Exactly. They damage the people they claim to care about. They magnify wealth disparities in the name of equality. They are too stupid to realize how cruel they are; or maybe they really don't care.
Nancy Pelosi is worth at least $27 million, likely over $100 million.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
What part of the population of San Fransicko continues to re-elect her? ...Jim Thompson
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| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
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| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
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I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Quite a few brain-washed Republican supporters do seem to believe that true freedom implies no government. No police force, no army, no community-wide health care ...
James Arthur doesn't accept this as a logical consequence of his anti- government attitudes. He more or less accepts the necessity for an army and a police force, but seems to have some trouble with the idea that dealing plagues and other infectious diseases does require a community wide and community financed health service.
In reality, modern industrial societies require a lot of community- based services, which have to be paid for by taxes. The Republicans don't like paying taxes, and they particularly dislike taxes that bear more heavily on the rich.
Under their influence, the US has a remarkably high level of economic inequality for an advanced industrial country - a GINI index of 40.8%
- which correlates with a whole lot of social problems, which trouble countries with lower GINI indexes - like Germany with 28.3% and Sweden with 25% - a whole lot less.
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It's rather like Prohibition - which filled the US with vie and crime, but they liked it. Eventually the US had enough sense to dump Prohibition. They haven't yet got enough sense to dump the war on drugs, which is the same mistake applied to slightly less popular recreational chemicals, and there doesn't seem to be any immediate prospect that they are going to outlaw the Republicans, which would probably be an even better idea.
Granting that people with lots of money are able to buy a lot more influence on the outcome of US elections than the well off-in most other advanced industrial countries, this isn't likely to change. The people who are making a lot of money out of supplying recreational drugs to the US population like the situation the way it is - they aren't going to make nearly as much out of any more rational arrangement. The Republicans like a set-up where they don't get heavily taxed, and they are too stupid to realise that a smaller slice of a larger pie would leave them better off.
If you plot the GDP impulse response to the stimulus, the effect was slight, and temporary. No lasting jobs or economic activity resulted, contradicting Sloman's theory.
The main overall effect was debt, and pent-up inflation, waiting to be unleashed.
With the debt weighing on everyone it's gonna be slow years ahead, at best, assuming Obama's house of cards doesn't just outright fall on President Romney.
Naturally, we need to adopt a communal, redistributive national economy--it's the only possible way to raise $7 billion a year (the CDC's annual budget) to prevent plagues and such.
I also agree that plough horses should be slaughtered, and golden geese roasted. That way, everyone will have more.
And I agree that your "needs" and comforts, however infinite, should be satisfied by other people slaving in their fields. Just a little longer, if need be. It's for the common good.
which is sort of like shooting speed into your arm. Short-term boost, long-term damage.
The problem with Keynesians is that they want to spend this year and save in the future. Always.
O can spend a trillion a year because effective interest rates are zero. I'd borrow and spend if my interest rate was always going to be zero! One day, lenders will get concerned, and stop lending at zero per cent. Or China will decide to push the dollar button on us; who needs nukes? Then everything will explode, like a thousand-times-bigger version of Greece. Gotta borrow more and more, just to pay the interest and refinance the loans coming due. That pushes interest rates up. Lenders get scared, and that pushes interest rates up. Just wait! The only way out is to renege on the debt by printing money. That will of course hurt poor and retired people the most. The smart money will do just fine off hyper-inflation.
You heard it here, as you heard about the European mess here.
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John Larkin Highland Technology Inc
www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
Precision electronic instrumentation
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators
Custom timing and laser controllers
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links
VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
The main reason rates are so low today is that we're buying our own debt (to push down rates): the Federal Reserve is buying over 60% of new Treasury debt. They have to. If we didn't do that, people wouldn't lend for the rates we're willing to pay.
(Aside: In a sense, it's predatory. When they sell people these investments, I wonder if Dodd-Frank makes the Treasury disclose that the Treasury has conflicts-of-interest, actively manipulates and makes a market in interest rates, is forcing investors to invest at negative real rates of return, all to reap obscene profits for the Treasury?)
The secondary reason is that however rocky it is here, it's worse overseas. People are still willing to park money here at a small loss, rather than lose more at home.
That's the U.K. for you. Margaret Thatcher didn't help. She didn't think that manufacturing industry was all that important, and the companies I worked have mostly been taken over by overseas firms. George Kent (where I worked from 1973 to 1976) was taken over by Brown Boveri of Switzerland - later ABB - while I worked there.
EMI-Central Research (where I worked from 1976 to 1979) went down the tubes when EMI went bust in 1979 and ended up merged with Thorn Electrical Industries. It was a slow process but there's nothing left now.
I worked for Eurotherm-Chessell for five months in 1979, and they've done well - though they merged with Honeywell and some others in 2009 and are now part of Invensys
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I went from there to ITT-Creed (1979-82) and got out before Margaret Thatcher's free trade ideas persuaded ITT to shut down the British operation and amalgamate it with Standard Elektric Lorenz in Germany, which got better support for the German government - though it's now Alcatel-Lucent Deutschland.
From there I went to Cambridge Instruments in Cambridge, U.K. - from
1982 to 1991 - which still exists, but as Karl Zeiss Microscopy Ltd and on a different site. It employs 100 people - about a quarter of the number that worked there when I did.
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They didn't fail, but the venture capitalist who owned the company when I was there merged it with other microscope companies and then carved them all up again. I suspect that the machine shop - which was the heart of the company when I worked there - still exists and employs rather more people, but I've got no easy way of tracking it down.
