How would we know how it would work out? Since WWII, we have had a nearly constant rise in government spending and entitlements. Yet if you listen to progressives, poverty, racism, lack of health care, and other problems are rampant. And despite spending much more per capita on health care and education than other nations, we're doing no better. Government spending is nearly 40% of GDP now; how much higher does it have to go according to you before the utopia you promise will arrive? And where is the evidence?
Yes, we "have a bug up our ass" about higher taxes. It's not because because we are stingy or care about the money, it's because the path people like you want to go not only fails to deliver on its promise, it is destroying our society and it will turn us into the same kind of rotten and stagnant societies that you find in Europe.
that my country has ceased to be the land of the free
Please tell me: when was it ever that ideal place? When Japanese-Americans were interned? When Nixon spied on his political opponents? When we had separate-but-equal? When McCarthyism was rampant? Annoying and stupid as the NSA surveillance is, it's nothing new, and it nowhere near as bad as many of the things that happened in the past. And it will get addressed.
It might be more expensive, and you're worried that people will walk out the door. But if you're good to your employees, word gets around. That expensive training pays off if you get better quality employees who stick around
If, in order to recover training costs, I pay an employee $100k instead of the $150k that they are worth after training, they walk beause they are rationally self-interested. If I raise their salary after training to what they are worth after training, I'm stuck paying for the training costs and end up going out of business sooner or later. That doesn't work, not because businesses are selfish, but because employees are.
If all employers work to improve the skill-set of their employees, society as a whole benefits with better workers.
Japan has that system. It has the consequence that employees sign up with a corporation at the beginning of their careers and then never change. It's not a good system either.
The GGP did. College costs A LOT of money. There is absolutely no reason that 17 years of education shouldn't be enough to give someone the basic beginning skills to start an engineering job
And there is absolutely no reason that 17 years of education should guarantee him anything. If he wanted a corporate job after university, he should have prepared for it through internships and work experience while he was at university. Now that he has graduated, labor laws make it much harder for him to gain that kind of experience. And presumably, businesses are getting employees with that kind of experience, because otherwise they'd be hiring him.
(Of course, "you don't have enough experience" is often simply a gentle way of saying "we didn't like you" or "you aren't good enough".)
It was just as fallacious when they used it. Marx and Lenin, much like Ayn Rand and her ilk, are wrong about all sorts of things.
Well, there you have your answer: you can't have a "gradual curve" between communism and anything because Marx and Lenin didn't know what they were talking about and communism is not a logically sound economic theory.
I gave clear criteria for when government programs are economically justified. What more do you want?
I suppose I can say one more thing. You wrote:
If, say, there were actually a gradual curve between pure capitalism and pure communism, and the optimal point along that curve were somewhere in between the far ends.
There is no such thing as "pure capitalism" or "pure communism". You're babbling in meaningless ideologies. There are economic policies, and some of them benefit society while others don't according to some criteria that we need to agree on. So you're even starting with the wrong assumptions.
It was Ohnocitizen who saw the world in black-and-white, arguing that any positive return by the government whatsoever was better than any profit. Since SNAP has a positive return, according to his criteria, it would be best for everybody if we took away all his money. I simply said that taxation and social programs need to be justified by clearly demonstrating that the societal benefits outweigh the costs.
As for "slippery slope", that's not my idea. In fact, it's the idea of Marx and Lenin, who argued (in effect) that taxation, social programs, and other such progressive favorites are the road towards the realization of communism.
this is a bay area company and I KNOW that they, as a general trend, have stopped investing in people and now only look for exact matches
Why should they "invest" in someone when the investment can just walk out the door whenever he/she pleases? Invest in yourself then get a higher paying job.
Note also that US debt to GDP ratio and the US budget deficit are outside the Eurozone convergence criteria and have been rising very rapidly during the last four years, another indication that they are "out of control".
"Out of control" is actually a quite measurable term with respect to debt
It is quite a measurable term and it applies to the US budget: debt is "out of control" because we are not successfully controlling it despite trying. Whether we are currently "over-leveraged" is irrelevant.
Nope, you're still being cavalier and using general terms.
Says the guy who hasn't made a single substantive contribution to this thread.
