Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

There's some handwringing that the ACA will cost the US jobs, not due to cuts, but because some people will no longer take jobs just for the sake of insurance. But if those same people do not feel compelled to work, I doubt it's because they're freeloaders. They've just found a way to make things work, or found that it's better or more financially/emotionally rewarding to stay at home with the kids while a spouse works, or whatever.

they don't want to be indentured anymore. good for them. let people retire and others cut back on their hours, so people who are out of work can take those jobs

i feel like i have seen dandydonweiner post intelligently about economics in the past? am i wrong?

But if more people are on government assistance, and that pace is escalating, I don't see how that can be a good thing.

in the img you posted only one of the program is increasing at an accelerating rate, food stamp recipients. welfare recipients looks like its decelerating, and disabilities looks like it's been increasing at constant rate for at least a decade

Not sure if prosperity can be shared "equally" but certainly the widely recognized problem of chronic unemployment is something that economists have studied a lot recently.

unemployment is only one part of this. income inequality since the 70's has mostly been driven by wage inequality

It's a pretty complicated problem with a lot of variables.

saying this but not explaining how it's complicated is a dick move

Maybe he doesn't have time to explain in detail how it's complicated, or maybe he doesn't know.

But let's see: we have less union membership which previously allowed some folks to make a living; we have a lower capital gains tax rate and low effective corporate income tax rate that benefits the upper classes; we have more manufacturing jobs that have shifted overseas, hence more unemployed people living on food stamps

an abiding question for mature adult americans -- what's worse: idiot apologists or asshole apologists for supply-side economics? it's hard to say!

just saying that

"It's complicated ;-)" - An Economist

is a big part of what got us into this problem. it's true that things are complicated but when u consider that "unemployment during recessions is voluntary" has been considered a legitimate opinion among macroeconomists for the past 20 years i don't think we should let economists' claim to authority on complex things with lots of variables shut down discussions

Silver lining of the chronically unemployed is the unemployment rate is 6.6% now!

less drain on resources too!

It's a pretty complicated problem with a lot of variables.

saying this but not explaining how it's complicated is a dick move

A dick move? If so, it was unintentional. Curmudgeon was right--the global economy is a massive ecosystem and the people who study it (economists, both academic and otherwise) regard it as very complex. I'm not dodging the issue to note that it's complex, I'm noting it because its complexity is what makes it a hard problem to solve,

i apologize if it wasn't intentional but this does look to me like waving away tracer's point & i don't see what the point of invoking complexity is if you're not gonna, like, say anything except as a silencing manoeuvre

if that's true, then it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that the fruits of our ever-increasing prosperity since the 1970s have not been shared equally. if each year a bigger proportion of americans have to rely on government assistance, it just proves that productivity gains are being gobbled up by a lucky few. it's not as though the means-testing for food stamp and welfare benefits have gotten more generous in that time.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, February 6, 2014 8:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not sure if prosperity can be shared "equally" but certainly the widely recognized problem of chronic unemployment is something that economists have studied a lot recently. It's a pretty complicated problem with a lot of variables.

― Pale Smiley Face (dandydonweiner), Thursday, February 6, 2014 9:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Heard an economist on the radio the other week defend the US tax code as essentially equitable, stressing that where this country falls very far short of its western peers is when it comes to actual distribution of tax income. I suppose that's basically along the lines of ... giving gratuitous incentives to huge companies with little clear return on the investment vs. spending more on the unemployed/uneducated/great unwashed? I mean, I know someone who just recently spent some time in Spain, which of course has unemployment numbers a magnitude higher than those here. And yet traveling around, you never see as much abject poverty and economic distress as you do here, even in the best of times.

To hear the conservatives tell it, abject poverty and economic distress are what made this country the Greatest Nation on Earth.

Well, how could we have risen to such great heights if we didn't spend all that time in the gutter?

Abject poverty and economic distress are what incentivized (if I may be so bold as to employ that bit of neologic meconium) all those child laborers, sweatshop pieceworkers and ill-clad ditch diggers to haul themselves up by their bootstraps, because they were made of sterner stuff than today's mollycoddled pantywaist disability queens.

If you don't believe this, you could go ask them. They'd tell you exactly how physical exhaustion and malnutrition helped power them and their children into a better world of Model Ts for All! That is, if they weren't all dead.

i don't see what the point of invoking complexity is if you're not gonna, like, say anything except as a silencing manoeuvre

You are free to dispute that chronic unemployment is not a complex problem.

Was not waving away that point at all, other than I do not see how, realistically, prosperity can be shared "equally". I summarily waved that point away, but not for philosophical reasons.

But since you bring that up, given our global economy, it would be quite complicated to share prosperity equally.

tax the rich

prblem solved pale smiley face

I do not see how, realistically, prosperity can be shared "equally".

This is something of a straw man, because the solution to this problem does not require an equal distribution of wealth, but simply a distribution that more nearly approaches equality, and that is not especially difficult or complex to initiate.

sure, we should employ and enforce systems that influence or even codify equality. But that's not what was posted.

and I would argue that it is complex to initiate globally.

nah, you just put on the ground, give the richest guy a very sharp knife, and tell him 'ok dude, cut this into 6.5 billion pieces. you choose your piece last." that's how we did in my house.

more of that, less of me Hunt3r

then rich guy stabs 6.5 billion people and keeps all the money.

