It's Fixed!!!Follow

With Geithner and Emanuel, it looks like Obama's staff is making an exodus *to* Illinois.

This. 100% this.

Although, this is a sign things are getting better. Whether that's because the economy hit rock bottom or whether it's because of policies put in place isn't as important as the fact that it's improving.

Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 6:17pm by Uglysasquatch

I'm pretty sure we could have been much, much worse off given that many countries (including us) have ended up much worse post-bubble pop in the past.


The more interesting question is what economic indicator levels should be considered "normal", and not "artificially-high-disaster-waiting-to-happen".

I finally got another real full-time job. Thanks Dems!

Not that there's anything near equal validity to the claims, of course.

Right. Of course you can reasonably guess that a storm in the area had more effect on it than, say, the number of spider monkeys in the Cincinnati Zoo.

Obama's candidacy was the spider monkeys.

We should rule America by law of chaos theory. Dr. Malcolm for President!

Well, the advertising agencies would be kind of miffed about losing all their jobs I suppose...

I'm all for it though. Limit campaign ad spending, set up laws giving all candidates and issues an equil set amount of initial ad space in newspapers, TV, other publications, then let them buy more after that up to the limit if they want, but get rid of the deep pocket corporate interests.

It was under warranty.

How much money would that be, exactly? Is it more or less money than that spent by say public employee unions? So... If I don't like what a company supports politically, I can choose to not buy their products and therefore limit their influence on politics. But if I don't like what the Teachers Union supports politically, what can I do exactly? Not pay my taxes?


BTW. This is what I mean when I say that companies are subject to market forces and governments are not. One of those things is something we *should* be upset about (tax dollars effectively being used for political activism). The other just isn't. It's not surprising that most people get it backwards though.

It was an unfair question. It starts with the premise that private companies have some kind of obligation to spend their money on what you want them to spend it on, and further that spending money on "political activism" is somehow automatically at ends with spending it "creating more jobs". If a company can make more money by hiring more people, it will. That decision isn't capricious, or political. If, by lobbying government, it can prevent laws from being passed which will hurt their bottom line, and thus allow them to hire more people, they'll do it. Said activism benefits both the company *and* the people they employ.




And yet, you mentioned companies. You singled them out as though somehow them getting involved in politics is "wrong", but not anyone else. I could just as easily argue that all those non-profit "community organizations" which take money from donations and then spend it on political activism could instead spend that money on soup kitchens and loans to small businesses to help the community members directly. Yet I don't see you complaining about them, either.



Except that they become rich by providing a good or service to the public, which the public freely chooses to use. They overwhelmingly do this via employment. Thus, their profit motive helps all of us. It helps the people they employ, and it helps the consumers by providing them a better product. And if the company does things which the public doesn't like, the public can boycott them. Can we boycott the government? I'm much much more concerned about government power and influence than private companies getting wealthy.

What does a union do? It increases the cost of labor, thus increasing the cost of the goods and services they provide. And they do this with a virtual monopoly in the areas where they exist. Public employee unions don't have *any* competition at all. And they're funded by taxpayer dollars. And the unions get a piece of that. And they spend it lobbying for even more support for the union.

If we're going to talk about political activism which is negative in effect, what the hell can be said about a process where a group of politicians increase funding for some public sector jobs, which in turn enriches the union, which then turns around and spends that increased money supporting the issues and campaigns of the very politicians who just gave them that money? It's about as corrupt as can be, yet almost no one talks about it.

When a private corporation lobbies the government, the end result is almost always going to be positive for everyone else. When public unions do, it's almost always going to be negative. So yeah. It's relevant to point this out.



But what's good for business is good for America, so we still end out in the same place. Are you trying to argue that a law which decreases corporate profits will somehow magically result in increased hiring by that corporation? How exactly do you think that works? When you make the people who hire people less wealthy, you really only hurt the people they might have hired. Do you honestly think it works some other way? If so, how about you explain why?

Edited, Sep 23rd 2010 1:14pm by gbaji

On the whole, we're better off if those industries are healthy and successful, than if they are not. With the possible exception of the pharmaceutical industry, all the others make money only if there are consumers willing to pay for their goods and services. Crashing the economy is not in their best interest.

And the pharma industry is an exception specifically because of the massive influence government has in the health care industry. So once again, we see that it's the intervention of government into business which create the potential for corruption. When government becomes a major consumer of a product, you're going to have problems.

It's not a one sided thing, whats good for consumers is good for big business as well. In fact, "trickle up" policies usually work better for the system overall, as the lower class generally has decreased ability to abuse any shift in power towards them.


lolno, there are plenty of obvious examples like "safety" (worker/consumer), discrimination, contemporary peonage, and "environmental impact" where this is obviously not true. Additionally the benefit a company receives from policy changes (via lobbying or otherwise) is often only felt by the upper echelon of the company, not passed down to the consumers or employees. In practice "trickle down" policies just don't work.
There is plenty of corruption without government intervention as well. Increasing government intervention via regulation may increase "corruption potential" in a vague sense just by adding more players, but not necessarily "corruption likelihood" as the more players there are and transparency there is the more eyes and checks there are to point out and deal with corruption.