New Rule: Rich People Who Complain About Being Vilified Should Be Vilified

100k USD where the fuck are you going to school? I graduated with about 23k USD in student loans from a good engineering school, Virginia tech, I paid for the rest myself and got a few grants. You know that interest is tax deductible and there is no way you would ever be loaned that much money without government support and backing right?
lol thanks for telling me how much debt I have


I didn't use the terms greet, lust or any other loaded weasel words like you are.
Well there's a compliment if I ever heard one


You need the proper ratio of producers to consumers and if the consumers don't have enough money to buy stuff then the economy has a hard time keeping going.
Yeah, so let's take money away from the rich and give it to the poor, right?


I don't think you should limit how much someone can earn. That is crazy talk.
That is crazy talk, you're right. Which is why I said "how much money someone has" - aka after taxes.


I think breaking up a company because it is supposed to be too big to fail is a very bad idea.
Giving a failing corporation billions of dollars so that the same people that ran it into the ground can run it into the ground again seems like a bad idea to me.


Monopolies are recognized as market failures and serious problems occur when you have monopolies operating in the wrong kind of market. They are absolutely related to this discussion.
No, they are not. See, you are once again getting into "oh, well there are rich people other there that run their companies in not-so-honest ways". While that is undoubtedly true, the solution isn't to tax them to hell but to stop them from being dishonest.


My point is that taxes are punishment like you keep saying they are taxes are necessary.
What?


Certain things should be public goods and should not be privatized. There are certain groups in this country who think that nearly everything should be privatized and I think that is dangerous. A lot of the money going into the tea party movement is coming from these people. The Koch brothers for example are extreme libertarians who want the federal and state gov'ts drastically reduced in size. There are probably places where they are right but if those people just get replaced by private contractors who actually cost more money then gov't workers how can that be any good?
Again, the solution is to stop massive privatization then, not to take money away from the rich and give it to the poor. If a rich guy buys a plane and flies it into a building, the solution isn't to take away every rich person's money or to ban planes - its to not let crazy asswipes buy planes.


What is true is that the Rich, well the very rich and super rich really, have much more elastic spending habits then most of the rest of the population. If they don't want to spend then they just won't.
I disagree. If I had a billion dollars, do you really think I'd care about how much, say, a new car costs? Or groceries? Or clothes? Or a foot massage?
 
I disagree. If I had a billion dollars, do you really think I'd care about how much, say, a new car costs? Or groceries? Or clothes? Or a foot massage?

You can only drive one car at a time. You can only live in one house at a time. You can only shag one woman... no, well, you know...

A billion dollars. When you get to that point, you can't spend the money fast enough to avoid making more.
 
No, they are not. See, you are once again getting into "oh, well there are rich people other there that run their companies in not-so-honest ways". While that is undoubtedly true, the solution isn't to tax them to hell but to stop them from being dishonest.

Ok there I things I need to reply to Twerp128 with and there are other things I need to say to you Level but before that happens I need to deal with this.

Are you trying to say that Monopolies, outside of a few limited instances, are not market failures?
 
I disagree. If I had a billion dollars, do you really think I'd care about how much, say, a new car costs? Or groceries? Or clothes? Or a foot massage?
The fallacy in your entire argument is that you think you know what people who have money think.
 
You can only drive one car at a time. You can only live in one house at a time. You can only shag one woman... no, well, you know...

A billion dollars. When you get to that point, you can't spend the money fast enough to avoid making more.
Sure you can. Start a pro racing team. That'll chew through a billion dollars pretty easily, if you want it to. :)

While you're at it, hire me as one of your drivers, won't you please?
 
Something to think about in average graphs of growth in America over time. Especially when looking at 1945-1973 time frames. I'll stick with cars and airplanes because I think they are representative.

At the start of that period America had a massive advantage of industrial infrastructure that had been bombed, blasted or otherwise destroyed. America didn't have to rebuild factories from rubble.

With cars, during that time frame, Americans liked the cars built domestically which were also quite competitive in costs. If you couldn't afford a shiny big car, perhaps you bought a smaller, less shiny one, but it was still made in America.

With passenger airplanes, worldwide (in the West), most were built, yep, in America. Certainly within America airlines had a few forays into foreign aircraft, but in general, most planes were built in Seattle, Long Beach, or San Diego. And those locations built a large majority of all the airplanes flown by western nations.

But by the 1970s things had started to change. "them thar furrin" cars had started to appear on the scene en masse, and by the 1980s it was a torrent. And for passenger airplanes, it was a little behind cars, but pretty soon, more planes came from outside the US, and some of the bigger airlines actually had more of "them thar furrin" planes than they had American aircraft, and were (when you looked at purchases) spending the majority of their spending on "furrin" aircraft.

There are numerous other industries that have followed that pattern; perhaps steel most famously.

