[quote]countingbeans wrote:
[quote]theuofh wrote:
If prosperous today is taking on 4+ dollars of debt for every dollar of economic growth, while still not creating jobs you may be onto something. [/quote]
Who is doing this?
Last I checked most large (and small businesses) are in the process of cleaning their balance sheets and hording large amounts of cash, for various reasons.
If you are talking about the government, well nothing new there, hence why the fed is trying to inflate the debt away, at the expense of the taxpayer ultimately.
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I meant the Fed.
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We are on the same page here, however it doesn’t matter if Key’s was right or not, he won the war, and the general population has grown comfortable with a government that services them to this degree. So… Right or not, it is going to continue.
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At least we are on the same page here.
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Also, you may be confusing technological development with prosperity and in dash GPS and IPADs don’t equal prosperity.[/quote]
Of course it does, lol. In 1993 you needed a laptop, a video camera, camera, watch, Zack Morris cell phone, Walkman, tapes or CD’s, and a removal storage disk the size of a small car to get the same value you do from an iPhone.
Technological advances are prosperity. It is a better distribution of resources. More value for less resources is prosperity. That value or more value for less cost is prosperity.
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The only value an Iphone creates is to the Apple shareholders and I’m not sure we agree on the same definition of value.
A lot of people seem to share your opinion given the bloated IPOs of a lot of the tech companies who haven’t even demonstrated a profitable business model. IMO its a bubble created by a bunch of older people with money to speculate with, who don’t understand computers, technology, or even use the products they are investing in.
I don’t see where all this electronic stuff equates to value, and if you could come up with a metric that equates this technology to productivity hence value in the form of man hours, we could optimize it and make billions of dollars from creating real value. I think any hard data on a mass scale outside of isolated case studies on this subject is lacking, and an argument can be made that technology hurts productivity instead of increasing it.
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Irrelevant really. Not only are the people in these developing countries better off for having these jobs, but it allows people in the developed countries to specialize in other areas. Globalization isn’t going anywhere, and the prospects for it are significantly better than the alternative. Economic windfalls (the earning of resources by a population) are much more attractive to leaders and people than sending a couple hundred thousand boots on the ground to loot for resources.
Standing armies and bloated governments take resources to maintain. For thousands of years those resources were gained by using those armies to “farm” smaller resource rich peoples. With globalization of economic activity we have a new option.
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Now it’s getting interesting.
Considering your “economic windfalls” usually require significant investment of resources, specifically monetary, to “farm” these smaller resource rich peoples. These is usually in the form of predatory lending practices by the established nations to the developing ones leading to the so-called banana republics. A free market isn’t exactly how I would describe how these nations turn out.
Friedman made your same argument years ago in the world is flat, but he was looking at the big players whose resource was a large labor force, willing to do whatever for little or no pay. He might be right, considering there are a bunch of jobs available now that most Americans don’t want, even those out of work.
Outside of dumb manufacturing jobs, which I don’t think exist, think about how many specialized jobs go into creating, programming, and maintaining the assembly lines, software, and everything that goes into building all this technology. Those are high value, high skill jobs that now exist somewhere else and probably aren’t coming back.
I’m still not convinced this is a good thing.
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This is no different than has ever been. Why do you think Social Security Insurance was formed in the first place.
None of your concerns here haven’t been voiced for multiple generations now.
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I’m really not sure why social security was created, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t to take care of people who decided not to save for a rainy day and expected to be taken care of.
If things are as prosperous as you say they are, why do we still even have it?
Considering it’s a liability, which is unfunded just like a lot of government and maybe corporate pensions, and not even tabulated as debt.
I’m hoping you can tell me more about how this works, i.e. what creative accounting is necessary to hide pension costs from current debt figures? I have a hunch this is being done on local, state, and federal levels, but I could use a professionals opinion.
Either way, this will sort itself out in the next 20 years, although I’d like to stop paying into it, if I’m not going to see any return on this investment. For the younger guys, it’s just an extra tax. All the more reason to have these companies pay for their employees, instead of me having to support them.
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Again, FDR & his ilk said the same damn things lol.
“But its different now! I swear!”
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You seem to be caught up in the past and specifically on FDR. This if far out of my Bailiwick, but a lot of things have changed since then. Probably more has stayed the same though.
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Like I pointed out before, it is 6 of 1 half dozen the other.
In any society, free or otherwise, people who lack get propped up by people who don’t. In a freer market this is tolerated because of the prospect of the people being propped up improving their situation. The “laws” of basic economic thought dictate that those people can’t improve their lot without cooperation, which in turn improves someone else. (voluntary exchange and all that…) So on and so forth, multipliers… etc you get the point.
Whether low skilled low wage workers are supported through direct government transfer (welfare) or through government mandated socialization (min wage) the end result (assuming the majority of these people improve their condition eventually) is worth the initial investment in their life by others.
The problem lies if a majority of these people try and make a living out of these jobs for perpetuity…
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I guess I’m not buying your previous argument or maybe I just don’t care if it hurts the poor by raising the cost of their goods more than it hurts me.
Some people are career burger flippers. Minimum wage is not the answer, but I do think there should be some inverse weighting applied to the size of a company and its profitability.
I’d really like to see the analysis, which somebody have pointed out that it was 1.1% increase in the price of goods. This is well under the current rate of inflation, which is partly due to the exhorbitant expenses of today’s government. Private companies would more efficiently implement whatever changes would be necessary, without the added cost of government bureacracy. Tell them to fix it or a pay a tax and they will do it in the cheapest, most efficient way possible.
That or just cut everything. Considering Congress still hasn’t passed a budget, it might be time for this. A judgement of solomon situation to get them to figure out what they really care about.
