There was talk about renaming the Krugman thread for this purpose, but that seems to be going nowhere. Besides which, I feel the Krugman thread should be left to discuss Krugman while this thread can be used for more general economic discussion.
Discuss:
- The merits of competing theories.
- The role of the government in managing the economy.
- The causes of and solutions to our current economic woes.
- Comparisons between the economic systems of different countries.
- Theoretical and existing alternatives to our current market system.
edited 17th Dec '12 10:58:52 AM by Topazan
a collection of small trees
These stories need to reach people. They need to know. Perception will color their behavior, so they need to perceive that the system is working if it is.
I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
Problem is there are very powerful people doing their best to make sure it doesn't.
Oh really when?
a collection of small trees
Yup. Why the libertarian ideal of "rational people with full knowledge" will never happen.
I'm up for joining Discord servers! PM me if you know any good ones!
Lost in Space
Well, it could, but it would somehow have to deal with the problem of powerful people controlling knowledge in order to advance their own agendas. Which would, in a completely Libertarian society, be totally okay. Paradox.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The Potato's Choice
The law in the night
The economist is dead on, and they cited most of the reasons why I joined the protests against the Brazilian government's fiscal policy.
edited 4th Sep '15 6:02:13 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
The whole "libertarians will cheat in a libertarian system, making it unviable" is more or less the basis for ordoliberalism, btw. The state sets a fair playing field (and enforces it with a vengeance), everything else operates as per classical liberal dictate.
Who Am I?
From the article linked to by Angelous Nox:
"...Faced with the prospect of public finances slipping out of control, Brazil’s policymakers have stuck their heads in the sand. The 2016 draft budget sent to Congress this week by the president, Dilma Rousseff, builds in a primary deficit for the first time in the post-hyperinflation era (see article). The very legality of a budget with a primary deficit has been questioned: a fiscal-responsibility law passed in 2000 has long been interpreted as banning spending that outstrips receipts. But whatever the legal debate, the budget is calamitous."
That's pretty bold, simply admitting that you plan on spending more than the gov't will take in.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
The law in the night
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
The problem with that spending is the amount of taxes resurrected, created and raised to pay for the increased spending.
All over consumption goods on the already burdened purchasing power of the average person. Our government decided for example to tax computers and electronic goods to increase the tax revenue, as if they weren't expensive already.
Inter arma enim silent leges
Who Am I?
What's the tax rate in Brazil?
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
The law in the night
Around over 40% and increasing, yet it has one of the lowest tax return rates in the world.
Who Am I?
Meaning that almost no one actually pays it? That was the mistake Greece made.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Fuck you, Fascist sympathizers
The problem being that rule of law is the hardest part. Brazil needs a re-think of their entire civil service, it sounds like.
The law in the night
Oh you meant the amount of people who pay taxes. What I meant was that we pay over 40% of our earnings as tax but we don't see a good return. On average the Brazilian worker has to spend 4 months working to pay for his taxes.
Around 15% of the population is eligible to pay the income tax, but most of the tax here isn't just over your income as it is over everything. Considering we pay other forms of tax like house, car and other assets ownership (yes, if you own stuff like cars and houses you must pay a tax to keep them) or things like layered taxes or tax over tax, where over some products and services has 3 or 4 different taxes applied on top of each other. As in if you buy a washing machine the price is composed of a tax over electro domestic products, a tax over said product being an industrial product, a tax over the distribution of the product and another tax over the method of payment.
http://www.impostometro.com.br/
This website measures how much in R$ we pay each year in taxes, it is already over a trillion in an economy that is at 5.5 trillion, virtually 1/5th of the gross income in Brazil is tax.
The deficit is a lot less related to the lack of money being collected but a lot more with the government trying to pay for its own expenses, including the thousands of state employees who are doing anything useful and got there due to nepotism, the amounts of useless public constructions, like two gasoline refineries in the buttfuck nowhere where they aren't needed and some stupid stuff like giving Cuba 3 billion USD to invest in a sea port while our own ports are defunct.
Another problem is that everyone is getting scared with the increased taxes and inflation, so the practice of stocking essential groceries up as soon as you get your paycheck and use whatever is left to pay the bills and debts is returning.
Even the unemployment and low willingness to spend and invest screwed me over twice this year, the first time when the company what was going to hire me had to fire their employees to keep afloat and the second time when people were taking out their children out of private English schools and again shutting the door on my face before I could get in.
edited 4th Sep '15 10:09:57 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges
Lost in Space
Look, running deficits is fine... if doing so leads to increased demand and thus boosts a sagging economy up to the point where it can sustain full employment. It does not help if your basic civil institutions are so screwed up that you can't effectively tax incomes. Taxing consumption is the opposite of what you should be doing, because that acts as a direct drag on demand.
