Americans may have to get used to a slow-growth economy, WHY

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by Buddha12, Jul 7, 2012.

  1. RedStar The Comrade! Registered Senior Member

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    This is exactly what Marx predicted.

    The death of capitalism is nearing.
     
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  3. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    And Communism is long dead, so what's left?
     
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  5. RedStar The Comrade! Registered Senior Member

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    When was communism ever achieved? Even the Soviet Union didn't claim to be communist (Hence: Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics). We can worry about communism once we achieve socialism.

    Socialism is left. We can just go about it in a different way, looking at what worked and what didn't.

    How do you feel about a law granting 51% of all companies to be owned by the workers who work the company? That's a good first step.
     
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  7. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    There are some employee owned corporations. I would feel uncomfortable making that a law.

    You might want to consider why Communism wasn't tried, even in the USSR. Could it be some flaw in the theory?
     
  8. RedStar The Comrade! Registered Senior Member

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    Why? It would seize power from capital and put it into the hands of labor. It's a gradual, nonviolent method of achieving socialism.

    Communism cannot be achieved until a society is free from capitalist production, and the USSR was not. International socialism is a crucial requirement for communism.

    If your claim is "communism can't work", you need to back that up with some actual evidence. It's not a self-evident argument, no matter how much you wish that empty soundbite were true. Some policies succeeded and some failed.

    Furthermore, the context of the Soviet Union has be taken into consideration. No communist or socialist today is trying to build a copy of Stalin's Russia. The material and historical context for that isn't the case today, in the United States.

    The United States has all the means to implement successful socialism. We are, now more than ever, in a position to have successful socialism. For one, it's industrialized.
     
  9. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    There are practical reasons why that law would never pass. Company owners have the money to lobby the government against it. Any other suggestions?
     
  10. RedStar The Comrade! Registered Senior Member

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    Sadly, that's probably why only an actual revolution will change anything. We can't defeat capitalists with their own system. What we really need is a national workers' strike for the entire working class. We must not only strike, but occupy the means of production, and seize the assets of the owners.
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    As Libor scandle has been mentioned in this thread I post more and broader on it, in part to answer the now bold part of X-man´s post 18:
    "... One of the Barclays traders manipulating the rate told Fed official Fabiola Ravazzolo in an April 2008 recorded phone call:
    “We know that we're not posting, um, an honest LIBOR.”

    Yet the Fed continued to play along for years as the knowingly manipulated LIBOR stole BILLIONS from the middle class. {Bold & CAPS added here by BillyT}

    It's the definition of conspiracy — perpetrated by the highest levels of international banks, central bankers, and regulators.

    And why would the Fed care? After all, they manipulate rates all the time, just under the guise of “policy.” ..."

    from: http://email.angelnexus.com/hostede...8f9814885cc2321a5cdaa3ba12a29cdd&ei=s76u048VN

    Another picture worth 10,000 words, but I add a few after it anyway:

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    "...John Corzine and MF Global leveraged to the teeth in high-risk off-the-balance sheet investments using CUSTOMER MONEY in an attempt to make enough money to hide its imminent insolvency. The bets failed and the firm ended up stealing more than $1.6 billion from its clients as it transferred money from the customers' accounts into the firm's to hide liquidity shortfalls.
    That money has not been repaid. It never will be. Meanwhile, Mr. Corzine walks around a free man. ..." this quote from same source as first.

    Billy T notes: don´t think the LIBOR scandle is just some English banking problem - The conspiracy stole money from your pocket if you have any loans - Libor, indirectly sets the interest rate you pay. When it was falsely made higher to boost bank profits, borrowers lost BILLIONS.
    You should be "Mad as Hell!" demanding many of these thieves go to jail.* The current economy would be better if you had spent those stolen billion in it instead of banks lending it to build the new, more modern factories in Asia, that helped the then non-competitive US factories to close - they stole your job too.

    * Barclay´s CEO resigning last week (and collecting his big severance bonus) is not enough, to say the least. We need to get the Guillotine back in operation.

