OT: About America in this NG

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Statism is essentially the opposite of anarchy, and as such, I heartily embrace it. Anarchy is what reigns in the inner city, where it is essentially survival of the fittest, based mostly on physical strength and weapons and powerful control over gangs of brutal unprincipled hoodlums,

that leaves no place for anyone to achieve anything using intellect and peaceful means.

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When I was about six years old, our families became part of the "great white flight" from the previously pleasant inner city neighborhoods where I grew up. My only friends were some black boys who lived a couple houses down, and I had no real racial bias, but when a more violent sort resorted to brutal, senseless crimes, we chose to move out.

My girlfriend in 1978 worked as a day care center administrator in Westport, and she dealt with the issues of poor inner city life. One of her kids proudly announced that he had a "new daddy, and now he has five!" She found a 5-6 year old boy having sex with a similar aged girl in the restroom. She had become a "big sister" to some poor kids whose mother lived in the projects. She was obviously mentally deficient, and had a number of boyfriends who got her pregnant and soon left. The kids were mostly OK, and we sometimes took them places to experience life outside of their immediate "hood". I don't know how they turned out. Hopefully we made a difference.

Another friend still works as a visiting nurse in the poor inner city. She sees a lot of self-destructive behavior, and people who just don't have the "problem solving abilities" that most of us take for granted, and without which people make bad decisions and get into debt or get involved in crime and drugs and are generally unemployable and otherwise unable to extricate themselves from their situations. She knows some that really try hard, and she tries to help them on an individual basis, but it's pretty much a losing battle.

So I have much more than a tourist's view of the inner city. So much for

your assumptions. Thank you or playing.

Paul

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A more rational approach would be to look at what you were actually spending before imposing an arbitrary 1% cut, rather than listening for the most vocal of the sacred cows.

It's actually a device for finding which special interest group has the biggest political clout, which isn't adapting your spending to needs of society but rather to the desires of the party machines.

Cheaper, perhaps - "better" is debatable.

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Oxymoron here - going extinct means dying off. Government offices may outlive the problems they were created to solve, but that doesn't make them extinct - "redundant" is probably the word that James was looking for, but "adaptable" is what happens in reality. James is a peculiarly rigid thinker - though regurgitator is probably a better description of the process involved, and he wouldn't recognise an adaption if it sat in his lap.

krw's idea of a "fact".

It's called Keynesian deficit-funded stimulus spending, and the Tea Party majority hijacked it as their own private pork-barrel and contrived to direct it to the top 5% of the income distribution, who are the group least likely to stimulate the economy by spending the extra money that they got. James Arthur chooses not to believe in Keynes, so sees this disgracefully wasteful behaviour as something to thank heaven for. Heaven may forgive him - more rational observers won't.

James suffers from in-grown flat earth economics. He doesn't understand much, and what he does understand is wrong.

James Arthur's tiny little box of flat-earth economics doesn't contain fairy dust. What is does contain may be dangerously addictive, and is clearly inimical to rational thought. May be he imports it through Central America ...

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

the

Heh. I see that you righteous people have your own Wiki, which they describe as "trustworthy". Like Fox news?

or

Paul

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Short-term gains are just that.

Essential maintenance often isn't missed for decades, by then the mis-manager has pocketed their cost-cutting bonus and moved on to do damage elsewhere.

--
?? 100% natural 

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news@netfront.net ---

glegroups.com...

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Well, that's where I suspected the difference lay. If I believed that, I'd be with you. But the manner of spending matters; paying someone to dig a hole, then fill it, isn't stimulative. (Lots of people believe *exactly* that, and I have yet to convince any of them, including Sloman. It's a basic lack of understanding.)

To me--theoretically and empirically--it's abundantly clear from every direction that government is an expense. By far most of it today dampens the economy, dissipates its energy and vigor; it sinks the ship.

Bill constantly makes the mistake of tallying the visible benefits, but not the costs. He hasn't studied basic economics.

It's easy to see why it doesn't work: anything the gov't spends to stimulate one person, it has to take from someone else, unstimulating them. Borrowing it doesn't make that better--the soon-to-be-penalized businesses and people are not fooled.

Keynes is widely discredited, yet even Keynes said borrowing from the future was a temporary several-month trick that loses its power as soon as businesses realize they'll have to pay the money back. Then, rationally, they cut back to save for the coming hit, and any further extra spending loses all power to stimulate. We're well into that operating zone.

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It's not similar, because that's not how the money's being spent. Suppose that manufacturing company spent that money on french fries-- where's the return?

Our money is being dissipated, only small amounts invested. To the extent invested, it's in things that are politically favored, not viable industries producing things that people want. Economists call that "inefficient allocation of resources." It reduces output and productivity, not increases it.

IOW, we're investing in decreasing productivity, and that's what we're reaping.

Businesses are anticipating large increases in their costs, which are real. The tax rates are high enough that you have to try and minimize them, but it's impossible to know how to do that today. So, they wait.

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

Yep. Decades ago we started spending on things that gave someone a short-term benefit, but quickly faded. To keep providing any noticeable benefit the amounts have to be ramped constantly, year after year. Bloat.

