G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
What a surprise. A bunch of business owners want to blame the president because the Teabaggers told them he wants to raise their taxes.
Not just Wynn....
- Thread starter Cancel 2016.2
- Start date
Alias
Banned
How does government spending create demand?
Alias
Banned
Obama has never ran a business, has never worked for a business, and doesn't hold a degree in economics. In fact, we don't know anything about his education because he will not show us his college grades.
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Let's say the president believes that a certain nation has WMD. He sends our military to invade and conquer that nation. The military asks Congress for money to buy supplies and recruit soldiers.
That's the demand, which defense contractors rush to satisfy, but in order to do so they must hire people and purchase materials and pay for transportation to move goods and people around during the production process.
Jobs are created.
Minister of Truth
Practically Perfect
Although such actions may stifle much of the rest of the economy, leading to a net loss of jobs and production, sooooo... The question still stands.
You're the dumbass that doesn't know how to read a chart. For the first time since 1986 poor sales was the number one problem facing small businesses. Under your reading of the chart the "some form of government concern" would be the primary problem facing small businesses every year since Reagan.
Vegas is over-developed. Until demand approaches capacity no one is going to do much building.
If there is anticipated pent up demand and undersupply. But that's just not the case in Vegas. There is substantial oversupply. If Wynn really wanted to build but was concerned about Obama he'd be buying up land right now in anticipation of the post-Obama era. But he isn't doing that. Why?
But you fail to recognize that companies are underutilizing their present work force. If demand picks up, there is plenty of capacity with current levels of employment to satisfy that demand in the near term and firms can hire an train new employees to meet an increase in demand:
You don't know how to read a chart.
Maybe I'll just post this over and over and over again:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303661904576452181063763332.html
And the the thing about the above is that it is from the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, not the hack-ridden op-ed page.
Alias
Banned
Your premise is wrong. The previous administration and many of Clinton's own party believed Iraq had WMDs. Try again.
Those jobs do not produce revenue. I'm talking about jobs that produce revenue. Bill Gates is an example. How did government spending create all those jobs that he created?
Bfgrn
New member
It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.
Edmund Burke
I'm sure people like Bernie Marcus, who said about the Employee Free Choice Act: "This is the demise of a civilization. This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it." Then he asked for corporate donations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to prevent America from turning "into France." are whining because for more than a decade they had the GOPC in charge.
A period where K-Street replaced Main Street in Washington; environmental laws were eviscerated, corporate lawyers were allowed to author legislation that would plunder and swindle the American workers and consumers. Corporations could offer dogshit health care coverage (mini-meds), while internalizing their profits and externalizing their costs onto the backs of We, the people.
And WHAT did they give us? ZERO job growth for that decade.
"Harry Truman once said, 'There are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of the other people - the 150 or 160 million - is the responsibility of the president of the United States, and I propose to fulfill it.'"
President John F. Kennedy
Edmund Burke
I'm sure people like Bernie Marcus, who said about the Employee Free Choice Act: "This is the demise of a civilization. This is how a civilization disappears. I am sitting here as an elder statesman and I'm watching this happen and I don't believe it." Then he asked for corporate donations of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to prevent America from turning "into France." are whining because for more than a decade they had the GO
A period where K-Street replaced Main Street in Washington; environmental laws were eviscerated, corporate lawyers were allowed to author legislation that would plunder and swindle the American workers and consumers. Corporations could offer dogshit health care coverage (mini-meds), while internalizing their profits and externalizing their costs onto the backs of We, the people.
And WHAT did they give us? ZERO job growth for that decade.
"Harry Truman once said, 'There are 14 or 15 million Americans who have the resources to have representatives in Washington to protect their interests, and that the interests of the great mass of the other people - the 150 or 160 million - is the responsibility of the president of the United States, and I propose to fulfill it.'"
President John F. Kennedy
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G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Those jobs created no revenue? What incentive did defense contractors and munitions factories have for providing the tools of war? Patriotism?
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Perhaps you should check out Microsoft's profits from supplying the government and get a clue....
http://www.microsoft.com/industry/government/howtobuy/federal/default.aspx
Bfgrn
New member
Where’s the Demand?
Very interesting thinking from The Economist‘s Democracy in America (whoever that is) on the (apparent) lack of demand in our current economy:
…people … may not be interested in buying a new car this year, but … they’re very interested in riding the subway … There is demand out there. It just isn’t for individual consumer goods.
This to reiterate the point that “there’s a $2 trillion backlog of necessary infrastructure repairs in America”. That’s just repairs.
There’s demand for those infrastructure goods. And because they’re public goods that private actors can’t capture the profit from, the private sector won’t provide them.
Recovery: What we want to buy now | The Economist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We’re Spent
THERE is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.
But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.
The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.
The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.
If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.