So when you look at income disparity shifts, keep in mind that the real top end of income -- people like Jobs, Gates, and now "new entrants" like Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page -- the really bright guys -- they are, in a very real sense, creating new stuff that doesn't have global competition yet. And that's why they continue to see high income growth.

Median income comes from your "base" for lack of a better, technical term. And for things like cars, planes, steel... the rest of the world caught up to the US in the 1970s and the heavy global competition is what has slowed it down. We see even today the signs of it in technology today for the average IT worker -- first it was just a little bit of "outsourcing" simple tasks to places like India, but as time passes increasingly complex work is being shifted at an ever increasing pace. I think 15 years if you took median IT salaries and mapped out 1985-2025, you'd see good growth for the first 20 years, and then some serious flattening out during the last 10 or so.

In short, it's not taxation or tax policies that have made changes, it's global competition. If you want to make a difference, you have to foster policies that encourage growth into new areas where there is limited competition. Government is historically terrible at doing that (with a handful of small exceptions such as the early parts of the space program).

Steve
 
Something to think about in average graphs of growth in America over time. Especially when looking at 1945-1973 time frames. I'll stick with cars and airplanes because I think they are representative.

At the start of that period America had a massive advantage of industrial infrastructure that had been bombed, blasted or otherwise destroyed. America didn't have to rebuild factories from rubble.

With cars, during that time frame, Americans liked the cars built domestically which were also quite competitive in costs. If you couldn't afford a shiny big car, perhaps you bought a smaller, less shiny one, but it was still made in America.

With passenger airplanes, worldwide (in the West), most were built, yep, in America. Certainly within America airlines had a few forays into foreign aircraft, but in general, most planes were built in Seattle, Long Beach, or San Diego. And those locations built a large majority of all the airplanes flown by western nations.

But by the 1970s things had started to change. "them thar furrin" cars had started to appear on the scene en masse, and by the 1980s it was a torrent. And for passenger airplanes, it was a little behind cars, but pretty soon, more planes came from outside the US, and some of the bigger airlines actually had more of "them thar furrin" planes than they had American aircraft, and were (when you looked at purchases) spending the majority of their spending on "furrin" aircraft.

There are numerous other industries that have followed that pattern; perhaps steel most famously.

So when you look at income disparity shifts, keep in mind that the real top end of income -- people like Jobs, Gates, and now "new entrants" like Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page -- the really bright guys -- they are, in a very real sense, creating new stuff that doesn't have global competition yet. And that's why they continue to see high income growth.

Median income comes from your "base" for lack of a better, technical term. And for things like cars, planes, steel... the rest of the world caught up to the US in the 1970s and the heavy global competition is what has slowed it down. We see even today the signs of it in technology today for the average IT worker -- first it was just a little bit of "outsourcing" simple tasks to places like India, but as time passes increasingly complex work is being shifted at an ever increasing pace. I think 15 years if you took median IT salaries and mapped out 1985-2025, you'd see good growth for the first 20 years, and then some serious flattening out during the last 10 or so.

In short, it's not taxation or tax policies that have made changes, it's global competition. If you want to make a difference, you have to foster policies that encourage growth into new areas where there is limited competition. Government is historically terrible at doing that (with a handful of small exceptions such as the early parts of the space program).

Steve

I agree with all of that but I'd like to add two more points.

1. In addition to the "head start" the USA had after WWII (as the only unharmed country of the Western or Eastern civilizations), they not only could take advantage of the lack of competition. They also used their newly-gained worldwide nimbus and influence to fill the power vacuum, which was left by the European countries and the British Empire, and to install their own system of economical exploitation, namely in South America, Africa, the Middle East and East Asia. It is the reason, why until today countries, that are actually rich with resources, have a population suffering from poverty.

Partly it happened in competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War (which actually wasn't that cold but cost millions of lives) and partly because there simply was no one who could stop them.

During the 1950's and 1960's the USA were busy with installing regimes or oust governments to their liking all over the world. In most cases they simply bought the loyalties of third world countries with money. Millions of millions went into the pockets of he heads of governments, securing the USA's access to resources. If they met resistance with political leaders who weren't corrupt, the CIA hatched rebellions and revolutions, until an America-friendly government was installed.

But times changed and slowly the USA started to lose control over their vassal states. The process started with the revolution in Iran, which for the first time made the USA look like a paper tiger. But also in other countries the people realized, that they had been puppets in the hands of American politics and weren't willing to play the game anymore.

The lousy image of the USA especially in South America today is a result of those reckless post WWII politics. Guys like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela might be crazy fools but they don't come from nowhere. They are a direct result of the USA's imperialism (yes, I'm using that word, because that's what it was!).

With the ongoing loss of control over former marionette states, the USA also lost a lot of their influence and economical power. They no longer automatically have a better position in the world, especially when it comes to competing with the reinvigorated European economies and the new rising Asian economies. And this exposes the weaknesses and neglects of past decades.


