I'll note that you, not me, called me smarter than you.
By that same rationale, you’re admitting that I am and you are not correctly using the word utility. You dodged the question again: if utility does not mean happiness, then what
does it mean?
Why wouldn't you at least like a little job security?
What would I like? I’d
like plenty of things: working hardly any hours, getting full benefits, a gigantic wage, options, freedom from ever being laid off, retirement plan fully paid for, etc; we can see here that just because I’d like to have something doesn’t mean I’m going to get it. What I’d like and what I can reasonably trade my labor for are two different things. I may like job security, however whether or not I’m willing to pay a significant portion of my wage for it is a decision that I should have the right to have autonomy over.
Wait, so, you're saying it's good to value those with higher seniority? Weren't you just trying to convince me that paying higher wages to those with higher seniority is a bad thing?
Typically it is in the best interests. I was very specific about saying “on average” in that statement to avoid any contradiction. It is
usually best to pay someone with seniority more, but it should be because they are worth more to the company, not simply because they have been there longer. The causation isn’t that seniority is the cause of higher compensation, despite the correlation. The causation is that, on average, those with more seniority have more experience, are more loyal, and produce more wealth for the company, that those without.
The distinction is very clear and relevant. Paying some more because they produce more gives them an incentive to work hard for a company to keep producing more. Paying someone more simply because they have been with the company longer provides them no incentives to produce more, but simply to not lose their job.
99% of labour contracts are renewed or renegotiated without even the threat of a strike action or other kind of dispute.”
Translation of that last sentence: I want you to somehow, without resorting to ignorance, strawman, or anything else along those lines, refute him.
Despite the lack of source, what is there to dispute? Unions get their way. A large company will only make major disputes if the company is facing massive economic hurdles in remaining afloat. Otherwise why risk it? The unions don’t
need to threaten strike; that is what unions do, they strike. It is implied. Furthermore, a strike is typically bad for press; it can send the company’s stock price plummeting and even perk the ears of other businesses to buy the company out.
All I really see from the above “sound bite” is that unions and business agree with how labor should be paid 99% of the time. This seems to tell me that unions aren’t necessary 99% of the time.
Public schools, already woefully underfunded, would be a joke. You can't just cut back these things.
Again, I’m not surprised you didn’t come up with a source. And again, I’m not surprised because what you’re saying is wrong. From
John Stossel’s 20/20 expose:
And while many people say, "We need to spend more money on our schools," there actually isn't a link between spending and student achievement. .
Jay Greene, author of "Education Myths," points out that "If money were the solution, the problem would already be solved … We've doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years, and yet schools aren't better."
He's absolutely right. National graduation rates and achievement scores are flat, while spending on education has increased more than 100 percent since 1971. More money hasn't helped American kids.
The solution to our education problems? Vouchers; not throwing money at it. I suggest everyone read that whole Stossel article, it is extremely informative.
Mismanagement can't occur if you change the rules such that it can't occur, as I've already said.
Lets just wave a management-efficiency wand that will magically make the rules changed to where mismanagement cannot occur! So Marril, what are these rules? What is your solution? How can you make it so Government, without any incentives to manage money correctly, will begin to do so with a simple ambiguous, undefined, nonspecific rules change?
... How many times must I say, "Restructure such that they have incentive" before you acknowledge that I've actually said it?
How, Marril? How can you give government incentive? You can say “give them incentives” all day long, but you have absolutely no plan or even a theory as to how that is possible.
you missed the parts where I talked about government positions offering no special wealth or position, with transparency such that any armchair accountant with a head for math could check to see where the tax dollars are really going, and that the numbers line up.
Here we go, some meat! Government positions not receiving wealth “or position” (whatever that means, what position do they get nowadays aside from their job title?) seems to have little impact on being corrupt. It takes an extensive amount of money to get elected, and therefore typically few people really depend on their position for a living anyways.
The big difference between transparency, which I’m a huge proponent of, and efficiency is in execution. The government could show you what it is spending it’s money on, but it doesn’t mean that it is spending it on anything worthwhile. Government is slow to react. It is convoluted. It has layers of bureaucracy and even when things are transparent still has no incentive to spend wisely. Transparency will help, but it is not enough to stop wasteful spending.