The only way that could conceivably be valid would be if your production capacity were so poor that consumer demand was having a huge inflationary impact. Then you'd want to force as much consumption as possible to be diverted into savings, which would in turn provide investment capital to get your industries working again.
The proper role of government is to reallocate money to where it will best serve the economy. If supply is down, encourage saving and investment. If demand is down, encourage spending. It seems like Brazil's government has decided to adopt an "Eat the Poor" mentality instead, diverting funds to enriching its business cronies.
edited 4th Sep '15 10:16:56 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The law in the night
I know but the deficit we're facing isn't over injecting money on the economy but over the state not being able to sustain itself.
No one is even talking about investing on the logistical infrastructure or continuing the projects, there is no more money left for that.
Our money reserves were all burned up during the election year to mask the impending recession in order to guarantee Dilma her reelection.
The government simply doesn't have money and it is trying to milk the population dry until they collect enough to pay for their blunders.
There are two choices, the current one being followed is to keep taxing everyone to close the deficit and risk destroying the purchasing power of the population even further, which I'd argue it would be way more harmful since it can snowball along the inflation and the double digit unemployment rate or get off the high horse, swallow up the pride and abandon the empty rhetoric and ask for a loan to the IMF or the that Chinese let alternative to the IMF.
I do not miss the irony of that, since our allegedly left wing government, loves to claim how they are helping the poor with their policies but ends up fucking them up harder than everyone else.
Our government did try to tackle both supply and demand sides simultaneously, during the Lula's government there was a huge incentive for the poor to purchase goods using credit and loan programs, while at the same time investing in production and the woefully inadequate logistics of the country. The problem begun to fester due to the insane amounts of corruption and sheer incompetence, all the supply side programs either stalled due to corruption and overcharging or were very meek. When the economy started to cool down, due to a lot of accumulative factors we're now suffering from our own credit bubble burst along the poor people dependent of credit finding themselves out of job or out of money and with a huge debt on their backs.
For comparison, our deficit so far is rated in 31 billion R$, on this year alone at least 85 billion R$ were washed away in corruption schemes and that is the value we found out about.
edited 4th Sep '15 10:37:07 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges
The Potato's Choice
Tesla Model X Pricing Revealed, Consumer Reports and the Tesla P85D:
…Back in 1900 cars were hand-made and cost $1,000, while a horse was only $70. It hardly followed that cars were doomed, or that those building them ought to have f—ed themselves. Moreover, this $132,000 crossover, and the other high-priced Tesla’s that have come before it, are absolutely necessary for the Model 3, and for multiple reasons: –From a technical perspective, every model to date has moved Tesla down the learning curve from the perspective of actually making cars, making batteries, and making software. The importance of this process–and the exponential gains that result–cannot be overstated. –From a financial perspective, the high-priced models sold to-date have helped in two ways: most obviously unit profits can go straight into R&D for future models, but also impressive sales, enthusiastic customers, and rapturous reviews support Tesla’s stock, further issuances of which have been used to pay for launching first the Model S and now the Model X. –Relatedly, and most importantly, from a product perspective, by not prioritizing low prices Tesla has been able to focus on selling a superior experience. This is a big reason why recent low oil prices haven’t put a damper on Tesla’s sales: Tesla’s customers aren’t buying electric vehicles to save on gas! Musk explained this himself in 2006 in a blog post called The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)…
The Fed Should Remember the 90s
Headline unemployment, at 5.1 percent, is now quite low by historical standards, and the baying for a rate increase is louder than ever. But inflation is subdued, indeed below target, and wages are still going nowhere. Should the Fed be raising rates in the name of “normalization”?
Well, consider the situation in 1997, when the unemployment rate dropped through 5 percent. The Fed did raise rates a quarter point, but then stopped, waiting for inflation to become a problem — which it never did, even though unemployment continued to fall, eventually to 4 percent.
The lesson is that the Fed really doesn’t know what level of U3 constitutes full employment, and should be very cautious about acting preemptively absent any signs of inflation problems.
