oh, but I agree. I'm not advocating government spending. I'm only saying that in principle, ANY government is corrupt and the most wealth is accumulated by being close to the power (either by lobbying, favoritism, coercion or plain corruption). Government (both as a concept and as a specific entity in each country) is the source of most of the inequalities, not the cure.
I see lots of return for government spending. I wasn't addressing inequality in that statement. Also, it could be much worse; we don't know what it would be without the current government investment.
The problem isn't spending because governments are a macroeconomic and microeconomic entity bundled together. Everyone wants to present it as a moral failure but it is quite simple. When your country consists of one industry and that industry is gone, so is your country.
You can borrow and spend money to diversify. Lots of successful countries have done it.
>So I can't point out a historic success story to bolster my point, but you can point out historic failures to bolster yours? It seems like you're stacking the deck in your favour there.
Once again, not what I said sir. I said you can't pick out one specific agency to validate your catch-all theory. You didn't say "Giving money to the government is sometimes good", you said "The greatest good for the greatest number is achieved through the state. Witholding taxes for the purposes of greed is immoral and unpatriotic." That's wrong if I can find a single counter example. The same isn't true of my position.
Your supposition that the government is ideal is only true in places where corruption and bureaucracy don't reign supreme. This is not the world we live in.
I am not arguing that Government cannot do good, I am arguing that government does not invariably do good, as your quote would suggest. Do you understand that you are attacking a position I did not carve out? I didn't say all government is bad, I said some government can be bad. YOU said government is invariably good which I can prove is false with a single example. The converse argument is not true.
Does that make sense?
Edit: To be specific, it is the dogmatic way in which you state your position that makes it difficult to accept. If you would back off just slightly and say that Government MAY be the best allocation of money, I could agree, but there's no way that the government is invariably the best distribution method for the public good. One need only look to Zimbabwe or even China to understand the error of this logic.
The problem isn't spending it's the effectiveness of it. The last thing that you want to do is have the government cut spending because it doesn't get rid of the corruption it just cuts the stuff that helps people.
I did not make that assertion, what I said is that the advocates of government spending only shift the burden of decision making and don't really propose anything at all. Or in other words, the claim "government spending can fix the economy" is trivially true but useless.
The link about public goods doesn't convince me that government spending on public goods is always the best choice, see example of too many roads.
As for printing money, isn't it kind of equivalent to taking on debt?
> Two problems with that statement. First, you're only looking at one side of the equation. You're ignoring the cost and damage to the economy that government spending does. I don't just mean by crowding out other, more efficient solutions, but the literal taxation and inflation that government uses to get the money in the first place inhibits economic growth. Both actions reduce the "bottom line" for consumers and companies and thus reduce the funds they have available when deciding to make capital purchases- whether it is a house or a car or sending kids to college or building a plant to create more jobs. All of the money government takes prevents those things from happening.
This is ignoring the fact that government spending results in a ton of net-positives. The government might tax your bottom line, making it harder for you to buy a Lexus (and send an extra $10K overseas), but those taxes build roads, provide social security and medicare, fund our military, etc.
Obviously government spending must ultimately come from the pocketbooks of the people, but the fact is that government spending is a necessity. Giving 100% of everyone's money to the government would be a very bad thing, but giving no money to the government would be at least as bad. So somewhere in the middle is an appropriate amount of taxation. Claiming that taxation and inflation "inhibits economic growth" as a blanket fact is patently untrue.
> The second is that you're ignoring that much of that "investment" is actually spent on activities that are themselves net-harmful to the economy. Such as the overzealous regulators that shut businesses down, the agencies that spend their time inhibiting efficient running of businesses, or even make it impossible to operate your plant safely because government regulations don't allow the use of the latest safety equipment (only what was on the market at the time the regulation was created) or FDA examiners that drive costs thru the roof, and prevent access to drugs for dying people because the drugs are "experimental" and might kill them in 20 years (though their disease will get them a lot sooner) etc. Much of the money government spends is on programs that make people less safe and more on topic, undermine economic growth with no real benefit other than providing good political jobs to hand out.
