Tell me...What would YOU do about this economic mess?

That makes sense to me as well.
.

 

http://rytis.6te.net/

- Creation of national public media for political elections. managers of public media will be considered government officials and will be upheld to the same bribery law detailed below.

- A law requering all business oriented media outlets that want to publicize public events to air 5 second ads on radio/television or 2"x2" ads on their web sites/news papers stating "you can alternatively watch this political coverage on a non biased public media outlet such and such"

- Law that prohibits special interest to make any contributions to public officials (politicians) or public officials accepting any gifts.

- Vote to create an organization which shall have the power to try and execute public officials/politicians such as yourself and the 3 closest family members for accepting bribes as well as executing any lobbyists attempting to bribe any public official. the members for this organization shall be selected from the military and can not in any way be related to you.

- Default on Debt/enslavement and print new money without interest to the bankers. Abolish unconstitutional federal reserve.
- Appoint Rytis Abrutis as a supreme international diplomat who's job will be to fix relations with foreign countries. Rytis will only be allowed to serve this role for 1 year and will not be allowed to hold any kind of government position after that.

- Set up of electronic voting system for up to date accountability in all parts of the nation

- Implement negative voting in all elections to offset any propaganda attempts for any candidate. each voter gets one for vote as well as one against vote.

 

1) implement the fair tax at 15% everyone pays and eliminate the IRS.
2) penalize companies that offshore jobs
3) every 3 years do an accounting of the efficacy of monies spent in each department to eliminate any overlap and end departments that achieve little results.
4) reward whistleblowers of fraud and theft for a fee of 10% of monies recovered on cases prosecuted.
5)make handing any money by lobbysists a crime and grounds for immediate dismissal and a huge penalty on the lobby.
6) No more bailouts.
7) end all three wars( those countries will descend into civil war anyway and we wasted our time and the lives of soldiers) and make defense contractors account for every nickle. this is how Harry Truman became popular when he stomped on all the defense cheats during WW2.
any politician that leaves office appreciably RICHER than when he cam in must undergo a thorough accounting and if any graft is found to be jailed and stripped of ALL his income.
9) Fire the entire treasury department as all are tools of big Finance whose cry for no oversight helped create this mess.

In a nutshell our toady elected have spend to the will of their lobbyists. have protected these lobbyists for decades to the loss of trillions of tax dollars and NOW haggle with each opposing lobbyist what YOU must give up, all while continuing to do the bidding of their lobbyists all the while telling you THEY know how to make it better but YOU must make sacrifices. They are NOT part of the solution.

 

Any knucklehead can find some bogus numbers in a search.
But what isn't bogus is the fact Bush had a 52 month reign of increased
growth.Bush's tax cuts reaped record receipts to the Treasury as
did Reagan when he applied tax cuts { added $ 500 More Billion to
the treasury than Carter }.Bush averaged 5.4% Unemployment and that
included the poor Pelosi years as Speaker.
Bush created Millions of jobs,yet Democrats low ball any number
offered.
With Obama we got the opposite.We had the " bogus " Saved Jobs " which
meant Obama took the Stimulus and gave to mostly Democrat Governors
who used to shore up their failing state budgets and keep from firing
state workers who needed firing.Of course it was a short-term fix.
Those " Saved Jobs " couldn't be maintained.
Obama actually gets credit for Losing Jobs on his watch.
How else could unemployment be at 9.2%.And Real Unemployment at 16%.

 

Cut spending and tax the rich more. Give a tax break to business that adds jobs, increases plant expansion or buys new equiment

 

I love the idealism of most posters on this forum.

 

Upon what basis do you assert that the numbers are bogus?

BFD. Clinton had a 96 month reign of increased growth.

BFD. Every president has had "record" receipts.

The record Bush holds is that no other president saw revenues go down in 4 of the 8 years as president. No other president is close to achieving that record.

BFD. Unemployment was 4.2% when he took office. And 7.8% when he left.

False. Only about a million new jobs were created while Bush was president. And all of them were in government.

How? By the fact that when Obama took office, the economy was losing 700,000 jobs a month.

Obama didn't snap his fingers and immediately stop that bleeding overnight. That is the basis for your criticism.

 

It's not idealism. It's revision of fact.

Lowering taxes is the number one conservative priority. Therefore conservatives cannot acknowledge the fact that after Clinton passed a huge tax increase, revenues soared, a record deficit was turned into a budget surplus, 22 million jobs were created, poverty declined to the lowest level on record, real incomes for all income groups increased, stock markets tripled, unemployment fell to the lowest level in decades, and the economy had the longest period of sustained growth since WWII.

Because that would be acknowledging that the tax increase did not kill jobs and tank the economy as conservatives back then claimed it would and conservatives today still claim.

So instead we get things like Foolardi's post, asserting that the numbers, which come straight from the government source, must be "bogus."

Idealism? No. Revision of history.