For example, the highly publicized “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska was criticized by the media and bloggers as the perfect example of government waste: a massive and expensive bridge that connected mainland to an island with a population fewer than 80. Did this stop the earmark from passing? Of course not, the politicians got their way and despite the transparency, the bill was passed. How is this possible? Due to tying. A politician knows it is very difficult for one single issue or vote to affect their chances for reelection (except for maybe major issues, like the Iraq War, which has singularly been able to decide elections). Therefore, they can vote to pass pork projects knowing if they appease their constituents the bare minimum they will achieve reelection. Transparency in government is something we need more of, for certain, however it is not wholly a solution to government’s inefficiency problems.
Government is inefficient because it has been made to be. It's as simple as that. Killing it off just because it's been made poorly is not the answer... it's similar to a product in this regard, you simply change it such that it becomes marketable and affordable.
I never said to kill it off, but you can cut the bleeding by removing what isn’t necessary. A tax-funded government is
inherently inefficient.
You continue to dodge the deadweight loss issue of collecting revenue through taxation. Despite this, it is still grossly inefficient because a politician has no incentive to wisely spend the money. Your answer? “Give them incentives.” Seems like a great answer, expect you’re leaving off one little thing: the “how.”
No, I'm not being sarcastic. After that "75% union dues" comment, I'm really quite curious.
Simply passing on a quote from a friend of mine. I gave you the source: a college kid. Not very reliable, I’ll admit, so give me a more reliable source (please not another blog) and I’ll change my mind.
You act like everyone works with the intentions of getting "filthy rich" as it were.
Strawman; I “act like” everyone works with the intentions of maximizing their utility.
Some of your examples made it sound more or less like giving it away... so why not simply do so?
It all comes down to autonomy. Your being in control of your actions; specifically how you spend your money. Many wealthy people give their money away. The first book I read on becoming wealthy, Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” had a specific section on giving back; he felt it was a vital part of attaining wealth. I happen to agree. I volunteer with many organizations in the community that help make my city and its people better off. The point is, it not only provides me with more utility when I choose to do it, but it makes it more effective in that I can give my time and money away to those causes which I personally feel passionately about. I have a right to my property and if I want to give that away it should be my choice of how much, to whom, and when. The fundamental purpose of government is to protect our property and our lives. It is our right to choose where our money is spent. We have a right to autonomy over where our money is given away to, how much, and when.
False. The waiting lists may be longer, but there is little to no difference in the quality of care.
From
Wikipedia, “The lack of the most recent technology is one of the most common causes of Canadians crossing the border to seek treatment in the United States.” Furthermore, “research and development spending in Canada is lower, but Canada still benefits from the research done in the United States.”
The biggest blow is the fact that
a Canadian-style health plan is simply infeasible in the United States due to the sheer costs.
Ah, you mean the tax on welfare that you don't have to pay if the money was earned from a job (as in, earn ten bucks, that's ten bucks off your next welfare check)? I'd say that's incentive to go out and get a job.
If every dollar you earned was one dollar less you could make off of welfare, you would be discouraged from getting any job that paid less, equal to, and likely even slightly greater than what your welfare income is. Furthermore, in many situations a family’s eligibility for many different programs is based on their income level; as their income rises they become more ineligible. With these programs all summed together, it is common that low-income families can have extremely high marginal tax rates, sometimes higher than 100 percent. If one’s marginal tax rate is greater than 100 percent, it means that for every dollar one earns more is actually taxed so heavily and reduces their benefits so greatly, that they have less money than if they had simply not made that dollar. This creates a powerful disincentive for them to earn more, given the very high (and it doesn’t always have to be higher than 100% to be a crippling disincentive) marginal tax rates. Often times these high marginal tax rates become a trap that sets up incentives making it in someone’s best interest to not earn more money.
Laying people off enables negative utility for said laid-off workers.
Not necessarily; they could go on to have a better job that leaves them with higher net utility in the long run. Furthermore, even for those whose utility is lowered, a company running more efficiently and effectively benefits all of society. Capitalism is again the best way to promote the general good.
How many middle-class citizens "mortgage themselves to death" because they'll never earn enough to break out of the middle class?
First of all, what is wrong with being middle class? The middle class far,
far better than anyone in their income percentile since the dawn of recorded history. They live far better than the vast majority of all people in underdeveloped and communist countries. Despite the fact that the middle class have it very good, relatively speaking, capitalism will continue to increase their standards higher and higher. GDP in the past 80 years has grown more than tenfold, while our population did not quite triple. In the past century the living standards for all members of society has increased tremendously as a result. Our average work week is 35 compared to 60 hours. We make on average $37,000 per year, compared to $9000 (adjusted to inflation). You were expected to die at 47 and likely the farthest you’d ever traveled, if you did at all, was to a nearby state. We owe these increases in our standards of living to economic growth. Funding our businesses and giving autonomy to our consumers is what fuels economic growth, not higher taxes and restrictions. There is great room for economic mobility and opportunity to achieve under our system. (source: Macroeconomics: Principles and Applications; Hall, Lieberman)
The carrot of capitalism is real, I won't deny that. However, so few people racing actually manage to get to that carrot that it's a sign that the system is flawed.
What is the carrot? How much is enough? Even the richest of the rich usually still go to work every day. How do you define who it is that reaches the carrot, anyway?
The exact term is "anarcho-capitalism."
Anarcho-capitalists still reject the state. They oppose all government; I do not. Marril loses again…
You are missing the point that a business can force you to cease working for them.
Labor is a tradable commodity. You offer it at specific prices and terms, and businesses either choose to hire you or choose not to. Getting laid off by an employer does not being they’re “forcing you to cease working for them,” it simply means they no longer wish to trade on those terms.
Put another way, you can’t go into a shop and force them to sell you something in it. The exchanges are voluntary. Similarly you cannot go into an employer and force them to hire you. Both parties must agree to the terms.
The difference between your government and my government seems to be that I've taken advantage of the services mine offers. Health care, public schooling, and the like... I've certainly gotten the benefit of those, which I've helped pay for with the taxes I've paid in the past.
Some things I can’t take advantage of. Social security is one of them, and probably the biggest outflow of my cash. The worst part of it is, because it is quickly going terribly bankrupt due to being a Ponzi scheme, I will never see the fruits of the taxes I have paid through my years.
America's economy must be on the verge of collapse if 62% of its industrial companies are facing insolvency and bankruptcy!
It is not 62% of industrial companies, but rather 62% of them that have a union who are making votes. I’d imagine that, given the hard times our unionized industrial companies are facing, that whenever a union is facing a vote and they threaten to move or shut down operations, they are facing insolvency. Lucky for us, most companies are nonunion and 99% of those that are renew their contracts without union threats.
In other words, private industry simply does not wish to spend unless such spending would in some way get them more money. The government, under no such restriction and which is indeed a restriction it cannot impose upon itself, of course spends it less "wisely" than private industry... but then again, government spending is more likely to beneficially affect society as a whole than private enterprise spending the same amount of money.
Not true; government spends on what it
thinks is going to help society and pays no repercussions if it does not. Business
must produce something that benefits society; if what they produce does not benefit society, nobody will buy it! Government can produce whatever it wants-- something that helps us something that doesn’t, whatever. Even if what they produce helps society, they are bound by no costs to producing it efficiently. They spend so poorly to the point where even when they
do manage to help society it could be done so much more effectively that often times it isn’t worth it.
If our budget is closer to being balanced than yours, I'd say our government is more wise with its money. This serves as proof that government is not necessarily as evil and inefficient as you seem to blanket it as.
Canada has a higher debt-to-GDP ratio than the United States, even with our massive and costly social programs that we cannot pay for. Get rid of those and we’re in great shape!
Good for a short while, sure, but in the long run, I seriously don't think your economy will survive. Part of managing your money well is knowing how to think ten, twenty, fifty, even a hundred years down the road.
Capitalism? Oh, you mean that thing that drove us to unprecedented levels of standards of living since the feudal system was removed and people were given ownership over their own property. Property rights were denied in feudalism; why do you think they called them the “Dark Ages?”
1) [Not allowing American citizens to own foreign companies] would do it.
This would be possibly one of the single most damaging things a government could possibly do. What happens if the government makes it so we cannot invest in overseas markets? Well for one the ADR market just ends with millions bankrupt. Likely other foreign governments pass blockades on buying US companies; “why invest in the US when they’re not going to invest in our country?” Partnerships between companies from different countries would have to be broken apart. Trillions and trillions of dollars would flow out of our economy.
You truly have no clue of the ramifications of your suggestions.
2) And when the laws crack down on people who circumvent the law, I'm certain fewer people would do it. Tax evasion being punishable by a minimum of X years in prison would certainly lesson the number doing it, as long as evaders couldn't simply drown out the court system with needless appeals (though a holistic concept, it is an argument for another thread).