...
THE notion that the United States needs to begin moving away from its consumer economy — toward more of an investment and production economy, with rising exports, expanding factories and more good-paying service jobs — has become so commonplace that it’s practically a cliché. It’s also true. And the consumer bust shows why. The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.
Sure, house and car sales will eventually surpass their old highs, as the economy slowly recovers and the population continues expanding. But consumer spending will not soon return to the growth rates of the 1980s and ’90s. They depended on income people didn’t have.
The choice, then, is between starting to make the transition to a different economy and enduring years of stop-and-start economic malaise.
The easy thing now might be to proclaim that debt is evil and ask everyone — consumers, the federal government, state governments — to get thrifty. The pithiest version of that strategy comes from Andrew W. Mellon, the Treasury secretary when the Depression began: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon said, according to his boss, President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”
History, however, has a different verdict. If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day.
The prospect of that cycle is one reason an impasse on the debt ceiling, and a government default, could do so much damage. Global investors may be the only major constituency that has been feeling sanguine about the American economy. If Washington unnerves them, and sends interest rates rising, the effect really could be calamitous.
But the debt-ceiling debate doesn’t have to be yet another problem for the economy. The right kind of agreement could help soften the consumer bust and also speed the transition to a different kind of economy.
What might that agreement look like? First, it could reduce deficits in future years, to keep investors confident that Washington too could begin living within its means after years of excess.
Second, a deal could avoid the Mellon-like problem of having government cut back at the same time as consumers. The Federal Reserve, the Obama administration and Congress seemed to learn this lesson in 2009, when they aggressively responded to the crisis, only to turn more passive in 2010 and spend much of the year hoping for the best. It didn’t work out. Today, the most obvious options for stimulus are extensions of jobless benefits and of a temporary cut in the Social Security tax.
But they probably shouldn’t be the only options. The biggest flaw with the past stimulus was that it imagined that the old consumer economy might return. Households received large tax rebates, usually with little incentive to spend the money (the cash-for-clunkers program being the exception that proves the rule). People did spend some of these across-the-board rebates, and kept economic growth and unemployment from being even worse, but also saved a sizable portion.
A more promising approach could instead offer a tax cut to businesses — but only to those expanding their payrolls and, in the process, helping to solve the jobs crisis. Along similar lines, a budget deal could increase funding for medical research and clean energy by even more than President Obama has suggested. These are the kinds of investments that have brought huge returns in the past — think of the Internet, a Defense Department creation — and whose price tags are tiny compared to, say, Medicare or the Bush tax cuts.
Politics, of course, makes many of these ideas unlikely to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately, though, these debt-ceiling talks won’t be the final chance for Washington to help the country recover from the great consumer bust. That’s the thing about consumer busts. They last for a very long time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Republican's solutions...
=
Very interesting thinking from The Economist‘s Democracy in America (whoever that is) on the (apparent) lack of demand in our current economy:
…people … may not be interested in buying a new car this year, but … they’re very interested in riding the subway … There is demand out there. It just isn’t for individual consumer goods.
This to reiterate the point that “there’s a $2 trillion backlog of necessary infrastructure repairs in America”. That’s just repairs.
There’s demand for those infrastructure goods. And because they’re public goods that private actors can’t capture the profit from, the private sector won’t provide them.
Recovery: What we want to buy now | The Economist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We’re Spent
THERE is no shortage of explanations for the economy’s maddening inability to leave behind the Great Recession and start adding large numbers of jobs: The deficit is too big. The stimulus was flawed. China is overtaking us. Businesses are overregulated. Wall Street is underregulated.
But the real culprit — or at least the main one — has been hiding in plain sight. We are living through a tremendous bust. It isn’t simply a housing bust. It’s a fizzling of the great consumer bubble that was decades in the making.
The auto industry is on pace to sell 28 percent fewer new vehicles this year than it did 10 years ago — and 10 years ago was 2001, when the country was in recession. Sales of ovens and stoves are on pace to be at their lowest level since 1992. Home sales over the past year have fallen back to their lowest point since the crisis began. And big-ticket items are hardly the only problem.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently published a jarring report on what it calls discretionary service spending, a category that excludes housing, food and health care and includes restaurant meals, entertainment, education and even insurance. Going back decades, such spending had never fallen more than 3 percent per capita in a recession. In this slump, it is down almost 7 percent, and still has not really begun to recover.
The past week brought more bad news. Retail sales in June were weaker than expected, and consumer confidence fell, causing economists to downgrade their estimates for economic growth yet again. It’s a familiar routine by now. Forecasters in Washington and on Wall Street keep saying the recovery’s problems are temporary — and then they redefine temporary.
