Time for more tax cuts!Follow

This is actually true, typically, of entrepreneurs. Large corporations not as much though, as larger profits usually mean larger dividends paid out or buying up competitors.

I just don't have faith in the trickle-down theory being as effective as some people claim it to be.

100% of very little returned in to the economy or an expansion of a company which results in more jobs?

Listen, I can't speak for every entrepreneur, but I can tell you that while we won't put every penny we earn back into creating more jobs, we will take a significant portion and try to expand, whether that be additional companies or making the ones we currently have, larger. And the portion of our earnings that we don't reinvest into our companies, is because we've kept it to spend on discretionary items, which is doing exactly what you claim the poor will do, except we're typically buying larger ticket items.

That being said, I can only assume the richest group, that top 5%, will do the same as us, but no, not being aprt of that group, I can't tell you for sure that they will.

Obviously, the Democrats need to start having the Brookings Institute or someone cook up scores for them and only allow the appropriate governmental agencies to look at them in a limited sense after a friendly party already told them what they wanted to hear.

Ah! But Moe, you forget the inventiveness of the Democrats. They'll just pay money to those people in the form of "tax credits", which can allow their taxes paid to reach negative numbers (as bizarre as that sounds). And the best part is that they can sell this to the gullible people of the country by making them think it's actually some form of tax cut! Brilliant, right?



The bigger problem is that when you transfer money to people in low income brackets, they do indeed spend most of that money and put it back into the economy. But that nearly all that money ends up in just one small portion of the economy and doesn't stimulate anything else. This is a problem because economic growth is spurred by increases in efficiency with regard to resource usage. Just selling a higher volume of something doesn't create economic growth if the resources used per unit of what you're selling is the same. Production improvements generate "real" economic growth, everything else is just transitory or illusion. Not a whole lot of research into new technologies and methodologies come out of the retail sales market, do they?


The biggest production technology improvements over the last century have come in the areas of mechanization, automation, computing, communication, etc. Along the way, we get material improvements, process improvements, better means of shipping, packaging, handling, and buying of those products that we buy. But you can't push a string. The economic effects don't "trickle up". Buying more cans of beans doesn't do much down the line to improve how cans of beans are made or how they arrive in the store, much less produce truly "new" things unrelated to the act of buying a can of beans in the store. You can't buy more beans and somehow fund the invention of computers, or cell phones, or flying cars. That's the real flaw in demand side economic principles. It "works" if you're looking at a static market, with static goods, and static "rules" for how things move around, and you want to figure out the best way to make sure everyone can afford everything that's on the shelves. It sucks really really bad if you want to make the market "better" down the line and to spur new product creation, and new methods for making and bringing products to market.


And that's just if we assume a dollar to dollar effect from that sort of transfer. The real effect (as we're seeing right now) is much larger. When you adopt a policy of doing this sort of thing, those on the production side of the economy become much more hesitant to do anything with the dollars they have for fear of getting locked into something that's going to be heavily taxed next year. That means that a dollar taxed might just "freeze" a hundred dollars (or more) which might have been spend productively, but is now spent more idly (like buying commodities like gold for example). As many of us conservatives have argued since Obama took office, this is why the economy hasn't really recovered. It's why the job market hasn't recovered. All the indicators right now show that the markets have recovered, and that big business (and their investor pool) have the funds to expand and grow and create jobs. But they're not doing so. The reason for that has been provided over and over, but some people just refuse to believe it. I don't know why, but there you have it.

No, I'm not. I have never once argued that a 2.8% unemployment figure was accurate. Ever.

What I have argued is that the error regarding that one number does not in any way prove (or even suggest) that the other numbers are also wrong. You're doing the usual "If I find one mistake anywhere, then the whole thing is wrong" bit. It's a cheap tactic Joph.

The Ryan plan will reduce the deficit more than the current status quo. It will result in lower unemployment. It will result in more economic recovery. Nothing you have posted proves otherwise.



Er? He didn't. The modeling was done by IHS Global Insight a third party organization which does economic modeling for numerous customers, including the US government. It's quite possible that a number of CBO scores are based on modeling done by this company and you just never knew who did the actual number crunching. There is nothing at all unusual about this.

You're confusing who did the modeling and the report Heritage did based on those numbers. But as usual, you don't let facts get in the way of a good conspiracy.