    Even RedStar is beginning to make sense to me:
    That´s how "Mad as Hell" I am! Perhaps, Marx was right: Capitalism does have "the seeds of its own destruction in it."
    Or more likely it is just human greed as in: "I´ll screw you to get mine."
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 27, 2012
  12. kmguru Staff Member

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    11,757
    It is one of the situations...where people buy more Trucks than cars. So little Truck is difficult to use. Once you have the truck, you need a car to move around, then you go for the bigger cars...It is a want...that someday will change just like our drug habits...
     
  13. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Billy T comment: Fewer jobs (wrt the growing labor force) with lower real pay means hard times and poor economy will at best continue, but more likely grow worse except for the top earners, getting bonuses etc. Answer to question: "Are you better off now than when Obama took office? is clearly "No" for most people, yet Obama seems to be leading Romney! This is a tribute to Republican ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory more than Obama performance as POTUS.

    I think Romney´s main problem is his close identification with the rich, doing well, rather than the masses losing economy ground. His desire to give more tax relief to the already rich (and a Republican party platform that considers dropping home mortgage interest deduction) is making this perception worse for him. Too many voters now understand that "trickle down" job creation made jobs in modern factories in Asia and that CLOSED factories in the US (or at least forced more out-sourcing of US jobs). The old Republican mantra "Don´t tax the job creators" aint´playing well with the growing mass of unemployed and underemployed as it once did.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 23, 2012
  14. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    False premise. Voters are generally sophisticated enough to understand that an election is a choice, and that it is not reasonable or useful to pretend that it's a referendum on whether Obama boosted median household income in some absolute sense. The questions are "was Obama better for the country than McCain would have been?" and "Is Obama better for the country than Romney would be?" Which is to say that they are questions of counterfactuals. And when you have Obama's opponents going around slamming everything he's done to speed the recovery of the economy, and the GOP determined to block that at every step, and the GOP candidates proudly declaring their plans to do everything possible to undermine the middle class and poor, it's not a particularly difficult choice even for pocketbook voters. Likewise, people haven't forgotten that we got into this mess on Bush's watch, and that Obama has done nothing more than his best to dig us back out - against determined obstruction from Bush's party, no less.

    Anybody whose expectations are so myopic and narrow as "did median household income increase, irrespective of context or alternatives?" is manifestly immature and basically irrelevant to any useful political discussion.

    It's not the success as such - that is actually a plus - but the perception that he didn't particularly "earn" his success (he's a product of privilege, through and through), that he got it by preying on the less fortunate, and that he schemes to avoid paying his fair share back into the system that enriches him. Someone like his father - a self-made man, job-creating industrialist, and proud payer of much higher taxes than Romney has ever countenanced - would do well, success and all. It's the greed and selfishness that turns people off, not the success. Combine that with policies proposals that are basically "soak the middle class so that me and my plutocrat buddies can pay zero taxes!" and you can see why it isn't going well for his campaign. Romney is the opposite of the American dream: a vampire capitalist who doesn't even possess the awareness to downplay that fact in public.
     
  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I did not invent this question. ("Are you better off now?") It is a very standard political question for more than a quarter of a century:
    Hear Reagan ask it five times in one minute back on 2 October 1980 at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loBe0WXtts8v
    For evidence of its continued use (Just 3 days ago by USA Today) see: http://www.clarionledger.com/viewar...re-4-years-ago-?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|Home

    I´ll let you tell more than 500 politicians and at least 100 newspapers and magazines that they have a "false premise" and are asking the wrong question.

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    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 24, 2012
  16. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    Nor did I suggest that you did.

    No need: I'm already well aware of how vapid, shallow and irrelevant most politicians and news media are.

    None of that adds up to an argument that said framing gets us to any insight. Do you actually contend that "are you better off now than 4 years ago?" is a truly salient electoral question, in general and in the specific circumstances? Or do you simply like it as a talking point?
     
  17. LaurieAG Registered Senior Member

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    If you consider that corruption won the cold war then that is what would be left.

    http://moneymorning.com/2012/08/23/what-to-do-when-every-market-is-ponzi-scheme/

     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    The US has run its monetary system for a couple of centuries now, and the crashes so far have been events with observable and temporary and unnecessary causes (including a 50 - 75 year run, depending on criteria, covering two major technological shifts and several wars, that featured no major crashes at all.) Meanwhile the prosperity generated has been extraordinary overall and unprecedented in history. If that's what a Ponzi scheme gets you, then most people would gladly sign on for another.
     
  19. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Yes, technology has made life better for many. Things like medical advances and the transistor, etc. get the credit, not the financial system.
    It has a long record of collapses and until now recovery:

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    Note the last 3 collapse have each taken progressively longer to recover job losses.
    But this time is clearly different. It is taking much longer to recover than the collapses of 1981,1990, &2001 (25, 32 & 45 months). Looks like ~7 years, if ever.*

    One possible reason is now every man, woman and child is more than $50,000 in debt, when just the already spent federal dollars are counted. If the unfunded federal obligations plus state and local debt is divided by the population, then every living US sole owes about half a million dollars. Most of the interest on the 15 trillion of current debt is making social stress. - Increasing the gap between rich collecting the interest the middle class paying it (or borrowing it from their unborn children).

    The middle class is shrinking and now has real median income more than 7 % less than in 2007.** It does not take a "rocket scientist" to see that these trends are unstable - leading to disaster. I.e. is a Ponzi scheme distributing current benefits from assumed future collections. (As ALL Ponzi schemes do. That is the defining characteristic of a Ponzi scheme.)

    * I am betting "never" is more nearly correct than "seven years, if ever" as dollar will collapse and send US & EU into "worst ever" "longest lasting" depression.

    ** 7.2% less according to Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-23/u-s-incomes-feel-more-in-recovery-sentier-says.html
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 25, 2012
  20. LaurieAG Registered Senior Member

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  21. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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    We are really screwed and there's no way to get out!
     
  22. quadraphonics Bloodthirsty Barbarian Valued Senior Member

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    No, that means that the federal government is in debt. It isn't as if there are some lien holders sending every man, woman and child bills for this debt every month, which is strangling their ability to save or invest in themselves. And, absent that, you have not posited any mechanism by which the federal debt is restraining job creation. You've simply segued from the topic to some other talking point you'd prefer to address, without proposing any meaningful connection between the two.

    Moreover, you are ignoring the fact that most of that federal debt is owed to American individuals and institutions - if you're going to assert that the federal debt amounts to "every man, woman and child" being in debt, then consistency demands that you also state that "every man, woman and child holds $26,000 in assets." Likewise, those unfunded obligations are all things to be paid out to Americans. Your silly method of focussing on only one side of the ledger and ignoring the other is inane.

    That is almost entirely money that is owed to other Americans. That isn't some net obligation that falls on America as a whole, it represents obligations between Americans. You might as well look at the $14 Trillion in outstanding mortgage debts and conclude "OMG America is in so much debt!"

    How? We're borrowing at negative real interest rates, remember?

    That doesn't make sense. The interest is negative, in real terms, and the rich are also helping to pay for it.

    But it does, apparently, require a rocket scientist to relate those trends to monetary policy.

    The benefits that are being distributed come from current taxation and borrowing at negative real interest rates. It's a transfer payment welfare system. A Ponzi scheme is characterized by graud, opacity and embezzlement - none of our social welfare programs have any of those elements.
     
  23. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    There are 314million Amercians. So 1 of every 3 is getting aid.*

    The fundamental root of the problem (reflected in debt now increasing > 1.3 trillion dollars annually) was recognized back in 1885 book "Democracy in America."
    See more discussion at: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...ments-stable&p=2573119&viewfull=1#post2573119

    *We actually passed the 1 in 3 ratio more than two years ago. If the Social Security benefits and Medicare, etc. were included we are about at 1 in every 2 now.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 25, 2012

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