The Trump Presidency - how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Hair

If you reduce the amount that gets in, you have to reduce the amount that gets out, or run a deficit and make debts to compensate for it; debt upon which you will pay even more money as interest rates to investors.
  1. Yes we are running a deficit and have been for a while now
  2. You are making the incorrect assumption that all government spending is good AND that there is no waste.
The Western World has been one of the best systems so far, yet stupid, greedy people are trying to destroy it and transform it back again into what the world was before it: extremely much to the already rich, just crumbles for the poor, destiny tied to your birth social position, not to your abilities. The moment an idiot rich can get richer and more powerful by doing NOTHING but spending his own inherited money, you know you have a problem.
I'm not sure where you got this from, some of the richest people in the world right now emerged in late 20th/early 21st century by building products and/or services that people found desirable. Just because someone inherited their wealth doesn't mean that they are lazy/stupid/shiftless, the reason some families are synonymous with wealth is because they managed and increased their wealth properly.

You are also confusing earnings with worth, Bezos as an example is worth $130Bn, that doesn't mean he gets paid that amount every year, that means all of his liquid assets, most of which is Amazon stock btw, are worth that much. So if you are taxing their "income" you really won't get a whole lot out of it.
There cannot be someone whose work is averagely valued 1000 times that of an average person. That is physically not possible, expecially in a human society, where everything gets done cooperatively.
That makes absolutely no sense at all, to use Lev's example, a doctor is significantly more valuable than a janitor. Anyone can be a janitor but it takes years of medical school, a certain specific (rather rare) mindset and willingness and ability to keep on learning as the field is constantly changing. Same goes for C-suit executives, not many people are even capable of the work (I couldn't manage at that level, hell I don't want to at any level) and their decisions have massive impact on thousands (and in some cases millions) of people so yes their labor is much more valuable.
what mafia does: either you do wha they want, or your life gets destroyed, maybe you even die).
Sounds a whole lot like the IRS and government to me...
Then, that doctor would get filthy rich, effectively robbing you of everything you have; not because his work is so much better, but because you can't refuse the transaction.
That makes no sense as there isn't just one doctor, there is not just one of anything
The "market" is a human behaviour: it only self-corrects when people can refuse the deal they get offered. If they can't, it won't self-correct anything and wealth will be destroyed rather than created.
I completely fail to see your point, people move between socio-economic levels all the time and in both directions, sometimes you are in a position to refuse the deal you are offered, sometimes you aren't and many times lower paying jobs are simply a foothold into the economy.
 
  1. You are making the incorrect assumption that all government spending is good AND that there is no waste.

Talking out of experience, when you cut without addressing the problems, you will be only cutting the working part, not the parasites. Trust 30 years of italian tries to do exactly that without addressing some of the real problems.

I'm not sure where you got this from, some of the richest people in the world right now emerged in late 20th/early 21st century by building products and/or services that people found desirable.

This is not the world from 60 years ago, nor it is the world from 40 years ago, and it is not even the
world from 15 years ago.

BTW, the point still stands: many of those people got way too rich for what they have done.

Just because someone inherited their wealth doesn't mean that they are lazy/stupid/shiftless

Of course not; yet they can succeed by being that, if they have enough money. Some of them even get elected president. It is a fantastic evidence that the system has problems that need to be addressed.

You are also confusing earnings with worth, Bezos as an example is worth $130Bn, that doesn't mean he gets paid that amount every year, that means all of his liquid assets, most of which is Amazon stock btw, are worth that much.

At some point, those things got into his own possessions; it is impossible that he has worked THAT much hard as an average guy. Most of that wealth actually comes from those who work(ed) for him.

That makes absolutely no sense at all, to use Lev's example, a doctor is significantly more valuable than a janitor.

As with Lev, the doctor could not work (not for that amount of time, anyway) if the janitor didn't clean the medical office. Part of the wealth of the doctor comes from a teamwork, and yet it stays with the doctor.

I am not asking for no stupid black or white actions, I am just pointing out that "what is earned" is not exactly an easy thing to determine, and there are reasons why extreme inequalities are impossible if not by taking away someone else's hard-earned money; not because people want to cheat (some of them want), but because of how our system is organized.