 

Or even more simple the - One percent Solution -.
Across the board cuts of 1% on all Government expenditures.
That is doable and will not overly impact any one sector or
entitlement.I remember once having to figure out on my
management job the Impact that a one cent increase in the price of a
product would have.I thought it was about THE most silly thing I ever
heard.But,in actuality just one penny Can and Will have an Impact.

 

Of course the Tea Party and Conservatives utilize historical revisionism. This goes without saying. However, idealistic policy manifests from ignorant historical revisionism or historical corruption, a belief in normative economics over positive economics, and a lack of analytical cognition.

Policy should be new, innovative, pragmatic, and realistic, not boring, idealistic, and regressive.

 

How can you give tax breaks to businesses that adds jobs while taxing the rich more? They're both the same people.

 

Why can we still afford a War on Drugs and not unemployment compensation that bears true witness to the concept and legal doctrine of employment at will?

 

There are plenty of good derivatives that hedge risk for those who are actually at risk, like your farmer example or debt holders who want some security in return for lower profits or airlines that hedge their fuel buying.

But, derivatives held by those who are not at risk should be made illegal, it is nothing less than betting that your neighbors house will burn down. No risk to you but the chance to make a profit from other's misery and every incentive to make it happen.

There is a law that restricts commodity trading to only those who produce and use commodities and market makers who are required to buy when no one else will. Goldman Sachs gained permission to trade in the oil futures market because they use oil to heat their buildings. They do not trade for their own oil, they allow others to speculate massively through their account. This type of trader should be stopped as speculators have overwhelmed many commodity markets and destroyed the markets' ability to signal actual supply and demand. Commodity market prices these days are more signals of inflows and outflows of speculative money than anything to do with supply and demand.

 

Full employment of resources in any given market should render the value of products of that market the equivalent to a commodity. The market for labor could be one example by ensuring full employment via market friendly means.

 

As long as gambling in the markets is taxed less than investing that will create jobs that's where all the money will keep going. Cutting taxes on the wealthy will just make it worse, not better.

 

If it doesn't prove anything, then it tells you nothing about low taxes.

If you have an economic theory on how low taxes retard economic recoveries, I would love to hear it, but I'm guessing you have nothing.

 

From my research on derivatives (which is from credible government sources), I have seen a drastic increase in derivatives activities since the Bush Tax Cuts were enacted. The most logical reason why is because tax cuts free up money for investment, but more self-interested investment. With higher tax rates, you prevent a business from investing in all sorts of derivatives and risk-transfer agreements because it forces them to allocate most of their funds towards keeping a company or corporation afloat and successful, without dangering the company or corporation itself, and its investors. When this is combined with a simplified and highly regulated financial system and lending system, like the systems we had before Reagan took office, you have financial stability. However, with tax cuts, the Securitization Food Chain, the 30 year period of deregulation, and the creation of innovative yet unstable derivatives, the financial system has run rampant.

I know Conservatives will respond to this stating that a company has the freedom to do whatever they want with thier money, as long as it is legal. However, I'll respond to this in advance by asking a simple question. This question is how many of you posess a loan or mortgage?

 

The fact that data does not absolutely prove something does not mean it tells you nothing about it.

My post about the correlation between low taxes and lousy recoveries isn't to argue that low taxes hurt the economy, but rebuts the often repeated claim by conservatives that low taxes create greater economic growth. The fact that the three worst recoveries were periods of the lowest tax rates doesn't support that claim.

But since you asked, my theory would be this.

What you need in a recessionary environment, particularly one characterized by fear or panic, is demand for goods and services. Where there is no demand, production slows, people are laid off, that creates more fear, less spending, and less demand. It can become a self-feeding cycle. That was exactly the scenario we were in in 2008, and looking at the way confidence has collapsed since the debt ceiling fiasco, we are in today.

In these situations, Govt intervention can play a positive role by increasing demand, spurring production, and mitigating the fear that feed the destructive cycle of fear. Demand is created by spending more.

So what is the problem with tax cuts in this situation, you may ask? Doesn't that put more money in people's pockets? It can, but that is not the entire answer. Putting money in people's pockets doesn't create demand if they do not spend it and either horde it or pay off their bills. The problem with tax cuts, is that most of the taxes are paid by the wealthier. And it is the wealthier who tend to spend less of their income.

That is a problem we have today. There are trillions of dollars sitting in banks and businesses that are not being utilized because there is insufficient demand for their products and services to induce them to engage in the kind of expansion that generates more jobs.

On top of all this, add a big concern about the deficits and the fact that tax cuts reduce the amount of revenues which increases those deficits, and you have all the more reason for an argument as to why tax cuts are not consistent with strong recoveries.

Thus, based on this theory, it should be no surprise that that the worst recoveries are correlated with the lowest taxes. Low taxes of the type characterized by the worst recoveries (e.g. tax cuts that most benefit the wealthy) would provide the least amount of stimulus effect.