Rich guy pays someone to stab everyone for him. He's got stuff to do.

confessions of an economic hitman

it is complex to initiate globally

Certainly, because there are no global institutions in place with the power to create or effectively enforce the laws that would be required. That would require a global institution with the power to impose taxes and control currency.

But who was it that was arguing that global economic equality was the only acceptable alternative to the present situation? I must have overlooked that post. I'll go back and check.

don if it makes you feel better we could use the phrase "even remotely fairly"?

http://www.cepr.net/images/btp-2013-07-17.png

i don't see what the point of invoking complexity is if you're not gonna, like, say anything except as a silencing manoeuvre

You are free to dispute that chronic unemployment is not a complex problem.

i mean in a way it's not, in that there is a pretty simple solution: employing people directly or incentivizing firms to hire people. it's worked in the past. the reasons for that not being politically feasible right now are perhaps complex, but i don't think it's particularly complex as a purely economic problem. you can use pissarides-style equilibrium unemployment searching & matching models to explain it with firms cutting on searching costs. what is it that you find so complex about it?

Was not waving away that point at all, other than I do not see how, realistically, prosperity can be shared "equally". I summarily waved that point away, but not for philosophical reasons.

But since you bring that up, given our global economy, it would be quite complicated to share prosperity equally.

internationally, sure that would be very complex. but nationally again i don't see what the big deal is? i mean there are arguments that re-distribution would "shrink the cake" so depending to what degree you believe those theories (i don't for the most part) you may think it less worthwhile to have a more equal distribution. but given that median income has been decreasing for 30 years and all nearly wealth gains have been absorbed by the top of the distribution there's not really any purely economic argument against it.

best thing for us to do would be to lower taxes on the rich and slash the social safety net. big government=evil. big business=good

Best thing would be track down the 85 richest people in the world and rob them of their wealth, doubling the worth of the bottom 50 percent of the planet.

In 2012, the top hedge fund manager in the U.S., David Tepper of Appaloosa Management, took home $2.6 billion in compensation. That's $50 million a week, or $824 every second of the year.

http://www.currentargus.com/carlsbad-news/ci_25084131/carlsbad-current-argus

I bet he's a hard-working job creator. Or maybe not.

i bet he works 50 times harder than the poor schlubs pulling only $1m / week. time to cut his taxes, to encourage him some more?

$24t up in smoke, after how many trillions for iraq? who won the war of 911, n. ron-ben ghazi? tax cuts!

Hey do you expect oil companies to provide their own security?

let atlas shrug away the enemies of the oil companies

been looking for an answer to this question: what is the engine that will drive the u.s. economy for the forseeable future? in the (now distant) past, the us had thriving steel-mills, a manufacturing base, etc., all of which made things the world needed, and provided solid, long-term jobs for many u.s. male high-school graduates. i imagine that part of the idea behind globalization was that lower-skill jobs in these and other industries would move to cheap-labor markets, while higher-skill jobs in these and other industries would flourish in the u.s. but many forces, including the u.s.'s failure to make the kind of massive investment in public education needed to create that type of high-skill workforce, has kept the idea from becoming a reality. so what's the next industry that will, or even can, make the u.s. economy roar again? i'm sure there are a dozen assumptions or inferential links that are debatable, and i'm happy to be disabused of any mistaken-beliefs.

i watched a depressing episode of up, where this question was put to a policy-advisor to mitt romney. his answer was something inconsequential and "local services," which sounded like a terrible answer when he delivered it.

local services to mitt romney, I think I meant

*he* meant, I mean, of course, no breach of anonyMITTy here, no sir

haha. it was such a bad answer. it basically sounded like, "there will be a financial-service sector, populated by the elite class," and everyone else will be paid to give each other haircuts and cut each other's lawns.

we still cultivate distracting content farms like nobody's business

Now you might think that business—having benefited from years of tax cuts that got us in this fix in the first place—might have agreed to shoulder most of the cost of the fix. But business said, "No, that would hurt the economy." Business has all the high-priced lobbyists and bankrolls most of the legislators’ campaigns.

The unemployed have virtually no voice in the legislature. So they get stuck with the tab.

http://www.dukechronicle.com/articles/2014/02/07/unemployed-stuck-tab

america, fuck yeah

Since my brain defaults to "blame Reagan" part of me feels like giving all those cuts to taxes etc has meant that we really can't put that cat back in the bag.

i'm the same way but more of me says fuck the rich, let's restore taxes to eisenhower rates

daniel i've been meaning to read this for some time:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fantasy-Island-Larry-Elliott/dp/1845296052

which talks about that question as it relates to britain, which has its own post-industrial legacy to deal with

Tech and financial services

fantasy island looks good. the author's clearly been writing, for some time, about the type of question i mention above:

Going South: Why Britain will have a Third World Economy by 2014 by Larry Elliott Paperback £10.34
The Gods That Failed: How the Financial Elite Have Gambled Away Our Futures by Larry Elliott Paperback £8.99

i'm going to start with fantasy island, but those other books look intriguing, too.