball with the union, and then the politician gives the unions what they want, but also the politician gets himself and his friends everything he and they want?
So where does the public come into all of this? Oh, I forgot, there always has to be a sheep at the table when 2 wolves decide what's for dinner.
These kids are going to be supporting you in your retirement
- that's where you are wrong.
The kids don't have money and don't have jobs to support anybody. The people who are getting the entitlements paid to them now (SS, Medicare), paid 1/10 to 1/3 of what they are getting out of that system and they were the people that supported the politicians that set that system up, which obviously was never sustainable. Now that's a mathematical certainty. Of-course the old folks, who are getting those benefits, are often the folks who have their own savings, have less to no debt, own their houses, they paid much lower taxes in both, absolute value and as a percentage of their earnings.
Those were the people who were getting paid in money that was much more valuable. Just in the last 40 years the paychecks lost 98% of their purchasing power due to inflation and that doesn't even take into account all the new taxes and all the debt that is now upon the young.
The public funded debt, the unfunded liabilities, the 'insurance' of all kinds, be it to the bank account holders (FDIC) or to student loan creditors (gov't guaranteed student loans) or to mortgage creditors (FHA and F&F and now the Fed itself). More and more is piled up upon the young.
It's a huge wealth transfer from the young and the poor the old and the wealthy. The sad part is just how blind the young and the poor are not to understand it. But by the time they will get it, it will be so late...
I don't believe that the young will want or will be able to support the old in just 10 years time. The lucky ones will leave in search of a better life, just like their predecessors did when they came to America.
nonsense, the public unions are an abomination, they are not established to be on another side from an 'evil capitalist', there is no 'evil capitalist' on the other side. On the other side there is the public, isn't there? Actually the other side is not the public, that's the problem, the 'other side' consists of politicians. The public, the actual public that pays for all of the bills doesn't have a say in the deal between the politicians and the public union.
The politician gives the union whatever the union wants and the union votes for the politician, thus re-electing the politician, so the public is cut out of the decision how much money is spent on government and who is the politician in government, because the public union creates all that support for the politician that plays ball with the union.
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The side that gets screwed is not an 'evil capitalist', it's everybody whose pay is cut every time a public union gets a raise. The other side is the public, whose pay is cut every time a politician, supported by a public union gets his way and helps himself and his friends.
When you say: "jerks like you think it's fine to keep cutting pay year after year", you are talking about the people whose MONEY goes towards the government.
You are right, many people are TIRED of paying the government, year after year, more and more, that's right. Those are the people that have to WORK and their MONEY, their LIVES are being bled by the politicians and the public unions.
Yes, if the public wants to CUT money that goes towards government, the public must be able to do it! The public must be able TO FIRE politicians and TO FIRE ANY government worker, including and up to all teachers, that's right!
It's actually their absolute right, the right of the public to decide that they are not willing to pay for it and they are then not interested in that service.
If you hire a gardener, it's your right to fire the gardener. If you go to a store to buy food one day, it's your right to go to another store or not to go to a store, but to go to a village market somewhere or to grow your food yourself. Nobody is entitled to your money, including the politicians and the unions.
He was clear enough: public unions, which even FDR was against.
A public union is an absurd idea in the first place, who is supposedly 'oppressing' these teachers? They are working for the government, who is this 'evil capitalist' that is oppressing them?
Also who is paying their salaries, is it the politicians that they are negotiating with? NOPE. It's the tax payer and the tax payer is the one who is getting screwed on this deal, he is the sheep that 'participates' in the decision what's for dinner, except the other two sides at the table are 2 wolves (politicians and the public unions).
There are no savings. Your meager savings are irrelevant, especially given the fact that whatever you manage to save, your government manages to squander.
In USA just the official public debt is 53K per person. The real public debt is over a million USD per person. Given the 16 Trillion public debt, 222Trillion unfunded liabilities, all of the FDIC 'insurance', all of the mortgages (with FHA or F&F 'insurance') and now the Fed buying up mortgages, all of the implicit guarantees to bail out the banks again once they fail, all of the student debt, etc.
There are no savings, that's why businesses do not have access to business loans. Sure, they could get business loans but the interest rate would not allow any business to take up a loan like that.
t if there is any form of governance then you might as well give up all of your rights
- at least in USA government was established to achieve the opposite, to maintain and protect individual rights. Over time it got eroded and subverted, but the reason for government was actually protection of individual rights, which enabled the free market to produce all the economic wealth that made USA the world's largest manufacturer, exporter and creditor nation by the beginning of 20th century.
Stable and secure society can only be achieved with people who are interested in protecting individual rights, not with people who are opposing to individual rights. Do you think you can have a stable and secure society, where a large number of individuals are being oppressed?
I am an atheist, so I wasn't talking about abortion. I was trying to come up with an abhorrent example that would explain my degree of disgust and repulsion towards the idea of collectivism as a general principle, of-course taking that example literally is also useful, because the systems based on ideas of collectivism murdered more people that 100,000,000 in the last century alone. All of the socialist, attempted communist, fascist and nazist experiments (all collectivist, all anti-capitalist, all with technocrats pushing for central planning, all this stuff) imprisoned, tortured and murdered many more people than just 100 million, so the example works.
Sellers are pushing prices up? SELLERS? :)
Economic ignorance 1, economic intelligence 0.
Obviously it's too complex for you, you can
try and
read to figure it out, but I doubt it's likely that you will.
Everything is wrong with that 'rule'. That is not a rule, it's an arbitrary decision left to an executive in power. It necessarily requires destruction of privacy and its goal is 'equitable society' or 'social justice', which means the government takes it upon itself to ensure similar outcomes for different people, which requires different treatment or discrimination.
Let me explain something to you, that you obviously do not understand (and by the looks of it few people here do), if you earn 10,000 dollar a year and the law sets your fine as 1% of it, you'll pay 100 dollars.
However with that type of income, very few of it goes towards savings and investment in absolute numbers, so most of that income is consumed, thus we are looking at mostly a consumer income.
If you earn 10,000,000 dollars, 1% is100,000. If the person in question lives on 200,000 per year, you have just taken 50% of his living allowance.
You don't get it, do you? You think people who make 10,000,000 spend it? That money is invested except for a couple percent, none of that money is spent, it's saved. This means that the government is forcing the person paying the fine to tap into the SAVINGS, not into his spending, and in case of top earners this means tapping into investment.
This is what is wrong with it, again, you can read my comment in this thread on income taxes in general (and obviously 'progressive' income taxes are a special case of general income taxes and 'progressive' income taxes require an even more ridiculous type of 'law' to be applied, a person with higher income is paying more as a percentage of his income, this ends up hurting the economy much more than it hurts that person specifically, he'll just invest less, he won't spend less on himself, and it's immoral, because it's gov't working towards 'equal outcomes' rather than 'equal justice' or Rule of Law.)
People who earn more money than they spend per year drive the economy, so that's the economic reason not to engage in redistribution of wealth, the people who will suffer most from this type of redistribution are the poor, who will see less opportunities, because there is less investment (government spending is not investment, it never has to produce a sustainable profitable result, thus whatever gov't does ends once the subsidy ends, and the subsidy depends on taxing the productive people, who also can 'end' given enough government interference, that's what is observed in USA and most of Europe).
Obviously redistributive type of government is tyrannical, it assumes it can take anything from anybody and 'give' anything to anybody, obviously what it really does, it steals from those who produce and subsidizes those who do not, but those who are subsidized tend to be those, most connected to power. While the SS and Medicare checks keep the voters bought and happy (until the economy crashes), the real purpose of the stolen money is to pad the bank accounts of the politicians and their friends, whoever that is, whatever company that is.
It's all rotten in every way, from moral and practical point of view.
I am talking about the Rule of Law, where government in all its actions is supposed to be bound by rules that are fixed and announced beforehand, so that based on this knowledge individuals can rely to plan their personal affairs. Rule of Law requires that the discretion left to the executive organs is reduced to a minimum. This is at odds (is incompatible) with any activity of government that is deliberately aimed at material or substantive equality of different people. Any policy aiming at substantive ideal of distributive justice leads to destruction of Rule of Law, since to produce the same results for different people, they must be treated differently. Giving people similar objective opportunities is not giving them the same subjective chance. Rule of Law produces economic inequality, no question about it, but this inequality is not aimed at any specific people in any particular way.
People who expect government to provide 'social justice' will never be satisfied with only formal justice, because they object that law has no views on how well off any particular individual 'ought to be', these people expect 'socialization of law' and they will attack independent judges and will support politicians that undermine the Rule of Law to provide basically what amounts to equal outcomes.
So for people to be treated equally they have to be treated equally under law regardless of their personal circumstances, of their wealth for example. This works both ways, the justice system is supposed to be blind to your wealth or lack of wealth if you are judged for some crime, but this also means that the very concept of 'progressive tax' (for example) is unlawful (and I hope I said enough for everybody who is reading to understand why that is, because it's late here, I have to split).
You are mistaken in a major way, the banks are not loaning out savings, there are no savings. The banks are busy getting money from the Fed and making loans to the Treasury. Businesses do not have access to any real savings and thus real interest rates for businesses are enormous, that's why they can't get business loans.
The banks (which are part of government actually) are not part of a productive economy, they are now an instrument of economic destruction, gambling with fake money, proxies for propping up failed governments. This problem is near 100 years old now, but it had a number of boosts along the way, the FDIC and the default on the dollar (1971 gold shock) and Alan Greenspan's put and then Bernanke's 0% interest rates and then the bail outs, TARP all that stuff.
So you can talk about banks, but I am not talking about banks, I am talking about people who save their earnings and either invest them or keep them protected from inflation and from ever growing, power hungry political elites.
Too many trolls with moderation points nowadays, so I'll reply as an AC this time. I am not arguing for USA in my comment, where did you read that? In fact AFAIC USA today is not free at all (and if you care to understand what I mean, you can read this, I explain what freedom is).
To me the very concept of collectivism is as repulsive as for example the idea of murdering 100,000,000 newborn by drowning them all in a tub filled with H2SO4. Do you know what I mean? And that is much fewer deaths and suffering than collectivism actually caused.
Obviously, I am just curious to hear from some Finn that is in that situation, either left or is living in Finland and dealing with it in a different manner.