economics: Germany

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The article doesn't mention the Laffer curve, nor any mention of manipulating any existing tax rate, beyond saying that they won't be increasing any of the existing taxes.

The Germans are contemplating a new tax "Berlin hopes to raise =802bn a year from 2012 with a financial-market transaction tax" which is probably aimed at putting a damper on the banks tendency to gamble on market flucuations.

Do tell us how you managed to find a reference to the Laffer curve in any of this.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

The page worked for me, once. They let you have one article free like once a month or something; more than that and you have to sign up.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

wrote:>

Don't tell anyone, but if you search for the title via google you can read the article.

"The stronger-than-expected growth and falls in unemployment were making it significantly easier for Germany to reduce its public sector deficit."

We'd be bouncing back too but for Obama. Even flat on its back, our economy would be trying to sit up if Big Bro wasn't busy holding it down. It was and is weakly trying, but he just won't let it.

It's his initiatives, tax-hikes, and attacks on employers and industries that restrain their plans. If you know your expenses are going to jump you don't hire. Period. Worse: knowing they'll jump, but not knowing how much.

Obama's disastrous handling of banks and mortgages compounds the situation--jobless people who normally would move to get a new job can't. If they sold their current houses they'd have to come up with the loss, cash, and even if they had that they wouldn't be able to get a loan for a new one. They're stuck.

o He's piling on more overhead $$ on employers, which directly sucks money from employment, from creativity, from innovation. o He's piling on more regulation, which means businesses do that rather than create and produce. o He's ruining our ability to efficiently allocate resources. o The money he's spending competes with private sector capital needs, sucking it away, so they can't get funds. It also creates debts whose costs will bleed the life and energy out us all in the future, including employers.

It's a perfect storm of destruction. That's why we're still in recession, and possibly headed down from here.

For the economy to recover all Mr. Obama needs to do is take his boot off its neck, and stop kicking its a$$. It'll recover on its own, if he only ever lets it.

The Europeans went along 1/2-way the first time on the stimulus bandwagon; now they're all jumping off. Good for them.

Obama's touting a new stimulus plan, and the Democrats seem to be pushing toward it for after the election. (They don't dare vote for it now.) They're perplexed their first plan failed, and figure they just didn't waste enough money to succeed.

Obama's almost as good at economics, creating jobs, and stimulus as he is at cleaning up oil spills. Almost.

James Arthur

Laffer, yes. Keynes, no. At least the Germans have sense.

John

"Pfennigs"

On Friday we had a circuit dispute and someone offered to bet me "dollars to donuts" that he was right, and I noted that donuts cost more than dollars nowadays.

John

If you use Firefox with Noscript it loads fine. Preventing the script from aborting the page load and replacing it with the register/logon is the key.

This is good:

"the key to success is to avoid employees"

John

Maybe in SF, they do. Out here in the real world, not so much. Yet.

The most expensive donuts in the world are probably those sold at the Tim Horton's outlet in Kandahar.

He's exactly right. That's my approach, and perforce, not of my choosing.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

Ah. Corporate greed.

John

It isn't Obama who shipped great swathes of American manufacturing industry off to China and Mexico. Germany is doing well because it does manufacturing better than anybody else.

Or so you'd like to think. Education is probably a lot more important.

This is what happens when a house-price bubble bursts. The US banks that created the housing bubble - also known as the sub-prime mortgage crisis - did it before Obama had the power to do anything about it. You blame Obama for it because you can't face the fact that your much- beloved banks acted like a bunch of greedy morons.

Not as much as letting the ecomony fall into a second Great Depression, as your preferred policies would have done.

Regulating your banking system would seem to be a good idea, since they created the housing-price bubble which went on to produce the sub- prime mortagage crisis.

As if you ever showed any sign of being able to efficiently allocate resources in the first place. Your balance of payments deficit is roughly what you pay for the oil you import, but your consumer's pay $2.50 for a US gallon, where I pay $7.00. Whose government is more interested in minimising the voule of oil imported?

Very likely, but since your banking system triggered an outright recession, the money he is spending is money that you private sector would not have spent until you'd had a full-scale 1930's style depression with everybody going bankrupt, when the private capital would have emerged to buy up bankrupt firms for ten cents on the dollar - or less.

Keynes had your number.

Actually, it isn't. The "perfect storm of destruction" would have been the 1930 style deep recession which your idiotic policies would have guaranteed.

He will. One only hopes that he takes "his boot off its neck" slowly enough to avoid creating a second recession equivalent to the 1937 recession produced by Roosevelt listiening to advisors who were as silly as you.

They didn't have the domestic house-price bubble that your banks engineered for you, and their economies were never in as much trouble as yours. They can afford to slow down the pumping priming somewhat earlier.

The first plan didn't fail - you've got 10% unemployment, not 25%.

Whereas the US banking system has demonstrated a remarkable capability to take down the international economy, and Dubbya's oil-company friendly drilling regulation system left BP free to cut corners.

Obama is human, not divine, and his capacity to clean up after other people's sub-human errors is finite. If you want to treat him like a god, you might think about sacrificing a few banking and oil company executives in his honour. It won't do the slightest good, but at least you'd be making it obvious how your poor excuse for a mind works.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Then why are they producing cars like the VW Sports Wagon in Mexiko? And why are engineers over there complaining that many get kicked out around age 45 because they are "too old"?

You've been getting away with this for far too long.

mike

The current crisis was government-made, but even so it needn't have been anything near this prolonged or severe.

Obama's made it worse, and continues to do so.

So, implicitly, as of 1937 Roosevelt's first and second stimulus packages (aka The New Deal) still hadn't worked, right? The fact is that government has no ability to create jobs. Not then, not now.

Mr. Obama's added 400,000 government workers. That's overhead, not production. If that's a new deal it's a bad deal--it's a burden, not a gain--and it comes at the *expense* of private jobs.

By pay alone you can safely figure that those 400K new government jobs are enough to permanently eliminate at least 1,000,000 private positions from the workforce.

That's wrong. It did fail. Wasting money helps no one, produces nothing. At least FDR got something tangible, some infrastructure, however much it cost him. We still use some of it today. Barack's money is gone, with nothing to show for it.

It's 18%, actually.

The President of the United States is actually legally required to take control of oil spill cleanups. Mr. Obama hasn't. He's derelict. When this President isn't actively obstructing this clean up, he's amply demonstrating both his ineptitude and his indifference to it.

He's in charge, he did his best to take credit when he thought it was going well, and to run away when it wasn't. That's leadership. Not.

So, the clean up is his fault, it's his tar-baby, and his brier-patch to lie in.

Sorry.

-- Cheers, James Arthur