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RE: Hey Steemit Economists: Trump Tax Plan is More Failed Trickle Down Economics
A balanced budget isn't necessarily good for the economy. Debt drives growth. It's all arbitrary anyway. None of it is real. It's just pieces of paper and pieces of data that indicate the value of something, so the idea that we wouldn't just print what we need to reach the needs of poor and suffering humans is crazy. Funny how we can always print more for war though and no one seems to freak over that like they do about the pittance we spend on food stamps. We also have no problem jacking up debt for the oligarchs either.
Half of our annual budget is spent on entitlement programs. I wouldn't call it a pittance. If you print more money you devalue existing dollars and they are worth less. Plenty of examples of hyperinflation exist for you to read up on.
Debt is the reason why so many people fail to get ahead in life and find themselves flat broke when they reach retirement age. They "need" to get that new car, iPhone, college degree in a useless field, and on and on. They buy things they cannot afford with money they do not have. Easy credit is a poison for people who do not have the impulse control to use it wisely or better yet don't use it at all.
Debt works a little different for a country, but it is still not a good thing. Eventually you have to pay the piper. Propping up an economy with debt is not a long term strategy that we should embrace.
I agree with you 100% that we need to call all our troops back home. We have been fighting illegal "wars" for years now and it needs to end. The cost of the wars combined with all the money we then spend rebuilding the infrastructure we just destroyed is a complete waste and creates no value for our country.
The other consideration is all of the money spent outside of the budget itself. The budget is only a part of the bigger picture. They can draw up a so called balanced budget and pat themselves on the back knowing that they will just write spending bills all year to finance all the crap they didn't put in the budget. That needs to be done away with. If you want to spend it, put it in the budget and put your name on it.
You just changed what I said buddy, I said food stamps are a pittance of our budget, not all entitlements are a pittance. At any rate, how expensive these programs are is as a result of terrible policies that allow them to be. Our healthcare costs are not high simply "because we have more people" as some love to point out, but is actually high as a proportion. That's because the government bends over backward to allow corporations the monopolies they want.
The fact that we don't have the federal government negotiate pharma prices with foreign pharmaceutical companies is a significant factor driving up the costs. Pfizer moves shop to Ireland and dodges taxes which gives them an unfair tax advantage over US companies which destroys competitiveness.
Your bit about people's personal spending being a cause of their own problems makes me think you may be short on life experience. Sorry to say that but if you think in the modern economy it is a choice to have a personal laptop or electronics that is ridiculous. Also, college degrees that are worthless? lol. Yes so every person can be an engineer and we have no poetry art films or anything else. No one can know politics or international relations because they aren't STEM majors. You realize automation is actually going to crush the STEM majors first right? Those will be the less important majors with in our lifetime.
You don't have to pay the popper if you are the US. Again it's a fallacy. Who is going to come and repossess our tanks and airplanes? No one. Nobody can do anything about our debt, and no one can do anything about any other major countries debt either.
We can print money for bank bailouts when they rob us but not bail out ourselves when the economy crashes? We can't get healthcare or social services but weapons companies can keep being subsidized by the state? What about corporate welfare that subsidizes corporations all over the country?
People need to understand what social class they're in and fight for their own interests. Don't worry about corporations they can take care of themselves. Worry about your own wellbeing and future. Ultimately, You have to live among the poor, not them. When they are desperate and have nothing left, it's you they will eat first.
It really does not matter because all so-called entitlements, by the national govt, are unconstitutional!
Well, I'll be concerned about that just as soon as we deal with corporate handouts and subsidies. Until then, class war.
If we strip our selves of social programs while simultaneously increasing enititlement programs for oligarchs, we are just disarming ourselves.
If you think STEM degrees will be made worthless by automation then you need to think again. Automation is created and maintained by people with STEM degrees or backgrounds.
All bailouts, handouts, subsidies, and other government giveaways need to end for everyone individuals and companies. Food stamps alone are a pittance sure, but where do you draw the line? So far we spend half our budget on entitlements and we have yet to draw a line.