So if we get rid of regulations the economy will improve? Some regulations are obviously a net negative, but most of our regulations were put in place to address known problems. Why would deregulating drugs help us? Clearly the drug companies are making plenty of money, and yet they are the ones arguing in favor of deregulation. If they are in favor of deregulation, surely they expect to make more money in the absence of regulation. Do you think that implies a drop in costs? Perhaps it implies a decrease in safety testing instead? We did a lot of deregulating banks, and that worked out really well. Please tell me why you think businesses would bother to be safer if OSHA was eliminated. There was a time when we didn't regulate workplace safety. We enacted laws specifically because in the absence of regulation, workplaces are less safe. When workplace safety is not required, more people die. When fire codes are not required, building burn down more often. The libertarian ideal ignores the fact that regulations were largely enacted to fix very real problems.
> The entire history of the USA supports it.
It most certainly does not. The wealth gap at its present is far larger than it historically has been in the US. Yet we don't see a sailing economy. On the other hand, after WWII taxes were obscene, yet the economy boomed.
> The error you're making here is that you think that letting people keep their money only helps the rich. IF you take all of the incomes of the bottom %50 of the populace and you compare it to the incomes of the tope %50 of the populace, there are a lot more people in the lower half and they make a lot more money. Not squandering that money benefits them a whole lot more than it does the rich.
This doesn't even make sense. There are not more people in the bottom 50% than in the top 50%. There are equal amounts in both halves. And the bottom half certainly doesn't make more money. That's why it's the bottom half.
> Frankly, the economics are not really up for debate. They don't support your side. The slogans about "rich people getting rich" are just rationalizations for theft.
Strangely, something like 80% of economists disagree with you.
> That theft, actually, hurts poor people more than it does rich people. Rich people are insulated, the poor are not.
Not at all true. Poor people pay no or nearly no tax. Middle-class people pay less tax. With respect to corporate tax holidays, not a lot of poor or middle class people see any income from that.
> Bush's original Tax cut proposed reducing taxes for poor people by %50, IIRC, and the reduction for the richest was around %2. After the democrats managed to "compromise" it, what got passed reduced taxes for the poorest by %20. Why weren't the democrats in favor of the large tax cut for the poor?
Probably because the poor don't actually pay any significant federal income tax. Many of them actually get tax credits.
Also because your information is incorrect. Bush's tax cuts brought the top tax bracket down by about 5%.
> And even still, even though every way you measure it-- dollar terms or percentage terms-- these tax cuts helped the poor more than the rich, ever since they've been passed, democrats have been calling them "tax cuts for the rich".
The tax cuts were moronic regardless of who they helped the most.
> Frankly, from an economics perspective, lower regulation, lower taxes, lower inflation, no matter how unevenly applied, helps the poor. It always does, it always will, and in fact it has to-- the primary way you get rich is by improving the lives of the poor.
This is delusional. You don't get rich by improving the lives of the poor. You get rich by getting a lot of money. You can do that by starting a profitable company, inheriting a lot of money, trafficking drugs, stealing money from others, and any number of other ways. Some ways that you could get rich will help the poor. Other ways will not.
> I don't understand why democrats constantly support policies that hurt the poor, are constantly trying to raise their taxes (While always, of course, claiming to only want to tax the rich) but they do.
I'm not a republican, so, put down that assumption I've just studied economics. What the politicians tell you about economics is designed to serve their interests, not yours.
I don't understand how anyone, Republican or otherwise, can look at what's happened in our country over the past decade and come to the conclusion that deregulation and lower taxes are beneficial. Look at the unemployment rate. Look at the federal deficit and debt. Exactly how have Bush's tax cuts helped most people?
The US Government spends more money than any entity in history. You think that isn't valuable to all those who wish to obtain some of that money for themselves?