The Vatican is a totalitarian state guilty of numerous human rights violations. I suppose it's a small improvement that instead of just judging and locking up people, they at least try to write down their policies as "laws".
Well, I think then the government should take all the money you earn and reallocate it. You can live in public housing and get SNAP for food. According to you, it's clear that that would produce the greatest societal benefits, since the government according to you knows better what to do with your earnings than you do.
You happen to be wrong because you are forgetting the multiplier effect. Every dollar the government spends is spent repeatedly before it ends up stopped in a savings account or cash horde somewhere. This is why income/wealth is taxed in the first place, to force it back into circulation.
This is so ridiculous that I can't tell whether you are trying to make fun of Keynesian economics and progressivism or whether you are that ignorant.
Just on the off-chance that you are actually serious...
Savings and interest payments have the opposite effect, money that is hoarded is a drag on the economy and does not create wealth.
Money that is "saved" is actually invested by others who know what to do with it. When you go to the bank and put your money there, it is immediately put into circulation by others to start companies, expand their businesses, build houses, buy cars, and generate value. That is the primary driver of economic growth. The more you interfere with that through taxation, the worse off we all end up being.
If the government spends money on a program that adds more value to the economy than the cost of the program (such as food assistance, which has close to a 2:1 return), then the government has produced wealth. Whether the entity is public or private doesn't figure into it at all.
That money the government spent was taken away from someone who then couldn't invest it in something else. So, in order to show a net benefit to society, it's not sufficient to show that the government produced a positive return, it's necessary to show that it produced a positive return that was larger than the person the money was taken away from would have gotten, and that these benefits are large enough to compensate for the additional negative effects that taxation and government spending have.
Of course, your claim of a "2:1 return" is unsubstantiated to begin with. The USDA study where this number seems to come from (you fail to provide sources for your ridiculous statement, so you leave your readers guessing) claims an economic multiplier of 1.79. An "economic multiplier" is not a "return". You can have "economic multipliers" with no net benefit to society at all, or even negative "returns". And even that number is based on a single report, using an economic model (rather than empirical data), created by single person at an organization with a strong interest to make SNAP appear in a positive light.
I happen to think SNAP is one of the better welfare programs and should continue, but your statements about it border on fraud.
We train our kids for more than a decade in a school system that is the opposite of the kind of society we want: it's a draconian, nearly totalitarian system that promotes belief in centralized authority and subjugation to expert opinion. And now, in addition to that, it trains kids to accept intrusive around the clock tracking and biometric identification. This does not bode well for the next generations of Americans.
The people making up DEF CON hijacked the term "hacker" for their security-related work. Give it back to the people who actually deserve it: smart, clever engineering types.
The "realities of this world" are that the budget and debt are out of control and that something needs to be done to reduce spending dramatically.
And what makes you think I or anybody else cares what your personal opinion on the utility of these programs is? What people should care about is a clear justification for each of these programs from their legislators, and if the legislators can't give a clear justification, they should be sent packing.
Neither. I have moved to a town with a low cost of living; it's big enough not to need rural or farm subsidies, and it's small enough not to have the enormous costs associated with big city living. Even though we clearly get screwed by all the subsidies that go to big metropolitan areas and rural areas, the cost of living and doing business still ends up being lower.
The farm bill doesn't keep anybody's cost of milk down, it increases it, because one of its features is price supports; that's in addition to the vast amounts of public funds that are wasted on it.
I'm not sure what you want to "respond to". I'm saying: for most subsidies, nobody knows whether they are helping or hurting society. You certainly haven't made any compelling argument. In the absence of clear, demonstrable benefits to society as a whole for a particular type of subsidy, it should be eliminated.
Sure, then those of us that live in more rural areas should also not have to contribute anything to your public transit costs, sanitation, or emergency services. Also, you can buy the reservoir water for your municipal water systems off of us
Actually, I moved to a more rural area. And I don't think I should have to contribute to that.
It's foolish logic - we all benefit from spreading things around so that everyone gets to have them. We are better as a society when everyone has access to roads, electricity, food, water, and telephone.
No, it's your logic that's foolish. "Spreading around" doesn't give people more, it gives people a lot less, and it discourages people from making rational choices.