Fisons Applied Sensor Technology - where I worked in 1992 and 1993 before moving to the Netherlands - got taken over by the Thermo Electron Corp. and renamed Affinity Sensors. They existed to exploit a particular bright idea, but other people proceeded to exploit the same bright idea more effectively. Thermo Electron weren't prepared to invest any money in keeping up with the competition, and eventually shut the place down, much to the disgust of my ex-boss, who put together a management buy-out which Thermo-Electron ignored despite the fact that it would have saved them money on service guarantees.
It's probably too difficult for you to understand, but a successful political career is one that puts you into powerful positions, and one that leads you to become president of the US has probably been as successful as is possible at the moment.
It has certainly produced a situation where Barak Obama commands as much political power power as is now available, which makes it uniquely productive as such careers go. You may not appreciate the product, but you do have a rather restricted point of view.
A bizarre and fatuous allegation, but presumably comforting to your over-sensitive ego. Quite why you feel the need to be quite so unpleasant does escape me. Maybe if you could have mastered rational argument you might have been able get by with fewer personal insults.
The same way they always did. Nobody really knows why your unemployment figures are concocted the way they are, but at least they've been concocted the same way for a while now, and their trend says something about the state of the economy.
Strange idea. You've already got a communal redistributive national economy - but it needs to be a bit more communal and redistributive than it is at the moment. Not much more - Pol Pot went way to far - and even getting to the Swedish level would have to be taken gradually.
I think you rather miss the point. Your current system slaughters a lot of potential "plough horses" and roasts a lot of "golden geese" by cheap-skating on their education and leaving them only fit for strictly unskilled jobs. It cuts the immediate tax burden on the well- off, but short-changes them of the skilled labour that ought to be available to exploit their capital.
My needs and comforts are currently satisfied by my wife's labours in the fields of academy (plus my relatively small Dutch pension entitlements). Our incipient move to Australia (next Saturday) reflects the fact that she's hit the local retirement age, while she can still continue to work in Australia. She won't earn as much there, but with her pension from her job here, we will still live very comfortably. I put off drawing my UK pensions for a few years after I hit 65 because we didn't need them, but they will start up in November to add a fairly insignificant and completely unnecessary, if comforting, extra income stream.
Which presumably didn't get beyond Adam Smith and the invisible hand of the market. You will have only done first year - freshman - economics if you were pursuing an engineering degree, which makes the content roughly equivalent to final year secondary school in places that take education seriously.
After having owned a couple that were less successful.
Fine. My wife and I have more money than we can be bothered spending. We tried to buy the flat next door but one to our Sydney apartment - which is in a perfect location but no bigger than we need - but declined to bid hard for it. We'd prefer to buy one of the two next door apartments - if they ever come on the market - and double our floor space. We won't need any help from the bank to do it.
My wife thinks that I should have gone into business for myself, but I've never seen an adequate potential market for the kind of stuff that I figure that I could sell. I may be over-cautious.
Wrong. Most of the grossly over-simplify by assuming that the free market is perfect and that buyers and sellers act rationally.
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Daniel Kahneman got a Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences for pointing out that this was wrong, and explaining why, but most economists don't seem to have incorporated his research results into their models.
John Maynard Keynes deduced much the same facts from observing markets in action, but there are a whole lot of economists who still insist on the perfection of the free market.
Scarcely a rational choice. His ideas about economics are equally bizarre. But then I regard skiing as a perversely expensive way of getting a broken leg.
I'm sure you can't tell the difference between that and the real thing. The real Paul Krugman did get Nobel Prize for Economics, though that's not much of a recommendation considering the monetarist fruitcakes who also won the same prize - Milton Friedman comes to mind. His policies didn't do a thing for Chile, though the fact that they were implemented under a right-wing military dictatorship who came to power via a CIA-inspired coup probably didn't help.
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has some interesting things to say on the subject, though you won't find them palatable.
Reactionaries think that any money spent on workers is a dead loss.
Some of them have worked out that paying them enough to keep them alive is a good idea.
None of them seem to have enough sense to realise that there's an optimum split between capital and labour that gives them the healthy and educated work force they need to take maximum advantage of their capital.
Germany and Sweden have managed to get close to that ideal division of the profits, but their reactionaries are as unhappy about it as the reactionaries in the US. The difference is that the rich idiots in Germany and Sweden can't buy votes as easily and cheaply as they can in the USA.
Sweden and Germany are notoriously regressive, authoritarian and repressive.
Russia actually is regressive, authoritarian and repressive but the income inequality there - GINI index 40.1% - is almost as bad as the US (40.8%).
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The Russian elite doesn't have all that much money to spend on educating its works force, or on feeding or housing them particularly well, so their miserliness is perhaps more understandable, if no less ill-advised.
The US has remarkably high income inequality for an advanced industrial country (GINI index 40.8%)
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and it costs them in terms of worker productivity. US workers are neither as health or as well educated as they ought to be, considering how wealthy the country happens to be.
Sweden (GinI index 25%) and Germany (GINI index 28.3%) do a lot better, and their lower income inequalities both reflect and explain the differences.
Yep. That's why socialist countries rock: Cuba, North Korea, China, etc. If we just force everyone to work, and pay everyone the same, that simple formula fixes everything. Everyone deserves their fare[sic] share (and not a farthing more). Let freedom ring.
When I was in Africa, being hunted by the locals (really), they said Zimbabwe was a "no go" zone--redistribution, 30yrs downstream, was too scary.
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