2. Much of the economical success of the USA is based on debt. The USA's wealth is built in borrowed money. The world knows it and is losing more and more trust in the "leading nation's" ability to recover from economical crises like recent ones. Each new blow will be harder to parry. And there will be more blows.


With the vanishing power and the loss of direct influence on other countries in the world, the actual weakness of the U.S. economy started to manifest itself. It already started in the 1970's, when Europe was rebuilt and started to catch up again. In my opinion the current economomical crisis in the USA isn't a new problem but an already existing weakness, that was present all along through the decades and was only covered up by convenient circumstances. Otherwise they wouldn't have such problems recovering, while in Europe things are already returning to pre-crisis levels.

As said above, the times of convenient cirumstances are over. The USA aren't able anymore to politically or economically dominate the world, like they did after WWII. The future of the USA doesn't look too bright. Debts are enormous, unemployment is high, exports are low and the Dollar is losing more and more of its appeal as the world's leading currency.

The problem, however, is, that most Americans are still thinking that their country is kind of invincible and that things will eventuelly be sorted out. Well, it's not that easy anymore. This realiziation still has to find its way into the heads of most U.S. citizens.
 
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Of course, the "winners" of WWII spent the post-war period building up their militaries, and the losers could only rebuild their economies and manufacturing.

MacGuffin" said:
Much of the economical success of the USA is based on debt. The USA's wealth is built in borrowed money. The world knows it and is losing more and more trust in the "leading nation's" ability to recover from economical crises like recent ones. Each new blow will be harder to parry. And there will be more blows.

And the other secret is that the rest of the US success is built on cheap goods manufactured elsewhere and cheap labour. Apple might have that "designed in California", but it is still made in China, like Dell, like mobile phones (although the biggest manufacturer is still Finnish). That can't be kept up indefinitely, because the only difference is smarts, and eventually some other country will unearth a Gates or Jobs.
 
Yes, many factors are playing together and the bottom line is, that the USA are not so much suffering from the aftermath of the recent crisis. The real reason for the slow recovery lies in 65 years of mismanagement, which is simply amplified by each new crisis. That's why the rest of the world recovers much faster. The growing difference between wealth and poverty is the greatest symptom of the weakness.

I don't see anyone there, who would recognize and change that dilemma, because there is an almost religious belief in the power of the Dollar and the assumed innate recuperative power of the USA. Maybe you really need to be an outsider with a view from a distance, to really see the problem and not being blinded by all the pomp and ostentation and the unshakable American ego.
 
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I want those kids to keep their confidence. After all, they make up 90 % of the monthly "Fail compilations" on YouTube!!! And I just love those...
 
Something to think about in average graphs of growth in America over time. Especially when looking at 1945-1973 time frames. I'll stick with cars and airplanes because I think they are representative.

At the start of that period America had a massive advantage of industrial infrastructure that had been bombed, blasted or otherwise destroyed. America didn't have to rebuild factories from rubble.

With cars, during that time frame, Americans liked the cars built domestically which were also quite competitive in costs. If you couldn't afford a shiny big car, perhaps you bought a smaller, less shiny one, but it was still made in America.

With passenger airplanes, worldwide (in the West), most were built, yep, in America. Certainly within America airlines had a few forays into foreign aircraft, but in general, most planes were built in Seattle, Long Beach, or San Diego. And those locations built a large majority of all the airplanes flown by western nations.

But by the 1970s things had started to change. "them thar furrin" cars had started to appear on the scene en masse, and by the 1980s it was a torrent. And for passenger airplanes, it was a little behind cars, but pretty soon, more planes came from outside the US, and some of the bigger airlines actually had more of "them thar furrin" planes than they had American aircraft, and were (when you looked at purchases) spending the majority of their spending on "furrin" aircraft.

There are numerous other industries that have followed that pattern; perhaps steel most famously.

So when you look at income disparity shifts, keep in mind that the real top end of income -- people like Jobs, Gates, and now "new entrants" like Zuckerberg, Brin, and Page -- the really bright guys -- they are, in a very real sense, creating new stuff that doesn't have global competition yet. And that's why they continue to see high income growth.

Median income comes from your "base" for lack of a better, technical term. And for things like cars, planes, steel... the rest of the world caught up to the US in the 1970s and the heavy global competition is what has slowed it down. We see even today the signs of it in technology today for the average IT worker -- first it was just a little bit of "outsourcing" simple tasks to places like India, but as time passes increasingly complex work is being shifted at an ever increasing pace. I think 15 years if you took median IT salaries and mapped out 1985-2025, you'd see good growth for the first 20 years, and then some serious flattening out during the last 10 or so.