The point of my analogy was that government has some specific functions spelled out by the Constitution. If we stuck to government's main functions rather than trying to have it do everything for everyone - we would make it less of a target for corruption.
But it could pretty easily be argued that it's something that we should be spending money on. The existence of an argument against a course of action doesn't, on its face, preclude taking that course of action. Such a line of thinking is, well, bizarre.
"1 is big government spending (with little oversight)"
The obvious problem here isn't "big government" spending. It's spending without oversight. This problem occurs all the time everywhere, in sectors both public and private. To claim that private businesses are immune to this by nature of their ability to fail and thus inherently a better mechanism than government is an absolute farce.
Take ownership of your government. To view the elimination of government as a solution to bad governance is both a lazy approach to problem solving and toxic to proper governing.
The problem is, that in almost all of the west, without government spending, 30% to 50% of society would be in deep poverty. To me it looks like the elite and the government collude to pacate the vast majority of have-nothings. A large percentage of a nation's income lands in the bags of a few thousands. In the mean time the government borrows money from the future in order to pay off the millions who get nothing.
You're assuming that government spending is helping. What if it's the problem? To illustrate, imagine a hypothetical country where 90% of the working population is employed by the government to enforce needless bureaucratic rules on the 10% of the population that is actually engaged in producing goods and services people actually want. Because of the taxes needed to fund the 90% and the onerous business environment, the country is in a recession. What is the solution? (Hint, it's not to maintain government spending.)
A big government is a "luxury" that poor economies can't afford. This is an old problem. Over two hundred years ago, Jefferson complained that the King of England "has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."
Where does your faith on government spending come from? Because I have exactly the opposite impression. The most extreme form of government spending is communism, and that didn't work out at all. The problem with governments is that they spend other people's money, so they have less incentives for being prudent with it.
I am amazed at how easily you skip over the fact that this means government gets to spend that money. As if that were some ideal outcome which would solve all problems.
Which government exactly is it that you think is excellent at solving societal problems and spending taxes efficiently?
Who is talking about government spending? The OP I was responding to was talking about livable wages provided by corporations. This has nothing to do with the government.
'Good' and 'bad' spending are pretty loose concepts. Sure, building weapons is worse than building tractors in terms of human impact, but when you get down to incessant government intervention in everyday spending, it's not clear that governments spend money better than individuals of any wealth level. Only a minority of citizens waste their money; while a majority of governments waste theirs.
Here's another framing: I think the government ought to fund infrastructure, healthcare, and so on, and also that it doesn't mainly because it's filled with corrupt lackeys of the wealthy elite, and even where it does fund these things the mechanism of distribution (government contractors) is also corrupt. It's perfectly rational to attempt to minimize funding that.
This assumes government spending is responsible and just. Taking someone's money to line the pockets of bureaucrats and paying inflated prices to government contractors isn't going to make me happy. There is too much corruption. If I felt tax money was being spent well, I might feel differently. Until the government can show they can be trusted with money, I don't see why they should be trusted with any more of it.
I'm not going to apply any morality to an individual spending money they earned. I am going to apply it to a government taking money through taxes. The government has a responsibility to do right by the citizens paying the taxes.
From what I've seen, most of the "tax the rich" people are assuming the government is going to spend the money to help the poor, or support whatever other causes they want... or more transparently, the money taken from the rich will go to them in some way. The reality is that probably won't happen. Even when the government does give out cash, like we saw during the pandemic in the US, look at what happened. A significant percentage of people ran out and bought stuff, costing more than what they were given. A concerning number took on significant debt (like a new car), as if those checks would keep coming. So the money went right back to people who own the companies, raising their wealth by billions, and the people ended up in worse debt than before the wealth was distributed. We see a similar pattern with lotto winners. It doesn't work. A government functioning like Robin Hood isn't the solution, we need education on saving vs spending, living within one's means, and being content with what one has. But these things are all bad for the economy, so there is little incentive for those in power to do it, so it falls on individuals.
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