For all the things that are available and cheap to you in a city that you want to deny to the rural area, the rural area could turn around and deny the city things. Would you prefer gunpoint subsidies
I prefer no subsidies at all. I prefer that people pay for the actual cost of things, because that's the only way they are going to make sound economic decisions that help everybody be wealthier.
It also works the other way around: rural folks subsidizing ridiculously overpriced housing, education, public safety, and other services that the "urban poor" use. Many of the "urban poor" are likely poor because they are "urban" in the first place. And what about the rural poor who really do need these subsidies?
That's the whole problem with all these "great society" programs: nobody really knows what the money should be spent on. Once you go down this road, you lose yourself in ever more complex and wasteful schemes of economic central planning, rent seeking, and outright corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
How would we know how it would work out? Since WWII, we have had a nearly constant rise in government spending and entitlements. Yet if you listen to progressives, poverty, racism, lack of health care, and other problems are rampant. And despite spending much more per capita on health care and education than other nations, we're doing no better. Government spending is nearly 40% of GDP now; how much higher does it have to go according to you before the utopia you promise will arrive? And where is the evidence?
Yes, we "have a bug up our ass" about higher taxes. It's not because because we are stingy or care about the money, it's because the path people like you want to go not only fails to deliver on its promise, it is destroying our society and it will turn us into the same kind of rotten and stagnant societies that you find in Europe.
Please tell me: when was it ever that ideal place? When Japanese-Americans were interned? When Nixon spied on his political opponents? When we had separate-but-equal? When McCarthyism was rampant? Annoying and stupid as the NSA surveillance is, it's nothing new, and it nowhere near as bad as many of the things that happened in the past. And it will get addressed.
If, in order to recover training costs, I pay an employee $100k instead of the $150k that they are worth after training, they walk beause they are rationally self-interested. If I raise their salary after training to what they are worth after training, I'm stuck paying for the training costs and end up going out of business sooner or later. That doesn't work, not because businesses are selfish, but because employees are.
Japan has that system. It has the consequence that employees sign up with a corporation at the beginning of their careers and then never change. It's not a good system either.
And there is absolutely no reason that 17 years of education should guarantee him anything. If he wanted a corporate job after university, he should have prepared for it through internships and work experience while he was at university. Now that he has graduated, labor laws make it much harder for him to gain that kind of experience. And presumably, businesses are getting employees with that kind of experience, because otherwise they'd be hiring him.
(Of course, "you don't have enough experience" is often simply a gentle way of saying "we didn't like you" or "you aren't good enough".)
It's not intended to be an argument; it's cynicism and ridicule. For the argument look up in the thread.
Well, there you have your answer: you can't have a "gradual curve" between communism and anything because Marx and Lenin didn't know what they were talking about and communism is not a logically sound economic theory.
I gave clear criteria for when government programs are economically justified. What more do you want?
I suppose I can say one more thing. You wrote:
There is no such thing as "pure capitalism" or "pure communism". You're babbling in meaningless ideologies. There are economic policies, and some of them benefit society while others don't according to some criteria that we need to agree on. So you're even starting with the wrong assumptions.
It was Ohnocitizen who saw the world in black-and-white, arguing that any positive return by the government whatsoever was better than any profit. Since SNAP has a positive return, according to his criteria, it would be best for everybody if we took away all his money. I simply said that taxation and social programs need to be justified by clearly demonstrating that the societal benefits outweigh the costs.
As for "slippery slope", that's not my idea. In fact, it's the idea of Marx and Lenin, who argued (in effect) that taxation, social programs, and other such progressive favorites are the road towards the realization of communism.
Why should they "invest" in someone when the investment can just walk out the door whenever he/she pleases? Invest in yourself then get a higher paying job.
The Vatican seems to be very much in touch with children.
Note also that US debt to GDP ratio and the US budget deficit are outside the Eurozone convergence criteria and have been rising very rapidly during the last four years, another indication that they are "out of control".
It is quite a measurable term and it applies to the US budget: debt is "out of control" because we are not successfully controlling it despite trying. Whether we are currently "over-leveraged" is irrelevant.
Says the guy who hasn't made a single substantive contribution to this thread.
The Vatican is a totalitarian state guilty of numerous human rights violations. I suppose it's a small improvement that instead of just judging and locking up people, they at least try to write down their policies as "laws".