It isn’t “tax evasion” with what most people do. It is simply doing transactions in such a way that you have to pay the minimum or no taxes on it. It makes it so you’re legally doing things to avoid doing transactions that would be taxed or taxed more heavily. It is not evading a tax that you should be paying. Accountants and lawyers get paid a lot of money to find shelters for taxes. Just think about how much of that money could be pour back into businesses and the economy if we didn’t have to pay for those services.
Only those with offshore accounts, which millions of Americans do not have. "All" Americans are not the same as a large number of rich Americans. You would do well to learn this difference.
Again, as I explained above, you’re woefully ignorant of the consequences of not allowing Americans to invest abroad. The damage would be so crippling that we would see a depression like none other.
Keep your story straight, Moss! First you say that government mismanages and loses money, and then you say it's a bad thing for the government to be interested in keeping its own money!
Government mismanages money, therefore it is bad when government gets it’s hands on a lot of it. What is hard to understand about that?
All I meant was that a government that doesn't care about social problems will never fix them, just as a private enterprise that doesn't care about social problems will never fix them, just as anyone that doesn't care about something will (barring outside influence) never do it.
Adam Smith famously coined the metaphor of the “invisible hand” to describe “how those who seek wealth, by following their individual self-interest, inadvertently stimulate the economy and assist the poor.” The point is that you don’t have to be
trying to fix social problems just as long as your actions
are fixing social problems. People acting in their own self-interests will promote the greater good.
How does a "market" help drug addicts, help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, help keep government programs running, etc?
By creating the thousands upon thousands of nonprofit organizations whose goal is to help these causes (besides the last one).
Actually, I'd say they're corrupt because they're more willing to hire someone in a third-world country for five cents an hour than an American for five dollars an hour, if the former was a viable option. At that point, you've stopped caring about resources or utility, but merely only care about accumulating more money.
What of the person who now can escape the poverty of small-scale agriculture and actually earn a wage to increase their standard of living? Why shouldn’t those people in 3rd-world countries have the opportunity to be employed for perhaps the first time in their lives?
Call centres in India do not provide any increase in the standard of living to Americans laid off for the "good" of the company. Overseas farmers being paid pennies an hour for coffee beans do not provide an increase in the standard of living of unionized domestic growers. Workers slaving away in locked factories in China do not raise the standard of living for Americans who have fewer job options because of this.
You’re looking at only one side of the equation. It isn’t simply about the fact that if jobs are sent to other countries that people in our country cannot have them. Keep in mind that Americans are also consumers. We can now afford to buy products that we may not have before due to the decreased costs of production. Wal-Mart provides customers with prices lower than anywhere else, effectively increasing the minimum wage in allowing people to buy more with the money they do have. You can find a large number of goods at Wal-Mart cheaper than anywhere else. Being able to purchase them at these low prices helps society as a whole.
That is just one example. Anytime a company lowers its prices or expands to new markets where it now offers a more competitive product society benefits. They are able to get more from their limited resource of money. This makes their lives better.
If you do not mean that every single one of these people benefits, then take the second or two (at most!) out of your day to type another few words, such as "the majority" or "a sizeable portion" or "the upper class" or whatever you see fit. Qualifiers like "all" and "always" should be reserved for when they truly apply.
Point taken.
Allowing the government to act without fiscal repercussions regarding policy law of the market, for one.
Not good enough. The majority of politicians, especially at the national level, are financially independent. They don’t need the paycheck they receive for their services nor specific donations from lobbyists to get by. Even the ones that aren’t financially independent very often vote based on their personal opinions rather than those of lobbyists. I will admit that many politicians are having their vote “bought,” however this happens less often than you think and typically is hidden ways. For example, a politician is rarely, if ever, moved to change his vote because of repercussions financially. What they may do more often, however, is add earmarks and kickbacks on bills to those who have given them funds. If you want to ban earmarks, I’m totally in favor of that! Typically it is the liberals who are more in favor of earmarks than the conservatives (although you can find
plenty of examples of Republicans spending wildly, being Republican doesn’t mean you’re necessarily acting conservatively).