In short, it's not taxation or tax policies that have made changes, it's global competition. If you want to make a difference, you have to foster policies that encourage growth into new areas where there is limited competition. Government is historically terrible at doing that (with a handful of small exceptions such as the early parts of the space program).

Steve


I knew I bookmarked this post for a reason.

September 28, 2010, 12:48 pm
Is It Good to Live in a Destroyed World?

On this blog and elsewhere, I often see assertions that America prospered after the Depression because our competitors were in a state of ruin.

That?s just not right.

First of all, trade was a minor factor in the US economy both before and after the war, with both imports and exports a much smaller share of GDP than they are now.

Second, while it?s true that the war had largely destroyed our overseas competitors, it had also largely destroyed our overseas customers ? because by and large these were the same thing.

Here?s the data on net exports as a share of GDP, which is what matters for overall demand. It was a small number before the war, and was back to being a small number by around 1950. There was a bulge for a few years in the late 40s. What was that about? The Marshall Plan, which temporarily allowed ruined economies to buy more from us ? in effect, a form of fiscal stimulus.

In general, devastation is bad for business.

http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb...ar=1955&3Place=N&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid


For the past decade or so exports of goods and services have been in the low 9 to high 12 percent range.

For the years just before and just after WWII we were never above 6 percent of exports except for the Marshall Plan years. 1973 was the first year we broke above 6 percent for exports.

Trade by either import or export just wasn't a very large share of GDP till the 80s. Net trade hovered in the plus or minus one percent range until 1983.

trade.jpg
 
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Well, the pre-war USA wasn't even a fraction of the post-war USA. For decades they could cover up their trade deficit by the fact, that the USA practically ruled the world outside of the Eastern Block, which gave them a unique position of power and influence, as I tried to explain above.

And as this power is now slowly eroding, the deficit becomes a problem, because there is no mechanism to cover it up anymore. Today I saw U.S. minister of finance, Timothy Geithner, accusing the Europeans (and indirectly the Germans) of being unfair towards the USA, because our economy recovers faster from the crisis and our exports are doing so well again already, which is really a joke, considering who was responsible for the crisis in the first place.

It also tells a lot about the nervousness in the current U.S. administrtion, when they already look for a scapegoat. Blaming others of being responsible for one's own problems, has a long tradition but it never helped a bit.
 
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Blaming others for own mistakes sadly lies in human nature. It becomes worse, though, when you kid yourself at the same time and don't draw any conclusions from the errors you made in the past.
 
Anyone else have a point they'd like to make but can't figure out how to make it legible? Yeah, having that problem on like three threads right now and I think this one started it.

/goes back to his hole to fix the writers block
 
Anyone else have a point they'd like to make but can't figure out how to make it legible? Yeah, having that problem on like three threads right now and I think this one started it.

/goes back to his hole to fix the writers block
:lol: I've been there all week. Damn midterms.

There will come a time when the reality of the US' slipping position in the world becomes evident to many Americans. I don't know what it will take though. Any of us who are actually paying attention already know that our position isn't tenable for much longer.
 
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Well, the pre-war USA wasn't even a fraction of the post-war USA. For decades they could cover up their trade deficit by the fact, that the USA practically ruled the world outside of the Eastern Block, which gave them a unique position of power and influence, as I tried to explain above.

And as this power is now slowly eroding, the deficit becomes a problem, because there is no mechanism to cover it up anymore. Today I saw U.S. minister of finance, Timothy Geithner, accusing the Europeans (and indirectly the Germans) of being unfair towards the USA, because our economy recovers faster from the crisis and our exports are doing so well again already, which is really a joke, considering who was responsible for the crisis in the first place.

It also tells a lot about the nervousness in the current U.S. administrtion, when they already look for a scapegoat. Blaming others of being responsible for one's own problems, has a long tradition but it never helped a bit.
Pretty sure the trade deficit is caused by excessive imports and diminishing exports. Not some pie in the sky cover up for the past 60 years. It's pretty well layed out really, I don't really know what the complaining is about because if anything it's benefiting everyone else? But hey, we could all go back to mercantilism, that's a Euro thing right? I will give you this MacGuffin, Geithner is an idiot for opposing the derivatives ban in Europe, and should be working to get rid of these sketchy wall street practices at home.

And thanks BR for that graph, the Trade Deficit is the 800 lb. gorilla everyone has been ignoring since '99. Fix the deficit and you fix the economy. Right now we're essentially selling off the farm to finance our over-spending.
 
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It is actually increasing exports but vastly increasing imports. Just look at the graph I posted. Exports have increased substantially since the 1970s but imports have increased even faster. Much of our trade deficit comes from oil imports and another huge chunk of it is partially explained by Chinese currency manipulation. Neither of those items are easy quick fixes.

I am still working on a longer well researched post to answer some of your questions twerp and Levels concerns. I don't think you want to read 10-12 pages of junk so I have to condense my research down.
 
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