The GOP eats itself on fiscal mattersFollow

Werd.

Then what was their reason to hire more people 3-4 years ago when unemployment was in the 5% range? Don't get me wrong, I agree that things have changed which make it more profitable to make money in ways that don't require hiring people, but that's kinda exactly my point. It wasn't the economy itself which made that change. It was the passage of the health care reform act and the constant threat of higher taxes.



Again, why was it different before? The motivation of the employers to maximize their profits existed prior to the last few years. You need to look at what changed between then and now to cause the change in behavior. Do that, and you might start to understand what I'm talking about. If businesses can make more money doing things which require hiring people, they will hire people. If they can make more money doing things which don't require hiring people, then... wait for it... they wont hire as many people.


Ergo, we should be making business endeavors which require hiring people more profitable. But the Dems have been doing the exact opposite for the last several years, haven't they? Seriously, this is not really that difficult a concept to grasp.



Of course it's about profit! Duh! But things like "uncertainty" and "risk" affect their expected profits. If it's riskier or more expensive to put your money into something where you have to expand a business, build offices, buy equipment, and hire people to make something for you, than it is to say buy some gold, or put that money into the a venture in another country where the risks of low returns are less likely, you're going to do that.




And they wont create more jobs unless you stop making creating jobs less profitable for them than not creating them. It's really as simple as that. And let's stop saying that we're "giving breaks" to anyone. What you call giving them a break is really *not* taking money from them. But you get that threatening to raise tax rates only increases their likelihood to not put their money into things which you're going to raise the taxes on, right? If I'm a multi-national corporation, everything else being equal, if I can put a hundred million dollars into expanding my business in an area where taxes aren't going to go up versus one where they might, which decision am I going to make?



Stop calling for higher taxes on business and business will invest money domestically. It's not rocket science.

Yet somehow, magically, we had 5% unemployment rate just a few years ago. How did we do this? Without higher taxes? And with apparently no ability to compete with China or Mexico!

Seriously. At least attempt to engage your brain before posting.




I didn't say that. I said threatening to raise their taxes is hurting employment. Passing the health care act which places mandates on increased insurance cost for every single person that's hired didn't exactly help either.

No one's arguing for us to cut taxes on big business right now. We're saying that we shouldn't increase them. It's interesting from a psychological point of view that you seem to equate the two so automatically.



Yes. Which is why perhaps actually pursuing a policy which will get them to invest domestically should be our priority, right? Please tell me that you can see that raising taxes on the wealthy and big business is the exact opposite of doing something which will encourage them to invest domestically.




Excluded middle. Profit isn't the only thing that matters in a broad sense. Most people, even wealthy executives (probably especially wealthy executives) would not pull out a gun and shoot someone in the head no matter how much money you offered to pay them. So your argument is clearly missing something. However, profit it is an incredibly strong factor when making business decisions. Everything else being equal, if you make doing something less profitable than doing something else, business will tend to do the "something else" more often.

There's nothing morally wrong with this, and it's not something we need to fix. More relevant to this discussion, it's not something that just happened in the last few years. Insisting that there's no way for us to get out of our current economic predicament unless businesses change the basic factors they have used to make business decisions for pretty much the entire history of man seems pretty silly. Why would you make that assumption? It has no grounds in fact at all.



What would they do with that money then? You just haven't thought this out, have you?


What has changed in terms of economic environment in the last 4 years? We had a housing bubble collapse, right? But while that may affect how much money is available to invest in job related ventures, there's no reason to expect that the ratio of such investment would change. What else? We passed the health care act, which increases (will increase when the effects kick in) the cost to employ people. And we have created gobs of debt which the party with the most power in the US government has argued must be paid for by raising taxes on big business and the wealthy.

What else? Can you name any other changes which might affect business decisions? Assuming we agree that there is sufficient capital in the market to support higher employment and that businesses are choosing not to hire more people, then what caused that decision? What changed over that last few years? Something caused unemployment to rise to about 10%, and then stay at around 9% instead of dropping back down to where it was before.

I've told you what I believe caused this (and is still causing it). What is your alternative explanation? Magic fairies? What? Do you have an explanation?

Huh!? Where the hell did you get that? It's a completely economic motivation. Businesses and wealthy people want to profit from their investments. Democrats have made investments involving hiring more people domestically less profitable. It's not rocket science to figure out why unemployment has stayed relatively high.




Lol! Yeah. The people who according to you pursue profit at the expense of everything else have chosen to not make money in order to tank the economy, so they can lose even more money in said failed economy, all with the goal of putting the GOP into power. Um... For what end? Occam's Razor, my friend.

By far the most reasonable explanation for the fact that unemployment isn't going down despite sufficient capital being available in the market is that right now it's not as profitable for businesses to invest in ways which increase employment sufficiently to decrease that unemployment number. It's really that simple. You're tossing out completely illogical guesses in a bizarre attempt to avoid the very simple and obvious explanation.


Stop letting your own ideology get in the way of common sense.

Edited, Aug 3rd 2011 6:40pm by gbaji

You were trolling him? Well that makes the stance you took on a few things look a little less stupid now.

FTFY.

North America in general is in a death spiral in terms of manufacturing because we have labour and environmental laws and other countries don't. As long as we have "free trade" without "fair trade" - America and any other country that doesn't impose hefty tariffs on goods made with underpaid labour in factories that can spew their filth into the environment scott free - will have precious few manufacturing jobs.

You want to know why Canada's economy is better than America's economy right now? Because it is based on selling the house to pay the mortgage (in other words, shipping our raw materials off to other people to process). We simply have more raw goods to sell off - and people here are employed pulling it out of the ground cause it is harder to outsource that labour.

People who have money aren't investing it in America because they can make more money by squeezing 10 hours of work out of a Chinese factory worker for a buck or two.

So no manufacturing jobs - and America isn't swimming in diamonds, doesn't produce enough oil for its own needs (let alone for export)... So what kind of jobs CAN be created? You can only have so many starbucks for the unemployed to sit at an sip lattes in.

In theory we could be monstrous in agriculture (more so than now) except that the hungry countries can't afford to buy our product anyway.

Turn that around though. If your statement is true, then doesn't making the bottom line thinner in the US create the same effect? It's all relative, right?

Knowing this (and I'll point out again that this isn't anything new), then isn't it absolutely moronic to deliberately take action to make it less profitable for businesses to operate in the US? And if we do that moronic thing, why is anyone standing around confused about why unemployment has risen?




Those are not inherently incompatible though. Make business profitable in the US, and companies will invest more in business in the US. Do the opposite and they will invest less in the US and more in other places. Again, this is not rocket science or anything. What's amazing is that you understand that profit motive will drive businesses out of the US, but then don't take that next simple step and examine whether we're making it more or less profitable to operate in or outside the US.

It's like you have blinders on or something.

And how was the housing bubble creating employment? It wasn't. It was generating profits for those who invested in it. Whether they took those profits and chose to use them in ways which resulted in employment had nothing at all to do with the housing bubble. It had a lot to do with whether or not domestic employment would turn a profit. 5 years ago, they thought it did at a sufficient rate to keep unemployment in the 5% range. Today, they think so less often resulting in higher unemployment.




Again though, the factors which affect the decision to outsource have nothing to do with the presence or absence of a housing bubble. You're correct that those factors have changed, but it's not because there used to be a housing bubble and now their isn't. That simply makes no sense at all.

Want to try again? You seriously think that the absence of a housing bubble causes unemployment while insisting that increased health insurance costs and threats of increased taxes don't? That's some serious denial you're in there!

Manufacturing is only part of employment in the US. WTF? I'm not even sure what point you think you're making here.



I'm still waiting for you to explain how a housing bubble apparently magically decreases the unemployment rate. We're not talking about some broad economic indicators of which employment is one and "money made in the housing market" is another. We're looking just at the unemployment rate.




No, but that's a completely different issue Joph. I agree 100% that we should not pursue policies which result in employment leaving the US. I happen to believe that the policies the Dems have employed over the last few years have caused exactly that, and that this is why the unemployment rate is as high as it is right now.


As a counter to that you present... some vague cries about the housing bubble? With no rationale as to how one affects the other? Really?



No. Your answer fails to address why unemployment was around 5% 5 years ago and is around 9% today. The housing bubble doesn't explain this. It could be blamed for a few years of slightly increased unemployment perhaps because investment capital was scarce, but today that's not the case. The market has the capital to invest in the job market today just as much as it did 5 years ago. But it's not doing so at the same rate. Thus, something else changed other than just the housing bubble collapse.


If the only effects in play were those directly related to that bubble, we should be in full recovery right now. Why do you think the Dems went on that big advertising campaign last summer about how it was the "summer of recovery"? It's because according to normal recession patterns for the last 30+ years, the economy should have recovered last summer. It didn't. There are other factors involved. Unfortunately, due purely to ideology, those on the left refuse to see those factors.


Which is precisely my point. You refusing to acknowledge this doesn't refute that point. It just presents a case in point of this liberal blindness to the importance of not ******** over the supply side if you want jobs to be created. But the Dems didn't believe us when we warned about this 2+ years ago, so I don't expect you to believe it now that exactly what we predicted has happened. It does make me wonder how many times you have to be shown to be completely wrong before you'll consider changing your viewpoint though.

What, really?

Am I stuck in some terrible comedy about amnesia?