Well, I think then the government should take all the money you earn and reallocate it. You can live in public housing and get SNAP for food. According to you, it's clear that that would produce the greatest societal benefits, since the government according to you knows better what to do with your earnings than you do.
This is so ridiculous that I can't tell whether you are trying to make fun of Keynesian economics and progressivism or whether you are that ignorant.
Just on the off-chance that you are actually serious...
Money that is "saved" is actually invested by others who know what to do with it. When you go to the bank and put your money there, it is immediately put into circulation by others to start companies, expand their businesses, build houses, buy cars, and generate value. That is the primary driver of economic growth. The more you interfere with that through taxation, the worse off we all end up being.
That money the government spent was taken away from someone who then couldn't invest it in something else. So, in order to show a net benefit to society, it's not sufficient to show that the government produced a positive return, it's necessary to show that it produced a positive return that was larger than the person the money was taken away from would have gotten, and that these benefits are large enough to compensate for the additional negative effects that taxation and government spending have.
Of course, your claim of a "2:1 return" is unsubstantiated to begin with. The USDA study where this number seems to come from (you fail to provide sources for your ridiculous statement, so you leave your readers guessing) claims an economic multiplier of 1.79. An "economic multiplier" is not a "return". You can have "economic multipliers" with no net benefit to society at all, or even negative "returns". And even that number is based on a single report, using an economic model (rather than empirical data), created by single person at an organization with a strong interest to make SNAP appear in a positive light.
I happen to think SNAP is one of the better welfare programs and should continue, but your statements about it border on fraud.
Obviously, they need iris scanning to prevent some 35 year old perv from sneaking onto a school bus pretending to be a second grader!
We train our kids for more than a decade in a school system that is the opposite of the kind of society we want: it's a draconian, nearly totalitarian system that promotes belief in centralized authority and subjugation to expert opinion. And now, in addition to that, it trains kids to accept intrusive around the clock tracking and biometric identification. This does not bode well for the next generations of Americans.
The people making up DEF CON hijacked the term "hacker" for their security-related work. Give it back to the people who actually deserve it: smart, clever engineering types.
The "realities of this world" are that the budget and debt are out of control and that something needs to be done to reduce spending dramatically.
And what makes you think I or anybody else cares what your personal opinion on the utility of these programs is? What people should care about is a clear justification for each of these programs from their legislators, and if the legislators can't give a clear justification, they should be sent packing.
Neither. I have moved to a town with a low cost of living; it's big enough not to need rural or farm subsidies, and it's small enough not to have the enormous costs associated with big city living. Even though we clearly get screwed by all the subsidies that go to big metropolitan areas and rural areas, the cost of living and doing business still ends up being lower.
The farm bill doesn't keep anybody's cost of milk down, it increases it, because one of its features is price supports; that's in addition to the vast amounts of public funds that are wasted on it.
I'm not sure what you want to "respond to". I'm saying: for most subsidies, nobody knows whether they are helping or hurting society. You certainly haven't made any compelling argument. In the absence of clear, demonstrable benefits to society as a whole for a particular type of subsidy, it should be eliminated.
There's plenty of economic data on that. No, our lower cost of living doesn't reflect subsidies.
Furthermore, on balance, we pay a lot more to the federal government than we get back.
Actually, I moved to a more rural area. And I don't think I should have to contribute to that.
No, it's your logic that's foolish. "Spreading around" doesn't give people more, it gives people a lot less, and it discourages people from making rational choices.
I prefer no subsidies at all. I prefer that people pay for the actual cost of things, because that's the only way they are going to make sound economic decisions that help everybody be wealthier.
I have moved to where my cost of living is lower. And I don't see why I should be forced to subsidize other people who refuse to do so.
It also works the other way around: rural folks subsidizing ridiculously overpriced housing, education, public safety, and other services that the "urban poor" use. Many of the "urban poor" are likely poor because they are "urban" in the first place. And what about the rural poor who really do need these subsidies?
That's the whole problem with all these "great society" programs: nobody really knows what the money should be spent on. Once you go down this road, you lose yourself in ever more complex and wasteful schemes of economic central planning, rent seeking, and outright corruption.