C-suit executives, not many people are even capable of the work

Not many, you are perfectly right, but still many more than the executives payrolls would suggest...
And after all, not that many of them are required either.

That makes no sense as there isn't just one doctor, there is not just one of anything

It depends on the conditions you have. In some places, in some areas, in some fields, there can well be just ONE of them.

In some areas, single persons or companies try to build up a situation where there is noone else to compete. Monopoly.

Or, in our simpler terms, what Jeff Bezos is trying to achieve (and will achieve, unless the conditions change) with Amazon.

I completely fail to see your point

Of course not: you are thinking about social ladder here, while my sentence was about how the exchange behaviour of human beings (which is behind the marketplace thing) works.
 
@Blind_Io your argument here isn’t very clear, are you saying that tax cut didn’t help middle class enough? Or are you saying that the ROI is too low to justify the cuts?
Both can be true. The tax cuts were targeted to help the wealthy, the challenge Level is having is that he seems to be assuming that all taxes are straight percentages - not progressive. The other part of this that we haven't discussed this time around (although we have in the past) - is that the tax cuts for companies are permanent, the ones for individuals are not. We have already seen how most companies are spending their tax cuts - by buying back stock or sitting on cash. Remember what we were promised with these cuts? That massive tax cuts to the wealthy would result in more spending, which would drive the economy. That hasn't happened. That corporate tax cuts would drive reinvestment. That hasn't happened either, at least not enough to drive GDP to the point of paying for the tax cuts. The tax cuts would pay for themselves with greater economic growth - not happening either. And finally, that the middle class would see this incredible benefit and be "so well off". Actually, the majority of Americans have seen such a small benefit that if you didn't tell them it was there, they probably would not have noticed.

So: the tax cuts for most Americans were just crumbs falling off the table enjoyed by the wealthy and by corporations. This is what "trickle down" actually looks like. The ROI on these cuts is not enough to pay for the cuts themselves, which is what we were promised.
 
As with Lev, the doctor could not work (not for that amount of time, anyway) if the janitor didn't clean the medical office. Part of the wealth of the doctor comes from a teamwork, and yet it stays with the doctor.
That's a complete BS argument, every person working in a business is paid a wage, that wage is a combination of how difficult the task is (it's easy to mop), how in demand it is (making sculpture out of loose diarrhea is rather hard but who wants to see that shit) and how replaceable the worker is (garbage pick up is rather easy but not many people want to do it).

Or to put it another way, the doctor could stay after hours and clean his office, janitor can't treat his patients.

@Blind_Io alright that clears it up.
 
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Try mopping for 40 hours a week.
 
Try mopping for 40 hours a week.
Been there, done that, whats your point? Also served people ice cream, washed dishes, made salads, vacuumed, worked deli counter, etc...

Just because something can be physically taxing doesn't make it a difficult task.
 
That's a complete BS argument

I'm not saying the doctor should be paid the same as the janitor, I am saying that without the janitor, the doctor couldn't do the job, or couldn't for as much time, having to dedicate a part of it to cleaning up.

Everything complex is a teamwork.

Or to put it another way, the doctor could stay after hours and clean his office

That's less time for the patients.

It is the reason why cooperation works well. Instead of having everyone doing everything, you put everyone doing what they do best, then you combine the efforts and get more efficiency, more efficacy, more wealth.

This is why whatever you earn is not really only what you have done, rather a combination of efforts from many people. Of course skills have to be rewarded correctly, but the necessity for cooperationg puts a limit on how much -more- than someone else working to the same project you can really produce, thus how much you can earn.
 
Been there, done that, whats your point? Also served people ice cream, washed dishes, made salads, vacuumed, worked deli counter, etc...

Just because something can be physically taxing doesn't make it a difficult task.

It may not be mentally taxing, but it can be physically. Either can be a measure of difficulty.
 
That's a complete BS argument, every person working in a business is paid a wage, that wage is a combination of how difficult the task is (it's easy to mop), how in demand it is (making sculpture out of loose diarrhea is rather hard but who wants to see that shit) and how replaceable the worker is (garbage pick up is rather easy but not many people want to do it).

Or to put it another way, the doctor could stay after hours and clean his office, janitor can't treat his patients.

