Quotes - Economy

It's a perception bias, with the poor being poorer and the rich being richer, the rags to riches stories also get more extreme. It creates the illusion that everyone can go from the very bottom of the ladder to the very top of the ladder but a few extreme outliers don't mean social mobility for the masses. Also the rich and powerful like to perpetuate this idea because it means that instead of going Robin Hood and taking from the rich and giving to the poor, people want to get rid of taxes for when they themselves become rich. Of course most people don't actually end up rich, but if you can make them believe, you get people working 60+ hour weeks for low pay, little help from the government and they want it that way...

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In U.S., on the other hand, everything runs on pseudo-debt -- government basically undermines its currency by printing it, giving it to the military industry and not expecting anything back that it can sell, so it dilutes currency with no useful effect. That can "bankrupt" the country if currency will be damaged enough for other countries to stop using it.

Oh, and those "money" you "owe" to China. They know you will never pay that back. They humour you while your market is useful for their own economy development. Once your economy will go downhill, your debt will be written of as expense of building Chinese economy. They know it. Russia knows it. EU knows it. Even I know it. You arethe only people delusional enough to believe otherwise.

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The essence of the argument is that if millionaires had more money to spare they would use it to employ people regardless of the ROI for that employment. That if a corporation encounters another 50 grand extra cash it will hire someone with it. Never mind that money spent on starting up a new idea can already be deducted from your taxes and that Reagan dropping the highest tax rate from 70% to 35% didn't lead to any dramatic job creation. There's an argument to be made that certain activities which are currently not viable because they don't generate enough revenue to be worthwhile might cross the border into viability with a lower tax rate, but the number of those activities would be very small and would still have fairly crappy returns and high risk.

It's essentially an argument which ignores supply and demand. So called "job creators" act on the supply side of the equation, they produce goods or services which are consumed by others. As anyone with even basic economic knowledge knows, expanding supply without commensurate demand drives down prices. Now we can presume commensurate demand does not exist because if it did tax rates wouldn't be stopping companies from meeting that demand, so we can also assume that no one is going to increase supply regardless of how much money they might have.

There are a couple relatively obvious ways the federal government can create jobs in the private sector. The simplest is income redistribution, give money to poor people and they spend it increasing demand and creating Jobs(though not necessarily American jobs). In the US we don't like this because it's the wrong kind of socialism. It's perfectly ok to provide a moral hazard by socializing risk and privatizing gain if you're talking about rich people, but doing the same for the poor is unacceptable.

Another involves increasing workers rights by essentially eliminating "at will" employment. This doesn't as such directly increase demand, but it would make it easier for employees to say no to doing the work of multiple people, which would mean that the false efficiencies companies are currently enjoying would disappear. This is partly unpopular for all of the above reasons, but also because while there would be a net job gain, there would probably be job losses in some sectors.

Many other ways exist which would serve the same purpose, but they'd all be rejected in the current American political climate because in the US the wealthy have sold a bill of goods to the population convincing them either that they will one day be rich enough to be affected by the buffet rule and so should vote against it or that, and I honestly have no idea how this works, private enterprise would take care of them much better than the government does, how this meshes with the accusation that the US has become an oligarchy or the entirety of American history I do not understand. Libertarians seem to believe that the US has become a corporate dictatorship so as a solution they want to remove the middle man and go straight to a corporate dictatorship. Mind you, we are talking about the same voting population who 4 years after Wall Street caused the biggest global economic melt down in close to a century through pure greed and stupidity is objecting to the implementation of any kind of regulation of the baking and finance sector. The GFC should have thoroughly discredited neoconservatism since the ideology proved to be wrong in every respect, but 4 years later we're still having the same arguments.