Yes a laptop is still a luxury item. You can access computers at any public library. Having a cell phone is becoming necessary, but that doesn't mean you have to have a $600 iPhone when a simple flip phone will suffice to keep you connected. You are really missing my point though by focusing on the need to have a laptop or cellphone. Those were just examples. A laptop and a cell phone are not breaking people. What is breaking people is the fact that they insist on living beyond their means across the board. They have a house they can barely afford, a car payment, an expensive cell phone, take yearly vacations, and on and on. They live paycheck to paycheck not because they don't make enough money, but because they spend every dime they make rather than saving.
Taking out a loan to get a degree that will never do anything to allow you to pay off that debt is foolish. There are STEM majors out there up to their eyeballs in debt that they will spend the rest of their lives trying to pay off even with a job in a STEM field because they chose to go to a very expensive school rather than a state school. No one particular major is immune to bad debt, but there are majors that are much more likely to be poor investments. Poets and artists in no way require a degree by the way.
People have been brainwashed to believe that getting a college degree is necessary for success and that if you get said degree you will be successful. Both of these ideas are wrong. Most job growth in the next decade or so will be in the skilled trades. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, millwrights, machinists, etc. are going to be in extremely high demand because so many of them are retiring and there is no one trained to replace them because of the two fallacies I mentioned above.
The reality is people do not want to delay their gratification until they can afford it. That is why so many households have tons of debt and no savings. They are unwilling to live frugally, below their means in order to build wealth. This is not true of everyone, but of most households it is. Debt is bad. Easy credit exists because the credit card companies love that sweet, sweet interest that their slaves pay them every month. Personal debt and refusing to delay gratification is a large reason why the middle class is shrinking and the lower classes are not moving up.
No one is going to repossess our tanks. What will happen is people will eventually lose faith in our ability to pay our debts (eventually we will default by the way) and at that point they will downgrade our debt. No one will be willing to extend us credit, and our economy will implode followed by the world economy. Printing money is not a long term solution. Eventually inflation will catch up to you. We are not always going to be the big kid on the block. China is poised to surpass us very rapidly particularly as they begin to develop a middle class. They will be the ones driving the world economy and we will be sitting here with our national debt unable to get credit and unable to meet our obligations to the citizens who paid into the systems that were supposed to be there for them when they retire.
Programs will write programs.
Again, if your concern was genuine about both social programs for people as well as corporate welfare and jingoism, you would be equally ranting against both. But you seem fixated on people's ability to get food or cancer treatment first. Why would that be the priority and not first going after the richest people in the country who aren't in a life or death situation? Alos, we have drawn a line, clearly, we cover less of peoples healthcare than any modern developed nation. The biggest issue we have is not how many people or how much we are covering people. You can easily drop the percentage of our budget that health services take up if we fight to reduce the actual health services and products costs like Canada does.
That you can access a computer at any library is somehow relevant once again highlights that you just don't have the life experience. Either you are very old or very young. There are few modern jobs that don't require you to bring your own laptop. Most of the jobs you seem to support in the STEM majors require a high-end setup as well btw. You can't tell your boss hey I'm actually not coming into the office because I'm working out of my local library...
Skilled trades are not the economy... plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, millwrights, machinists, etc. need to work for people, and those people have highly specialized jobs because of the advanced economy we live in, which requires an education. Btw those job growth projections from the US Bureau of Labor say those are just amongst jobs that will grow. It isn't to the exclusion of other jobs. The overwhelming number of the jobs are actually in positions that require an education.
Education makes poets and artists better. And yes many of the singers, actresses, and artists you have heard of went to art schools. Even 2Pac went to an art school.
In regards to people's issue of gratification. First off you act like those impulses aren't created, encouraged, and coerced by the same companies selling them stuff. They have been advertising and brainwashing people into a lack of impulse control their whole lives. And second off the impulse control is a very minimal aspect of the issue. You're taking a super narrow issue that doesn't even affect everyone and choosing to blame that for much more obvious issues.
Like the complete stall in income growth as the cost of everything else has gone up. What is my generation supposed to do? Our disposable income is being strangled but if we don't spend the economy stalls.
China is overtaking us because of massive public spending and government using the state to drive the economy or shore up economic crises in the country. You're using them as an example of what is overtaking us as well as saying that is what not to do. The world's highest entitlements spenders happen to also be the richest and most successful states...
It is almost like public spending drives the economy.