 

And when our tax code taxes speculative investment income at least than half the rate it taxes earned income, should there be any surprise that we have so many focusing on investment banking and hedge funds and speculative investment instead of earning and production?

Or should we be surprised that since investment taxes have been slashed we've had two huge speculative bubbles that caused our economy so much damage?

It is what our tax code encourages. It is time we made our tax code encourage earning and production instead of speculative investment. At least change it so that it does not so heavily favor the latter.

 

I agree Iriemon, we should be preventing speculative bubbles from ruining our economy. As long as investment, or capital gains taxes are at low rates, and taxes in general for billionaires are at low rates, the threat and reality of a speculative bubble will always hold this nation back.

I have some innovative long-term policies on derivatives regulation and derivatives taxation that I am still trying to gather research for so I can send a legitimate proposal to Senator Chcuk Schumer.

 

I issued a challenge, and I have to say you met it, so my congratulations to you! Although I don't buy it, I do find it internally consistent, which is something that even Nobel Prize winning economists sometimes have difficulty with (I am referring to Paul "we need an alien invasion" Krugman of course!)

However you didn't dispel the idea that low taxes created greater economic growth. Certainly the early 80's tax cuts brought a decade of strong economic growth (even considering the interest rates of the time). And what were called the Bush tax cuts gave us a strong economy and low unemployment for years until the recession.

But I wouldn't argue (and I don't know of anyone who would) that low tax rates grant you either immunity from the business cycle or immunity from the type of financial crisis that we suffered. Taxes don't seem to have anything to do with the collapse in the housing market the caused both the recession and the financial crisis.

 

I agree wth your statements and Iriemon's statements. Tax cuts can lead to to an increase in investment and business growth, but only if it is complimented with a willingness from business itself to do the right thing. In at least 50% of the cases, businesses will do the right thing, but that other 50% in which businesses act in self-interest and cause harm to the economic system. Therefore, the issue of taxation is 50 percent economics, and 50 percent morals.

To conclude, there needs to be a certain type of business environment to prevent morals from destroying the economic side of tax policy.

 

Thanks! Maybe I should send my post to Stockholm.

First, I would not state as a matter of proven fact that lower taxes absolutely cannot create better economic growth. First you cannot absolutely prove anything in economics, and second, I would agree there are conditions in which a tax cut can create stronger economic growth. I also think that tax policy, within reasonable bounds and that we've had over the past several decades, has marginal or insignificant effect on economic growth.

Again, my post was to point out that the chart evidence lower growth recoveries with periods of lower taxes -- which is inconsistent with what many conservatives claim about lower taxes.

If you want to look at correlation as evidence of whether tax cuts spur growth, I would argue that the correlation does not support the inference that lower taxes equates to higher economic growth.

Here is average real growth rates for several periods of time (derived from the BEA.gov data):

Average annual real growth in the 50s = 4.15%.
Average annual real growth in the 60s = 4.44%.
Average annual real growth in the 70s = 3.26%.
Average annual real growth in the 80s = 3.07%
Average annual real growth in the 90s = 3.11%
Average annual real growth in the 00s = 1.81%

Average annual real growth during FDR: 9.17%
Average annual real growth during Truman: 1.40%
Average annual real growth during Eisenhower: 2.99%
Average annual real growth during Kennedy: 4.25%
Average annual real growth during Johnson: 5.22%
Average annual real growth during Nixon: 3.55%
Average annual real growth during Ford: 1.53%
Average annual real growth during Carter: 3.26%
Average annual real growth during Reagan: 3.40%
Average annual real growth during Bush1: 2.15%
Average annual real growth during Reagan & Bush1: 3.0%
Average annual real growth during Clinton: 3.87%
Average annual real growth during Bush2: 2.03%

The 50s, 60s and 70s were a period of high taxes -- 91%(!) top rate in the 60s lowered to 70% in the early 60s. The 80s had the Reagan tax cuts, the top marginal rate was slashed to 50% then 28% under Reagan, up to 31% under Bush.. And the 90s had the Clinton tax increase, to almost 40%. The 00s had the Bush tax cuts.

As for Bush, it is true that the recession pulled down his average a bit (we can put aside the question of whether his tax cuts were a cause of the recession, but they certainly didn't prevent it). However, even excluding 2008, economic performance during his tenure was, at best, subpar.

Year - % chng real GDP
2001 1.1%
2002 1.8%
2003 2.5%
2004 3.6%
2005 3.1%
2006 2.7%
2007 2.1%
2008 0.4%

GDP growth exceeded 3.0% only two years, and his best year was bested by six years while Clinton was president.

Everyone can make whatever inferences they want from this data. But to me, the data does not support the proposition that lower taxes, at least as measured by top marginal rates, promotes significantly stronger economic growth.

That would be tough argument to make.