Allowing for greater penalties for conflict of interest in business (minimum of removal from office if you are caught at this)
What do you mean by this? Try and be specific.
restructure such that money becomes a nonissue for the actual electoral and campaigning process
A double-edged sword. On the one hand, without money for TV ads, signage, direct mailings, etc, constituents will likely be less informed. However, there will also be less disinformation and shady dealings. Would you be allowed to spend your own money on elections? If so, I see this making politics even
more skewed toward being only the rich that can compete, without party funding for underfunded candidates. Also, would I be able to independently run an ad supporting a candidate (or what about just an issue?) as long as the money is raised and spent by myself (or a PAC that I run) and not by the candidate? There are lots of questions and clarifications necessary. It is an interesting proposal; however I still don’t see someone who gets elected without any funding being any better necessarily at efficiently spending taxpayer’s money than someone who is well-funded. Just because you’re elected without the help of various PACs and other funding methods does not mean that once you get into office you’ll even be able to spend the taxpayer’s money wisely, let alone actually doing it.
I seriously, seriously want to toy around with semantics here
That is what you do best!
But I'm rambling off topic
Correction,
that’s what you do best.
It seems counterintuitive to think that intentionally harming the planet is good for "all" (there's that word again!) of society.
Driving an ambulance hurts the planet. It produces greenhouse gasses. Would we be better off without ambulances? What about plastics? They cause much pollution to produce, however they keep things safe from contamination and prevent illness on a massive scale. Nearly all food and medical equipment is packaged in plastics. Food can keep longer and thus we are able to feed significantly more people than otherwise. Antiseptics take pollution to make, and they prevent infection on a massive scale. The production of most drugs takes extensive pollution to create, yet these drugs save millions of lives.
The point? Many things that make our lives
significantly better cause pollution to produce. Would society be better off without these things? Pollution is a cost to society, however there are many cases when that cost is less than the cost of not having the good we are producing.
Or at the very least, disincentives for corruption.
Corruption is not the only reason why government money is spent inefficiently and ineffectively. It is a problem, however it is not even the tip of the iceberg. Massive pools of money in government are spent on programs which simply cannot work. Social security is one of them. It is a Ponzi scheme and cannot remain solvent for much longer; it will fail. This is not due to the government being corrupt, but simply inept at effectively creating programs that actually work.
But then again, scaling back the government to install an anarcho-capitalistic system would be a very large paradigm shift in itself, so we are indeed on equal footing.
Anarcho-capitalists do not believe in the state. My proposition would be to scale back the government to the size it was when the government was founded.
Chris brought up an interesting point in a conversation we were having a few days ago about your logic, Marril. Since he hasn’t responded, I figure I’ll post it.
What we can’t figure out is how you feel that people are entitled to their jobs, but not entitled to the money they make from those jobs. That people should receive all these unearned benefits from their employers through unions and whatnot, but once they earn them it is alright for the government to take them away at fantastic rates. How is this not a double standard?
How are you supposed to put a number on something that essentially has an infinitely negative effect? That's like having the punishment for murder be some sort of high fine.
Does permanently polluting a small pond or cutting down a small forest have an infinitely negative cost to society? Of course not! You’re misunderstanding the difference between the “cost to society” and the “cost to repair.” Society does not suffer infinitely when a small piece of the ecosystem is destroyed.
Oh, I guess you already forgot all that stuff about terrible working conditions, low wages, long hours, and child labor.
You’re listing a bunch of negative things, however I fail to see what point you’re trying to make. You’re simply saying that I’m “not addressing” them. What is the point you’re trying to make?
I'm only here to point out how capitalism isn't as great as you apparently think it is, and you've only now decided to point out how it's all been off-topic.
Child labor is not a component of capitalism, but rather a component of society’s standards. Child labor has existed for years, especially in agriculture. It has since gone out of favor in today’s society. Our economy has shifted from production to services. A child simply cannot do the work. Furthermore, even if they could, standards and ethics for society have shifted this to being a taboo thing. Look at the boycotts that happen whenever a company is exposed for violating human rights. Kathy Lee’s clothing line went bankrupt. People don’t settle for human rights violations on any terms, either; take the boycotts of South African products during apartheid. These “human rights violations” are more a function of society’s standards than any written-in-stone standards. 100-150 years ago what would seem appropriate then is not appropriate today. It isn’t because of capitalism or the lack of, but because of social standards in society.
Well, how are monopolies market failures? In a sense, they're the pinnacle of business success: your product is so good that the competition is phased out of existance.
It isn’t always because your product is so good. It can be because of a natural monopoly; where the more you produce the cheaper it becomes to produce more. This creates barriers to entry. Also some large corporations are able to specifically price their product so low that they actually lose money on operations, but continue to do it because they know they’re so big they can take the loss and that it will drive competition out of business with their super-low prices, which, after destroying competition, they can raise back up to profitable levels. Furthermore, capitalism works because of competition. As I stated with how taxes create deadweight loss, so do monopolies. Competition creates a situation with no deadweight loss of surplus. It is not a premise of capitalism for a business to become a monopoly. Monopolies don’t help society the way that competitive industries do, thus when one occurs governments can correct that market failure by breaking up the monopoly.
In fact, let's say that it is indeed work, a job or career opportunity. Do the poor have it? No. Do the rich have it? Yes. Have the rich somehow "earned" this position? No, not necessarily. So is that fair? Obviously not.
What position? The position to manage other people’s money or the position to invest your own money? Remember, even putting money into a bank’s savings account is an investment.
Lost season 2 4 lyf!
6 DISCS! WHAT!?
Just finished “Live Together, Die Alone” and
man I can’t wait for Season Three! God that island is just FULL of secrets! What happened in the hatch after they didn’t press the button?! What will happen with Jack, Sawyer, and Kate? Will Michael and Walt really get off the island? What is the back story on “the others?” Man I can’t WAIT!
The union was barely mentioned, really. It's a whole long article, as well... perhaps you're exaggerating it? I did see the words, "in my opinion" written in your post, after all.
- The carmaker is saddled with a $1,600-per-vehicle handicap in so-called legacy costs, mostly retiree health and pension benefits.
- Normally a company in such straits contracts until it reaches equilibrium. But for GM, shrinkage is not much of an option. Because of its union agreements, the auto maker can't close plants or lay off workers without paying a stiff penalty, no matter how far its sales or profits fall. It must run plants at 80% capacity, minimum, whether they make money or not. Even if it halts its assembly lines, GM must pay laid-off workers and foot their extraordinarily generous health-care and pension costs. Unless GM scores major givebacks from the union, those costs are fixed, at least until the next round of contract talks in two years. The plan has been to run out the clock until actuarial tables tilt in GM's favor (a nice way of saying that older retirees eventually will die off). But with decreasing sales and a smaller slice of the market, that plan backfires -- leaving GM open to an array of highly unattractive possibilities.
- How bad could it get? BusinessWeek's analysis is that within five years GM must become a much smaller company, with fewer brands, fewer models, and reduced legacy [aka union] costs.
- He is going to have to force a radical restructuring on his workers and the rest of the entrenched GM system, or have it forced on him by outsiders or a bankruptcy court. The only question is whether that reckoning comes in the next year, if models developed by Vice-Chairman Robert A. Lutz fall flat; in 2007, when the union contract comes up for negotiation; or perhaps in five years, when GM may have burned through its substantial cash cushion.
- At some point the laws of physics take over and, like steelmakers and airlines, GM is at the mercy of global forces. It simply cannot compete in a global economy with the enormous burden it now carries in legacy costs.
The entire article clearly states how GM is losing money and needs to cut back, but cannot because of the union-contracted costs of doing so. The union is preventing GM from turning itself around, and now GM is in danger of having its bonds be rated junk status (they are currently BBB with a “negative outlook”). The article is quite clear about the enormous burden the union’s “legacy costs” and other restrictions are putting on GM’s ability to be solvent. If you watch CNBC or any other business news outlet, it is widely reported that GM cannot remain at the status quo much longer unless it does something about the union burden.
And as that figure cites the debt as a percentage of the nation's GDP, it's quite misleading indeed.
How is that misleading? Is a $200 billion debt for the island a Fiji the same significance as that same debt for China? Of course not! Putting debt in terms of a country’s GDP is a way of fairly measuring the impact of that debt on the country’s ability to pay it. This is
not misleading. If Exxon Mobil made $1 million in sales this year, it would be a catastrophe. Investors would be pulling out left and right. If the grocery store down the street from me made $1 million in sales this year, there would be more investors wanting to get in on it that the owners would know what to do with. Debt, like any other financial figure, is all relative; specifically to size and ability to pay. Both are represented in the GDP numbers. The information I presented to you is a representation of the relative debt impact each country has. The only thing about it misleading is your attempts to discredit.
Left wing governments are very good at leading the people.
Leading them right off a cliff!
Right wing governments, due to their more inherently capitalistic nature, are far worse with money.
Makes sense; whenever I think of “capitalism” the first thing that comes to mind is “far worse with money.” Great logic!
Will nobody explain how the cost in lack of surplus due to deadweight loss from taxing can be corrected in any way other than taxing less?