The politicians responsible have long ago moved on. Meanwhile, the damage accumulates from loss to the economy, and from poor quality of services rendered.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

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On James Arthur's part. He doesn't understand Keynes' basic point, which is that markets aren't entirely rational, and goes on from there to ignore mo st modern economics. There are more constructive things to be done with sti mulus money than to pay people to dig holes and then pay other people to fi ll them, but since the whole point of stimulus spending is to fool people i nto thinking that the economy is active, this - minimal - approach does wor k.

Since James Arthur can't - or won't - see what stimulus spending is designe d to achieve, and does - in fact - achieve, what abundantly clear that Jame s Arthur's ideological blinkers blind him to reality.

Since James Arthur can't see the cost of not stimulating the economy, and s eems to think that the Great Depression was some kind of salutary cold bath for the US economy, he's in no position to claim that anybody else hasn't studied basic economics. His whole position is based in demented right-wing cloud-cuckoo-land

Sadly for James Arthur's crystalline certainties, they are fooled. The US e conomy has been fooled into growing at between 1% and 2% per year over the past couple of years of stimulus spending.

Only in James Arthur's cloud-cuckoo-land. Keynes has been revised and up-da ted, but the neo-Keynesian synthesis still defines economic orthodoxy. As w ith anthropogenic global warming, there are "experts" around who will tell the extremely well-off whatever nonsense the well-off want to hear and are prepared to pay for, but only people with a severely impaired capacity for critical thinking take them seriously. James Arthur - unsurprisingly - is u nwilling to believe in anthropogenic global warming, opting for the grand c limatologist conspiracy theory instead.

Really? Where did he actually say precisely that? Cite, please.

What a pity that markets aren't rational

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It could be, but that would put the stimulus money in the pockets of people who couldn't be relied on to spend it, where it's less effective.

There's nothing in that for the company, unless its workers were either hun gry or discontented, but ti would stimulate the wider economy.

The problem is that without stimulus spending the economy would have starte d shrinking at about 6% per year. People would have been made unemployed, f actories and businesses wopuld have been shut down and sold off for a few c ents on the dollar, and the output and productivity would have gone through the floor, as they did in the Great Depression.

Stimulus spending happens to be much the lesser of two evils.

Whereas as rerun of the Great Depression would have stimulated productivity ? The few people left in employment would have been the most productive, an d their bargaining position would have been weak, so their wages would have gone down, raising productivity per deflated dollar, and increasing the re turn on what capital investment could still be gainfully employed, but it w ould have been a very destructive way of "raising productivity".

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If they are anticipating large increases, the increases aren't yet real, bu t merely figments of James Arthur's brain-washed imagination.

Business confidence is low because GDP is only growing at 2% per year. It w ould be a lot lower if it were shrinking at 6% per year. Business always co mplains that taxes are too high, and tells anybody silly enough to listen t hat any further increase will put them out of business. Sometimes they are telling the truth, but too many have cried wolf for too long for this to be taken seriously.

Nobody is suggesting such stupid expenditures with no net useful result. But even so, if the government hires someone to do that, it will at least recoup, say, 20% as income tax. The worker will probably need transportation, so his expenditures on fuel are partially returned as tax, while the purchase stimulates the energy businesses, especially local merchants. The process repeats many times, and except for any portion of the money that goes overseas or into the pockets of drug lords and such, it is recirculated, and each transaction passes a portion back to the government. These transactions also raise the GDP, and the economy improves. This may also create some inflation, which is beneficial for borrowers as the interest becomes less significant.

I don't understand how you can believe this. Government consists of people and offices and resources just like any other business. The main difference is that it does not exist for the primary purpose of lining the pockets of the top administrators and stockholders as is the case for private enterprise. Every government contract enables businesses to start up or expand and hire workers and purchase materials and services. Government services provide valuable things such as the postal system, police, fire, education, security, and protection from pollution and harm to individuals by corporate entities that would otherwise not be concerned.

The people (and businesses) who receive government benefits immediately put that money to good use by purchasing things they need. The very rich already have everything they need, and their motivation is simply the accumulation of more money. They can (and do) avoid taxes by using accounting tricks and loopholes. They can also invest their money in legitimate local businesses, which is what we need more of.

Unfortunately Obama's stimulus plan was largely thwarted by the conservatives, and the stalemate reduced its effect and made it drag on much longer. Even so, it is working, and the mess we had gotten into was really quite extreme.

That is silly, but it would still stimulate the economy of potato farmers and the producers of vegetable oil, as well as the businesses that handle the distribution. One would also assume that the company had a good use for the fries, that would add value in some way. Maybe a better example is a

company like Solyndra that may have made poor choices in their expenditures for research and development that did not result in a profitable product, but that was also partially due to unfair government price manipulation of Chinese products that sabotaged the business.

We need to invest by spending on workers and production equipment, not financial institutions and stock market day trading which is really just

legalized gambling. Actually, much money has been made for rich investors by

*increasing* productivity and reducing cost, which means that automation and outsourcing and megastores result in less workers producing more. That's the Romney plan. It works for the top 5% or 1%, but for the average Joe, not so much.