You're reaching here. No. I don't think any of this is odd. Why don't you show me that it's unusual for a member of congress to come up with an economic plan, then do some preliminary modeling of said plan, make some tweaks, etc, and then come up with a formal proposal. I would assume that's how any reasonably intelligent person would go about doing this. CBO doesn't score things until after the legislation has been written and is in the process. You honestly don't see the value in getting some kind of estimate of the effect of your proposed bill *before* you get halfway through the legal process?




No. Should I? They find out that some numbers in a table are wrong. So they remove the table first so that no one accidentally thinks those are the real numbers while they're sorting out what happened. WTF? If they'd left that table in there, you'd be arguing that by leaving the table unchanged they were continuing to lie to people in order to make them think that the Ryan plan would really drop unemployment to 2.8%.

No action by them would be satisfactory to you, so why pretend that you find anything they do "odd" in relation to anything else they would do?



I have no idea. Why don't you write them an email and ask instead of tossing wild speculation around? Since I don't know when they became aware of the error, and when they removed the table, I can't tell you why they didn't put a new one with correct information in it. Could be legal reasons. There are authors accredited with the report, right? You really can't think of any reason for this other than that there must be some strange conspiracy to hide a completely trivial mistake and Ryan must be personally in on it or something?


Bit of a stretch, don't you think?



When was he dishonest? You still have provided absolutely zero evidence that anything Ryan has done is unusual, much less dishonest. How about you do that instead of just speculating that he might have done so?

But... yeah... why bother learning anything when you can just insist that nothing ever happened?


That said it all :)


Ummm... well, yeah. They did. Did you not even read the little blog you linked earlier and see the names of the authors? Or did you just not bother to see who those people were? Or is this back to you being ignorant of the CDA models used and trying to brush this off on something else? Hell, before you were trying to convince me that Heritage had some other guys entirely doing this and they were just innocent lambs who wouldn't have even known there were any massive errors in their report.

Hint: They all work for the Heritage Foundation.

Keep slobbering, little puppy! Yip! Yip! Yip!

Edited, May 27th 2011 7:31pm by Jophiel

But these low income people will take this extra money and spend it at Mcdonald's and Wal-Mart, which will both find the need to expand, and then hire these people. It's a win-win!

No, most sane people know that that works. The question is whether or not its as effective as giving the tax break to those who actually create the expansions and jobs. I say not likely, where as you say absolutely not.

Really? Thought experiment time: Can a (retail or other consumer product selling) business stay in business if the only customers it has are also its employees? This is *not* a trick question. The answer should be innate and obvious.

The idea of demand creating prosperity is absurd. It can't work. Not "it doesn't work well", it simply and quite axiomatically cannot ever work. The only systems which work and are remotely similar is purely (or nearly completely) agrarian economies. In that case, everyone can work the land and then take a share to provide for themselves. But once you have an economy with layers of business between the production of goods and the consumption of goods, you cannot spur on growth by simply handing money to the end consumers. It just doesn't work.

Heck. It really doesn't work in the agrarian models either, since someone has to grow the food. Providing food to those who aren't helping to grow it in the first place is always counter productive. As mentioned above though, people lose sight of this very basic economic fact when we add in the layers into the middle and make the mistake of thinking that we can create prosperity by taking from Peter and giving to Paul.

It just doesn't work. It has never worked. If the goal is to help those who can't work, or can't work enough, that's one thing. But any argument which suggests that the whole is better off economically for doing this is just plain wrong. It's always a cost to the whole to provide that charity. That's not to say we can't (or even shouldn't) do it, but we should not lie to ourselves about the cost.




False dilemma. You're also making the mistake of starting with the somewhat bizarre notion that it's all the government's money and we're making choices of how to "spend it". A "tax break" doesn't give money to that producer, it takes less away. The real question is whether the whole economy is better off leaving the profits of business in the hands of those who earned it, or to take those profits (via some form of tax) and give it to those who aren't productive. That's the question. We should start with an assumption that we take no tax money at all and then ask if by taking it, we're helping or hurting the economy.

Then why phrase the issue as a choice between giving money to consumers *or* giving tax breaks to those who produce the goods they consume instead of phrasing it as a choice between giving money to consumers by taking it from producers or not doing so at all. It's the same mathematically, but the way you phrase it certainly makes it seem like a choice between the government "giving" money to one group or another, when that's not even remotely what we're doing.

It's not a trick question, but a stupid one, especially because you didn't think it through. The answer is yes, based on how you worded the question.