@Blind_Io alright that clears it up.
I agree with Prizrak on this one. There is a difference between skilled and unskilled labor. The doctor is skilled labor, the janitor is unskilled labor - while the janitor contributes to the functioning of the office, many people can do his job. Mopping is not technically demanding labor so there is a very large pool of people who can do that job. The doctor, on the other hand, is highly skilled labor and it would take a great deal of time to train someone to do that job and it requires great expense.

The second half is how much people want to do the job. Cleaners in ORs and ERs get paid more than someone working in the office areas because they are exposed to possible contagions (blood, urine, feces, etc) and their job requires greater skill and training (effectively disinfecting an OR post-surgery, use of specialty cleaning products, documentation of the job, etc). As a result, few people would take the job cleaning ORs if it paid the same as emptying wastepaper bins in an office building. The value of the work is greater, so ideally the pay would be greater as well.

I worked for a small employer that wanted to use the therapists for unskilled labor - such as cleaning the offices. The problem is that we were only paid when we had a client in the chair, so this would have been unpaid time at work. No one went for it, and it resulted in everyone putting their foot down about doing "favors" for the owners to keep the place running. The owner and head therapist ended up staying late to do housekeeping. That's fine, it's their business and if they believe their time is best spent doing that work, they can do so.
 
It may not be mentally taxing, but it can be physically. Either can be a measure of difficulty.

If you want to play semantics... moping is not a complex task, and with machines like this not even difficult...
3555726
 
You are not mopping on a machine, you are simply guiding it as it does the mopping.
 
This is a job that is already being done by robots.
 
So, how's the trade war going? Not so great, huh? Maybe it's because the guy who started it thinks that tariffs mean the country of origin cuts us a check for every shipment of goods.

https://markets.businessinsider.com...ns-22-billion-through-april-2019-6-1028296264
Trump’s tariffs have cost Americans at least $22 billion since the trade war began, report says

President Donald Trump's trade policies cost Americans tens of billions of dollars through April, according to new estimates, even before major tariff escalations took place.
The pricetag of duties levied by the Trump administration added up to nearly $22 billion during that time period, the free-trade group Tariffs Hurt the Heartland said in a new report. That was before Trump more than doubled the tariff rate on $200 billion worth of Chinese products in May, so current totals are likely much higher.
Senator Chuck Grassley, who is leading efforts to craft a bill that would seek to rein in presidential trade powers, has given the same estimate. US Customs and Border Protection has assessed more than $15.2 billion in tariffs on China and more than $6.5 billion from those levied on steel and aluminum imports, according to the Republican from Iowa.

"To be clear, American importers and consumers are paying for these tariffs," he said at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Tuesday. "$22 billion out of the pockets of hardworking Americans is not in our national best interest."
While Trump and his administration claim that tariffs hurt foreign exporters, evidence suggests that businesses and consumers at home pay the price.
"The Trump administration is learning that it is hard to punish someone else by taxing yourself," said Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at Upwork. "Tariffs harm the domestic economy in addition to those we are imposing them on, so it is difficult to really damage major trading partners significantly without doing a similar amount of economic damage at home."
At the same time, retaliatory measures have hit American businesses hard. The Department of Agriculture expects farm exports to fall by nearly $2 billion to $141.5 billion in fiscal 2019, largely because of tariffs China levied last year to hit back against the Trump administration.
Trump asserts that his trade wars will ultimately help Americans, by pressuring countries to change business practices he sees as unfair. Seeking to level the playing field for the US, he argues that any short-term pain will be worth it.

From September of last year: “China's now paying us billions of dollars in tariffs and hopefully we'll be able to work something out.” - Trump.

From May this year: “Tariffs will bring in FAR MORE wealth to our Country than even a phenomenal deal of the traditional kind. Also, much easier & quicker to do,

Trump has promised to use the revenue that the government raises from China (remember, the government is not actually raising money from China) to help businesses harmed by the trade war. Washington will demand payments from Beijing, use the money to buy food, and pass the food on “to starving people in nations around the world!”

EDIT: Fixed the link.
 
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Can't do that, if you say the "T" word then people get angry and won't vote for you. Like people who make $27,000 a year getting pissed about the Estate Tax.
 
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