flishtaco wrote:
Gbaji is a voodoo economist and cant seem to own up to it. Trickle down economics to give to the wealthy doesnt work, they keep the money and spend it outside the United States over and over again.
Ah... The "trickle down economics doesn't work" argument. Um... Proof? I think it's inherently obvious that if a business doens't have enough money to hire workers, they wont hire workers. There's no way around that fact.
I'm not arguing an all or nothing approach here (unlike Dzy, who I agree with on about half of what he says and disagree with the other half). I've stated on many occasions that a certain amount of Demand side spending is a good thing. I just personally think we put more there then we should.
I also will always argue against folks who use absolutes (even though I just did it! :) ). Trickle down economics works just like everything else: In moderation. No one process is perfect. The difference is that I recognize that. When I see people arguing that we should increase taxes to the wealth and corporations because: "They just spend it elsewhere anyways", I cringe. Um... Some percentage (a pretty large one in fact) of their money is spent building industry in the US. Reducing their money doesn't change that percentage. It just reduces the amount of industry across the board.
Rather then taxing the hell out of our corporations, we should be providing incentives for them to conduct business inside the country. Interestingly enough, that's exactly what the so called: "Corporate Wellfare" does. Just taxing them doesn't do it at all. If anything, it encourages them even more to move their operations elsewhere, where the taxes wont be so high. Think about the results of what you are arguing for before arguing them.
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If you instead take that same money and food the roots, then those people spend the money in the US and create new markets for bussiness' to capitalize on.
Um... What money? If you keep taxing businesses, they'll just go elsewhere and you lose your tax base. By giving money (food) to the people instead of giving them jobs, you are increasing the number of people not working, which in combination with the flight of businesses to other shores, reduces the amount of taxes you can collect. It doesn't take an economic genius to see that in a relatively short amount of time, you'll have a whole hell of a lot of people standing in line for free food, but no one actually making it.
Sure. To a point, "giving" money to the Demand side helps. But only to a very small amount. Someone has to make the products that people buy. That means industry, and that means jobs. Every penny you tax from business is a dollar less that they can spend making products and hiring labor. You are literally eating your own hand when you tax this area too high.
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(FYI gbaji the request was for an article that proves we are losing in manufacturing, not who was at fault. Did you really even read the f%^king question? and yes Smash is right that is when Bush decided to reclassify people who "manufacture" hamburgers)
Why on earth would I dig up an article proving we're loosing manufacturing jobs? That's your responsiblity. I only pointed out that the one article provided only mentioned one year, and included some conditions that only applied to that one year (huge dockworker strike). You need to show a trend.
Also. Manufacturing is only one part of the equation. As someone pointed out (not sure which thread, but it was in one of the linked articles), we've "lost" millions of farming jobs over the last century. We used to have somewhere around 20% of our entire workforce farming, and now it's somewhere around 1.2%. Um... Is 18.8% of our workforce unemployed? No? Why is that do you think? Maybe because they moved on to doing things more important? Maybe as automation in the farming world decreased the need for farm labor, folks were freed up to do other jobs. Same thing with manufacturing. A change over time of the specific demographics of one type of labor is not the whole picture.
You're just not seeing the whole picture. This topic was not about manufacturing jobs in the US. It is about "what has he (Bush) done?". You posted an article about some problems with trade and jobs from 2002. In the article was mention of what Bush planned to do about it. Oddly, the economic downturn that was looking really bad in 2001 and 2002 has turned around. Now maybe Bush's actions had nothing to do with that, but if you ask "what has he done", there's an answer. At the very least, he took was started out looking like the worst recession we've had in 30 years, and turned it around in less then 2 years. It took FDR a decade and a world war to do the same. The next big recession was never fixed by Carter. It took Reagan (using the same economic principles Bush is using) to turn that one around.
Ah... But he's done "nothing". Right...