And once again, these other states welfare systems are less problematic because they have national negotiations on pharmaceuticals as well as medical products being imported. It's not complicated how we can fix this, we don't need to let people starve suffer or die. Bernie Sanders tried to fix the pharmaceutical issue but he was betrayed by Cory Booker who tanked the bill being passed even though Sanders had gotten the Republican voted to pass it. Yet another reason Centrists are trash.
Sorry but we are nowhere close to programs writing programs on an industrial scale. It will be decades before humans are mostly removed from programming on a large scale. Even then, you will still need humans for creative thinking. We have not yet come up with AI. When we reach that point supplies of most everything will outstrip demand so much so that most necessities in life will cost nothing. At that point you are talking about an entirely different type of economy. I would like to talk about current affairs though if you don't mind.
I am against government handouts in general. If anything I am more against corporate handouts than those for individuals. Businesses have to be allowed to fail when they make poor decisions or they will keep making them because they know they will be bailed out. People are not too dissimilar, but companies impact far more people than an individual can, and I have compassion for people in need and none for a poorly run company. I just happened to respond to your one comment which happened to be about handouts to individuals.
I never said that blue collar jobs would grow and no others would, I just said that there would be significant growth in those jobs compared to white collar jobs simply due to the fact that very few people are training to become skilled workers because everyone wants to be white collar. Supply and demand will drive up the value of blue collar work compared to white collar jobs.
We actually have not drawn a line. No one has tried to slow the increasing cost of entitlements at all. Our solution is to print more money, vote to raise our debt ceiling, and then stick our heads back in the sand hoping that our benevolent and wise government will take care of us.
I am glad to see we agree that people are brainwashed to consume. That is a major issue whether you believe it or not. It should concern you that the majority of families in this country have less than $1000 in savings. This is one of the reasons so many people feel they have to have a government safety net to protect them because they have chosen not to provide one for themselves.
You seem to be focused on the outliers of the economic bell curve while I am talking about the majority. Yes there are people who cannot afford to save money because they don't make enough to do so. Their issues are different than the majority of Americans. I don't mind them getting some assistance to help them get on their feet, but the kinds of "assistance" our government gives does not encourage people to try to better themselves. It encourages them to do the opposite. If they start to make more money and get ahead, then they lose their assistance before they can afford to lose it. That makes no sense. There are better solutions that will encourage people to try to get ahead rather than keep them impoverished.
Where we really differ though is you believe government is the solution to all our problems while I believe that people are better suited to solve their problems.
Oh and nice try with the ad hominem attacks. Try to focus on attacking my arguments rather than me.
Do you run up your credit cards, then claim financial success? The only reason debt would drive growth is if our entire monetary system were based on debt... Oh wait...
There is a reason the framers called for a sound money system, backed by gold and silver.
So you just restated what I said? lol
Yes we are in a debt based system so debt does drive growth...
The founders established a gold backed system because they were in the 18th century...
Being in the 18th century had nothing to do with the system they set up. It was set up that way so that wealth would not be under the central control of the State, and so the currency of the nation would actually have intrinsic value. That same system is just as relevant and possible today, as then. If sound money were an 18th century ideal, why would the Chinese be busy buying gold, and not releasing figures as to how much they actually own?
And, I wasn't restating what you said, I was mocking it. We do have a debt based economy, and you could call its expansion "growth", but in reality, the expansion of debt is not growth.
Russia is buying gold too, it's just to stabilize their currency to make sure it doesn't collapse up against US sanctions. China is doing the same but less because of sanctions, and more because the value of gold is constantly going up which allows them easy profits, but also because if they control a larger share of the gold in the world, they are less susceptible to currency spikes or changes which spurs domestic investment. Gold is a product to buy and sell and profit from. The purchase of it isn't indicative of any major shift in the perception of the economy. Btw the US still holds the largest amount of gold and we have 4 times the amount China does... yet we have a speculative system...
Public debt is an imagined problem. We are VERY far away from not being able to deal with that problem. The major issue is private debt. People's wages have been stagnating while costs have gone up everywhere. If people's basic necessities like rent have all shot up and they don't make more money then it goes on credit card debt. Then a larger and larger share of people's disposable income is going towards credit card payments. Then they cant spend money on stuff which stalls the economy. Like it or not that's the situation. The government has two choices, either force debt forgiveness, or subsidize the hell out of healthcare, education, and social services to eliminate those strains on people's disposable income so they can pay their debts and buy things. This means public debt drives growth because it offsets private debt.