Why is this time different? Many people seem to think that the case for raising rates is made stronger by the fact that we’re currently at zero, which seems weird and unnatural. But if you actually think through the logic, it’s the other way around. When the Fed funds rate was 5 percent, there was room to cut if a rate hike turned out to be premature — that is, the risks of moving too soon and moving too late were more or less symmetrical. Now they aren’t: if the Fed moves too late, it can always raise rates more, but if it moves too soon, it can push us into a trap that’s hard to escape.
Hiking rates now is still a really bad idea — and the arguments for that bad idea just keep getting worse.
(Noah Smith @ Bloomberg) China May Never Get Rich
Basically, China's been playing catch up to the rest of the world, nothing more, nothing less.
Preliminary Initial Notes on the Economics of Star Trek
• Today, here in the United States, we are down to 3% of the labour force who are growing our food…
• Going from 75% to 3% means as far as basic calories and nutrients are concerned we have gone 95% of the way to the Replicator as far as basic calories plus essential nutrients are concerned…
• Agriculture has been the occupation of most of the human race since the invention of, well, agriculture…
• Roman legions conquered much of Europe and some of Asia on basically a big loaf of barley bread a day, plus some salt and garlic–plus whatever squirrels they could catch, and whatever greens they could gather where the legions were marching…
• They were happy to have this diet as long as they had sufficient salt attached to it…
• That 2,500 calories plus essential nutrients plus enough protein was the destiny for most of human history…
• That average diet of bare calories and nutrient–even with 75 to 80% of your labour force devoted to producing it, produced adult males whose average height was maybe 5’2″ or 5’3″…
• Such a diet! If you were to try to give it to your children today Alameda County Child Protective Services would come and take your children away and you would never see them again… On comfort:
• We [lucky enough to be here in the middle-class North Atlantic] have solved scarcity with respect to food, have solved scarcity with respect to clothing…
• Consider that the average Prussian noble family in the 18th Century had one gown suitable for court appearances to be shared among all of the females–and these are people who are nobles, these are people with a “von” in their surname…
• Last time I was in Britain, we went to Oliver Cromwell’s house in Ely–the house he lived in when he was parliamentary representative: the ceilings are seven feet tall…
• When I was 25, my house in Waltham Massachusetts was more comfortable and had many more square feet per person than Oliver Cromwell’s house–plus we had appliances, and we had central heat and air conditioning…
• Nathan Rothschild, the richest man of the world in the 19th Century, died when he was younger than I am of an infected abscess in his back. We don’t die of infected abscesses.”
• People regard Riker as a weirdo because he would rather be second-in-command to Picard than to control his own spaceship. And it’s pretty clear that that quest for honor and authority is a feature of society, rather than errors by screenwriters who haven’t gotten the memo…
edited 5th Sep '15 6:08:17 AM by PotatoesRock
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. - Douglas Adams
Who Am I?
Except that the Star Trek economy is depicted as sustainable, since it's built on exploitation of a resource that is available across the infinite reaches of space. Our economy is build on non-renewable fuel supplies, so not so much.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
The law in the night
Star Trek is a post scarcity society, seriously, the Holodeck can create everything you'd ever want and matter replicators are ubiquitous.
Rikers doesn't want to leave the Enterprise because it is one of the few ships in the Federation exclusively dedicated to exploration, if he ever accepted the proposal to command his own ship he'd probably be assigned to patrol or rear echelon duties.
For him there is a lot more prestige being second in command in a highly recognized ship than being assigned to one that won't see any action.
Inter arma enim silent leges
Jupiterian Local
A procrastination in of itself
With the reference to middle-class I think he was saying that said thing are post-scarcity for the middle-class, not for everyone in North America.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Who Am I?
It isnt "post-scarcity" until they are produced using cheap, clean and renewable resources. Otherwise they are creating more scarcity, not less. The only reason we don't see this is because the non-renewable resources haven't started running out yet.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Karkadinn
Making food is so cheap that we throw vast amounts of it away every single year just to keep the store shelves looking good. There will always be luxury items in any given industry that cost more than they need to, if only because people like their status symbols. If the lack of those is your definition of post-scarcity, no privately produced goods are ever going to achieve it. At least, not under the current, profit-driven paradigms.
When scarcity is lacking, people contrive to MAKE it.
edited 5th Sep '15 4:07:36 PM by Karkadinn
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.
Jupiterian Local
If food were truly post-scarcity, then we could afford to throw away food just because it doesn't look pretty enough. It would be the equivalent of opening a window to let in some fresh air. It literally wouldn't matter, because food would be just that cheap.
We're not to that point. We're no where close to that point.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
We do have numbers. As of March Arkansas alone saved $10 million already.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur