Bribery in the US governmnt

[kNIOKAS]

lol @ that youtube channel trying to make it about one party being corrupt

I hate people like that

Where did it said anything like that? Have you watched the vid?

[MavsSuperFan]

The government spending 40% of GDP and printing money like Mugabe = economically conservative? You are a truly ignorant fellow.

If you're earning a good salary these days you'll be lucky to take back half of it = economically conservative.

A conservative economic policy would use government power to protect established wealth, but the government took the side of the labour unions long ago already now, and allowed them to use intimidatory and coercive tactics to achieve their ends. A liberal (true liberal that is) would pursue an economic policy where the state remains neutral in disputes and seeks only to enforce EQUAL rules of conduct and equality before the law. A socialist economic policy seeks to actively redistribute wealth through administrative centralisation and confiscation of wealth by force and threat of punishment. Both conservative and socialist economic doctrines require a strong central power (they have a lot in common really), whereas a liberal economic doctrine doesn't require such a concentration of power, in fact it seeks to limit it as much as possible knowing that nearly all the serious damage caused in the history of civilisation has been inflicted by nation states and the actions of their governments.

Just because it isn't working and people are still in poverty doesn't mean the economic policies pursued are not socialist. People were in poverty in the Soviet Union as well you know. It's amazing how the power of the central government can expand so dramatically over the last hundred years, and yet there still be people proclaiming it 'conservative' - do you even know what the word means?

everything is relative. Eg. when people call the roman empire technologically advanced we mean compared to their peers

Compare us to any other first world country. Very few are to the right of us economically.

If you want to argue in absolute terms in your opinion the US is not economical conservative or compared to some hypothetical dream of ron pauls/the austrian school of economics than sure, but compared to other first world countries in europe, canada and japan, I don't know how you can possibly argue we arent an economically conservative nation.

If you're earning a good salary these days you'll be lucky to take back half of it = economically conservative.

um... yeah look around the first world dude
Edit: also if you are paying your nominal tax rate, go get a better accountant. Your effective tax rate should always be much lower than what you nominally should pay. Because of deductions and tax credits.

Take Mitt Romney for example (keep in mind romney knew he was running for president and had an incentive to get his tax outlays up)

Mitt Romney paid $1.9 million in taxes on $13.69 million in income in 2011, most of it from his investments, for an effective rate of 14.1 percent, according to hundreds of pages he released Friday in a move to quiet political controversy over his personal finances.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...738_story.html

Effective tax rates in america are very different from nominal tax rates. Eg corporations have a nominal tax rate of 30%+, however almost no large corporation pays 30% of its profits in taxes.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...99492233215330

U.S. companies are booking higher profits than ever. Yet corporate tax receipts as a share of profits are at their lowest level in at least 40 years...

U.S. companies are booking higher profits than ever. But the number crunchers in Washington are puzzling over a phenomenon that has just come into view: Corporate tax receipts as a share of profits are at their lowest level in at least 40 years.

Total corporate federal taxes paid fell to 12.1% of profits earned from activities within the U.S. in fiscal 2011, which ended Sept. 30, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's the lowest level since at least 1972. And well below the 25.6% companies paid on average from 1987 to 2008.

Corporate income-tax receipts typically fall during recessions, and they declined sharply after the 2008 financial crisis, which wiped out big swaths of profits across the huge financial sector. But U.S. profits have rebounded sharply in recent quarters, while tax receipts have stayed low.

but the government took the side of the labour unions long ago already now,

unions are under constant attack nationwide, and are much weaker now than at their peak in the 1970s.

American unions are actually a joke compared to the power that german, french, etc unions wield

[Dresta]

everything is relative. Eg. when people call the roman empire technologically advanced we mean compared to their peers

Compare us to any other first world country. Very few are to the right of us economically.

If you want to argue in absolute terms in your opinion the US is not economical conservative or compared to some hypothetical dream of ron pauls/the austrian school of economics than sure, but compared to other first world countries in europe, canada and japan, I don't know how you can possibly argue we arent an economically conservative nation.


um... yeah look around the first world dude
Edit: also if you are paying your nominal tax rate, go get a better accountant. Your effective tax rate should always be much lower than what you nominally should pay. Because of deductions and tax credits.

Take Mitt Romney for example (keep in mind romney knew he was running for president and had an incentive to get his tax outlays up)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politi...738_story.html

Effective tax rates in america are very different from nominal tax rates. Eg corporations have a nominal tax rate of 30%+, however almost no large corporation pays 30% of its profits in taxes.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/...99492233215330

unions are under constant attack nationwide, and are much weaker now than at their peak in the 1970s.

American unions are actually a joke compared to the power that german, french, etc unions wield

Sorry, but everything in this post simply points towards the need for a simpler tax structure. Canada does not have higher taxes, they are rather similar in fact, but the structures are so complex and variable that they are nearly impossible to compare overall and say 'country A has more tax than country B' - you are much better off looking at government expenditure, as that can only be paid for through taxation, borrowing, or printing, all of which are effectively forms of taxation (and in this Canada and the US are pretty much the same, government spending is simply more effective in Canada because it isn't dealing with over 350 million people and the sheer mass of inefficiency centrally administering the lives of so many people results in). Japan is utterly ****ed so i wouldn't be using that as an example in the future.

As for that bullshit about things being relative: that just shows really how ignorant and ill-informed you are. There is nothing 'relative' about it: 40% of GDP is 40% of GDP, be it in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, of fourth world. All that is needed to show how ludicrous your assertion is is a simple hypothetical: if every other country were completely socialist, how would that make the one country that manages to preserve a simulacrum of private enterprise conservative? Answer: it wouldn't, you are just talking nonsense. The reality is that Western countries are largely pretty similar in that they all abide by the consensus that ubiquitous and arbitrary government intervention is a good thing, and that is a socialist principle at heart, and that doesn't change no matter how much you want to call something 'conservative' to plug your agenda. Funny thing is that when rich countries underwent the growth that allowed them to become rich, they had small public sectors, now people are better off they demand and can afford a larger public sector - you have your cause and effect here completely muddled, it was Classical Liberalism that brought the economic growth that made us 'first world countries.'

Nor is 'first world country' a phrase with any tangible meaning - plenty of former Soviet Block countries thrived under low levels of taxation after the Soviet break-up; Slovakia's drastic recovery was largley due to the 15% flat tax rate instilled after the removal of Meicar. South Korea is thriving when others are struggling and it has a public sector of only around 20%. Pretty much every country with a large public sector has been stuck in permanent stagnation for over 30 years. Germany has only been doing well because it exploited the prodigality of Southern European countries for its own benefit (large borrowing to buy their exports), and Australia only because of its trade with China.

As for your comment about the Austrian school and some 'hypothetical dream' - i take exception to being pontificated to about economics by someone who has clearly never read anything aside from a few pop-econ books and now thinks he is some kind of expert because he can regurgitate opinions he read on the blogs of someone like Paul Krugman or Brad DeLong, a pair of sophists if i ever saw one. Your comment somewhat proves your ignorance of both economics and economic history. You are mistaken in thinking the Austrian school monolithic, as it is a school with a rich history of diverse and interesting thinkers, many of whom have made important contributions to what has become mainstream economic thought (Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Hayek, Wieser, Mises, Schumpeter) - all different thinkers whose works are ostensibly different, the only thing they share is their seeing Economics as a logical science rather than a mathematical one, something more akin to geometry than to say, Physics, and their rejection of the macroeconomic aggregations ushered in by Keynes (and they were certainly not alone in this). Though Schumpeter is different and does not even have this in common with the others. They rejected these things because they are not an accurate representation of real world events, and so do not have real world value - they are realists, and it is incredibly presumptive for you to disparage them so when you have not read any of them, and when mainstream economics actually does adhere to some 'hypothetical dream' where they believe the subjective valuations of individual human beings can somehow be expressed using mathematical notation containing distinct values that must be arbitrary if the subjective theory of value is accepted (which it is).

Nor are they the fringe group of idealists you want to make them out to be. In fact, before Keynes, the economic consensus was that ubiquitous government intervention was impracticable and would lead to a whole host of problems down the line, problems we are currently suffering from in fact, and that were predicted by the likes of Hayek a good 60 years ago (high levels of debt, inflation, inequality etc.), even De Tocqueville 200 years ago predicted some of them. Then Keynes, who wanted his name to go down in history, formulated a doctrine that was politically expedient and that would work over the short term (more political expediency) and spent the rest of his life selling it to the world, particularly to politicians and to the next generation of economists (have you even read the General Theory? It is an utter mess, and took 10-15 years before it could even be made into a semi-coherent system using the IS-LM diagrams). He was perfectly placed for this because he was a man of extreme privilege (member of the Cambridge apostles, an unrepentant elitist who thought himself the elite who should rule), and who dominated the intellectual atmosphere of the time with his charm and persuasiveness, and he even got his groupies to attack opposing economists most viciously, and libellously at that. He didn't care about the long-term consequences of his doctrine, nor its political asymmetry because, as he said 'in the long run, we're all dead' (there are numerous other quotes from him disparaging the need to save or to care about the future if it costs the present). He was a remarkably selfish human being, a fascist sympathiser (probably because their economic policies had quite a lot in common with his own) and brazen anti-semite (if you request i will provide the quotes from his writings that justify this). But he changed the economic landscape and created a new and powerful consensus that still dominates Western society to this day, but that does not mean his theories, or the economic policies pursued by Western governments, are theoretically valid, because, by in large, they are not.

I find it remarkable that you can expound on thinkers you know nothing about and have not read and to disparage their diverse theories with one sweeping remark as if you had expertise on the matter. Would you do the same thing with Einstein's theories without the learning required to understand them? You are like a creationist you rejects evolution without even knowing what it is.

edit: before Keynes, the majority of economists rejected ubiquitous government intervention and would have been shocked at a public sector comprising 40% of GDP. Only the Marxists, the German Historical school (dead and buried) and the American Institutionalists would have that it remotely practicable. It was not just the Austrians by any means, it was nearly all serious economists (Wicksell, Marshall, Walras, Pigou, Mill, Jevons, Walras etc.) - but i know, you haven't read any of them so your are ignorant of this. Still didn't hesitate to expound your ignorant opinion though did you?

[B-hoop]

Its all a question of short term and long term. Intervention will always cause unforeseen consequences in the long term, but in the short term recessions are ugly beasts specially to the poorest.

So its a question of acting now to alleviate the symptoms and possibly create longer term problems or not doing anything and suffering through the throes of recessions until it runs out. Politically, the second choice is death, ask Hoover.

I agree with the Austrians, but i think in the end its impractical, because no government will stay still while hell break's loose in the economy. Also, small actions can lead to the creation of bubbles, so to expect 0% intervention of a government made up of human beings is delusional.

[Dresta]

Its all a question of short term and long term. Intervention will always cause unforeseen consequences in the long term, but in the short term recessions are ugly beasts specially to the poorest.

So its a question of acting now to alleviate the symptoms and possibly create longer term problems or not doing anything and suffering through the throes of recessions until it runs out. Politically, the second choice is death, ask Hoover.

I agree with the Austrians, but i think in the end its impractical, because no government will stay still while hell break's loose in the economy. Also, small actions can lead to the creation of bubbles, so to expect 0% intervention of a government made up of human beings is delusional.

But the policies we're currently pursuing (printing money, inflating asset bubbles etc.) hurt the poorest most because they result in an increased cost of living without any real increase in wages, and benefit the wealthy (hence rising inequality). In recessions the cost of living should really be going down as the economy contracts, and prices go down, cushioning the blow brought by increased unemployment by making things cheaper to buy, and helping the less well off to maintain their standard of living. Instead prices and the value of assets are going up, as are prices, just so the government can point to the GDP statistic and go 'look, growth, recovery: we're doing our job, elect us again' while basically just kicking the can down the road and postponing the inevitable pain the very necessary restructuring of our economy would bring.

Then of course there is the political asymmetry of the matter: it sounds good and well to say 'spend in recessions, save in periods of growth' but this doesn't happen: the spending initiated ends creating vested interests that demand continued renumeration after recovery (in exchange for political support). We run deficits in recessions and booms alike; in theory this Keynesian ideal sounds nice, but in practice it hasn't worked out that way. It is also somewhat of a myth that FDR came in and saved the day after inaction by Hoover (who actually started a lot of the projects FDR continued and expanded): unemployment hovered around the 20% mark throughout the 30's, and the problem was not solved until WW2 (full employment, wehay!!), and after, when the US benefited massively from the collapse of Europe, selling them vast amounts of weaponry, and extorting the UK with programs like lend-lease that effectively made the US a crypto-colonial power. But you're right that it's now impossible to win an election without granting favours, which is why the power to do so must be restricted in the first place, otherwise it just results in governance controlled by vested interests like we have today. The legislature now has more or less the power to do whatever it wants, and that runs contrary to the principles enumerated in the US Constitution and its intellectual foundation (the Federalist Papers), which assert the principle of the rule of law and of government under the law, rather than the arbitrary rule of government officials and bureaucrats.

I don't think any Austrian (even Rothbard) promotes zero intervention, and the likes of Hayek, Menger and Wieser actually promote quite widespread intervention provided the actions of government are constrained by general laws that prohibits arbitrary discrimination by the legislature, and promote equal treatment of citizens and state neutrality, combined with the protection of individual rights. It is why the label 'Austrian' economics is completely outdated, as the differences between various members of the Austrian school are vast, and also how you can tell someone that dismisses them all under the moniker of 'Austrian' doesn't have the first clue what they are talking about.