If you’re looking for one overarching explanation for the still-terrible job market, it is this great consumer bust. Business executives are only rational to hold back on hiring if they do not know when their customers will fully return. Consumers, for their part, are coping with a sharp loss of wealth and an uncertain future (and many have discovered that they don’t need to buy a new car or stove every few years). Both consumers and executives are easily frightened by the latest economic problem, be it rising gas prices or the debt-ceiling impasse.
...
THE notion that the United States needs to begin moving away from its consumer economy — toward more of an investment and production economy, with rising exports, expanding factories and more good-paying service jobs — has become so commonplace that it’s practically a cliché. It’s also true. And the consumer bust shows why. The old consumer economy is gone, and it’s not coming back.
Sure, house and car sales will eventually surpass their old highs, as the economy slowly recovers and the population continues expanding. But consumer spending will not soon return to the growth rates of the 1980s and ’90s. They depended on income people didn’t have.
The choice, then, is between starting to make the transition to a different economy and enduring years of stop-and-start economic malaise.
The easy thing now might be to proclaim that debt is evil and ask everyone — consumers, the federal government, state governments — to get thrifty. The pithiest version of that strategy comes from Andrew W. Mellon, the Treasury secretary when the Depression began: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon said, according to his boss, President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”
History, however, has a different verdict. If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day.
The prospect of that cycle is one reason an impasse on the debt ceiling, and a government default, could do so much damage. Global investors may be the only major constituency that has been feeling sanguine about the American economy. If Washington unnerves them, and sends interest rates rising, the effect really could be calamitous.
But the debt-ceiling debate doesn’t have to be yet another problem for the economy. The right kind of agreement could help soften the consumer bust and also speed the transition to a different kind of economy.
What might that agreement look like? First, it could reduce deficits in future years, to keep investors confident that Washington too could begin living within its means after years of excess.
Second, a deal could avoid the Mellon-like problem of having government cut back at the same time as consumers. The Federal Reserve, the Obama administration and Congress seemed to learn this lesson in 2009, when they aggressively responded to the crisis, only to turn more passive in 2010 and spend much of the year hoping for the best. It didn’t work out. Today, the most obvious options for stimulus are extensions of jobless benefits and of a temporary cut in the Social Security tax.
But they probably shouldn’t be the only options. The biggest flaw with the past stimulus was that it imagined that the old consumer economy might return. Households received large tax rebates, usually with little incentive to spend the money (the cash-for-clunkers program being the exception that proves the rule). People did spend some of these across-the-board rebates, and kept economic growth and unemployment from being even worse, but also saved a sizable portion.
A more promising approach could instead offer a tax cut to businesses — but only to those expanding their payrolls and, in the process, helping to solve the jobs crisis. Along similar lines, a budget deal could increase funding for medical research and clean energy by even more than President Obama has suggested. These are the kinds of investments that have brought huge returns in the past — think of the Internet, a Defense Department creation — and whose price tags are tiny compared to, say, Medicare or the Bush tax cuts.
Politics, of course, makes many of these ideas unlikely to happen anytime soon. Unfortunately, though, these debt-ceiling talks won’t be the final chance for Washington to help the country recover from the great consumer bust. That’s the thing about consumer busts. They last for a very long time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Republican's solutions...
Alias
Banned
No, they didn't "create" revenue. Government spending is spending money paid by taxpayers. Do you understand that?
I don't think anyone is questioning that there is uncertainty about the direction of the economy and the job market. The question is whether that uncertainty is due to the policies of the government or to economic factors that the President does not control, like aggregate demand in the economy.
According to Republicans, if the economy is performing well, it's the President's fault (Reagan), unless the President it a Democrat (Clinton) then it's due to factors that the President has little influence over. If the economy is doing poorly it is the President's fault (Obama) unless is the President is a Republican (GWB), then it is due to factors that the President has little influence over.
Minister of Truth
Practically Perfect
You don't think Iraq and Afghanistan were, and still are, detrimental to the overall US economy? Also, if you haven't noticed my overall military philosophy, then you should pay attention. I value the Coast Guard (which doesn't deploy at all) and National Guard (of which many units are solely divested into defending our borders) above all, because they provide homeland and civil defense. I really do not believe in the "need" to project military power around the world in order to cower other nations and potential enemies. I think most of our overseas bases should be closed and the troops rotated elsewhere, such as stateside or to foreign bases where we cooperate in joint ventures with the host nation. While I support the Afghanistan mission because it was a necessary war in the first place, our economy and domestic well-being are always going to be sacrificed whether it be WWII and Afghanistan; or Spain, WWI, Korea, Vietnam, etc.
So, yes, we are always sacrificing our overall economy (jobs, productivity, credit, etc.) when we engage in war. Our federal deficits and debt for the last decade would be smaller if not for the War on Terror.
Alias
Banned
While you're at it, take a look at the world-wide revenue from sales.