Business costs are associated with R&D and setting up for production, which should soon be followed by profits and continued employment. Businesses are not taxed on such expenditures, so it is in their best interests to innovate and expand and produce. But the corporate recipe these days is more often a blueprint for huge, fast gains for the top dogs, while scrimping on the expensive long-term assets that would immediately benefit workers and suppliers, but delay the benefits and pose more risk to the top dogs. The new business models are based on accounting tricks and arbitrary cost cutting, with little interest in the core of the business. It's all numbers and money and undeserved bonuses and perks, and not about innovation, machines, and ordinary people. Those are all considered to be costs and liabilities or temporary assets that can be liquidated.

Paul

Get ready for the next big ones:

A trillion dollars in student debt, much to be defaulted on

Obamacare, which will be expensive and disruptive

Higher interest payments on $20 trillion or so of government debt. Envision lots of inflation.

All courtesy of your friendly government.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

It's a much better investment than unemployment, welfare, and incarceration. Forgiveness or modifying loans to make them affordable should reduce defaults, as will the improving economy.

Maybe just a little, but more effective and fair, and in the long run less expensive and simpler.

We NEED inflation of energy costs to protect the environment and promote

reasonable efficiency and reduce waste. There should be immediate fuel tax increases of at least $1 to $2/gallon, countered by an individual fuel deduction on taxes based on a reasonable per capita yearly allotment. People who use public transportation, bicycles, carpooling, telecommuting, or electric cars will see a tax benefit, while those who drag race in Humvees will pay dearly for their shenanigans.

Yep, I agree. Some people will just have to eke out a living at $300,000 a year, and pay a little more to the common wealth, allowing the average Joe to make a little more than minimum wage and have more to spend locally. You conservatives and libertarians lost - big time. So get used to it, stop whining, and contribute something constructive.

Paul

[snip]

Everything is wonderful. The Post Office is a "perfect" example at government being in the business business ;-)

Ah, yes. The "worker's paradise"... coming soon to a town near you :-( ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Well, maybe better red than dead, or better pink than sink. But we really need to be more "green".

The fact is that we should become more comfortable with having more leisure time to enjoy life simply and in concert with nature, rather than being slaves to our jobs and electronic entertainment and the futile pursuit of material wealth.

We don't need more workers unless we revert to an agrarian civilization.

Robots and smart machines can do most of the chores we need done to survive comfortably. We have the means to create a "free peoples' paradise", which may go against the grain of those who cling to the Puritan work ethic and the idea that idle hands are the devil's toys. But many people need to be educated to enjoy free time and meaningful social interaction and communion with nature, and turn away from violence and selfish competition.

Thoreau said it well:

Paul

be a lot lower if it were shrinking at 6% per year.

--
In the linear model, any growth is looked at with at least a modicum 
of confidence, while any loss isn't.

Baloney. You can't even make a good cut at calculating the atmospheric energy content due to man, and the content due to "Mother" ;-)

Some of us thrive on our productivity and the mental exercise.

Losers always phrase things that way.

Thoreau lived in a different time.

Personally I'll cling to my work ethic (and my guns) because I think you are representative of the scum sucking up the health of the United States... forcing us into a civil war... then you'll be history >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

I wonder if Slowman is really entitled to some dole from Australia? I'll ask my buddies down under. Maybe I can get him tossed on his worthless ass >:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 
              
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

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Josephkk gets it wrong as usual. I can't say that the job hunting in Sydney has been all that productive, but I've spent a few hours traipsing across town to talk to people who may eventually have work for me.

Jim's as far out of touch with reality as ever.

Sadly, my ass isn't worthless enough for me to get any kind of old age pension from the Australian government. My UK old age pensions - which aren't means-tested - are too big to let me draw an kind of Australian old age pension (which is, and not only on my own income but also everything my wife gets).

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

t would be a lot lower if it were shrinking at 6% per year.

.

I'm getting pension payments from the UK and the Netherlands, but pensions aren't dole, but benefits paid for in advance. Most of what we spend comes from what my wife earns, which definitely isn't any kind of dole.

We expect Jim Thompson to be out of touch with reality, but we do expect better from you.

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And how would I be doing that? James Arthur wants to drive the US economy into deep recession, which would destroy a lot industry, both in the USA and here, and I'm pointing out that he's wrong, which suggests that I'm trying to preserve the economy rather than destroy it. If you were silly enough to take James Arthur seriously - you might not see it that way, but you aren't that silly.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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An unfriendly government - as in 1929-33 - would have given a re-run of the Great Depression, with a lot more destruction of once valuable businesses, but deflation rather than inflation. You chose the less wasteful option, whether you believe this or not. James Arthur clearly doesn't, but he doesn't believe in anthropogenic global warming either which suggests a fundamental incapacity in critical thinking - which you happen to share.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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And Jim thinks that he can ...

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As long as it is confined to electronics. Outside of electronics, Jim- out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson hasn't exercised his brain for a few decades now.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney