How do we fix the economy???

biochem wrote:

PeterZ wrote:What rubbish. You'll find companies with a heavy reliance on research get pummeled by the stock market when their R&D expenses fall. Those expenses are directly related to the likelihood of future revenues materializing.

I'll disagree with that a bit. I'm in the pharmaceutical industry and the effect of short term quarterly thinking has been absolutely devastating. As a rule investors only care about phase III trials and somewhat about late stage phase II. They don't like to see cuts to those but for the rest of R&D, they couldn't care less. Cut away and reduce expenses, effects of cuts in earlier R&D programs are so many years away that investors simply don't care.

In most cases the CEOs don't own the company. Their financial incentives even the "long term" ones are short term by pharma R&D standards. So they focus on the near term R&D: phase III and the like. By the time their policies on drug discovery reach the point where investors care, they are long gone.

Tenshinai wrote:

Imaginos1892 wrote:Bullshit. US federal debt at the end of 2000 was about $5.7 trillion and at the end of 2008 it was about $9.7 trillion. That's horrifying, but "president shrubbery" didn't even double the existing debt, so you can only blame him for about 21%. Today, 0bama owns 54% of the US government debt and still has another 8 months left to dig the hole even deeper.

That´s only true if you elect to be highly dishonest about how it happened.

What was one of the first things Obama did after taking office?
Oh yeah right, he signed onto the Bush emergency packages! Which if he had NOT signed onto, would almost certainly have turned the crash into a free fall without a visible bottom. And he and his folks had literally zero chance to replace those with anything of their own, because again, that would have been as bad as not signing them.

Those by themselves were one of the single largest contributors to the runaway deficit.
But not the only ones.

Next we can take a look at how the Bushmen played around with the military, especially R&D projects, they essentially set a number of less than sane projects up, contracted from at the earliest 2006, up until ending as late as 2015.
And many of those just "amazingly" happens to have been porkchop buddy-contracts for "friends" of the Bush-regime.

And of course, when Obama shut down the most stupid of those projects, the Rep´s blamed him for being "weak" and whatever. Despite the fact that most of those projects were outright just stupid or bad ideas.


Then we have financial economy issues. Which just happened to make sure Obama was the one who had to handle the USD crash and its effects in regards to paying debts to foreign creditors.


THEN we have the economy as a whole, which yeah... The Bushmen pretty much made sure the oil and military industry was doing great with all the subsidies... And much of the rest was ready to crash and burn along with the financial crash.

The moment you start trying to look at who caused what, you find that GWB took USA from an almost zero deficit situation, to a plunge into near bankruptcy, AND made sure that it was his successor who got to pay the political price for it.

Imaginos1892 wrote:Bullshit again. The government does not hire people to create value; most of them spend their days filling out and piling up government forms which are of no use to anybody.

Shows how much you know. Seriously?
If a government starts/ends up with a commercial business, do you really think they´re going to hire/keep nothing but paperpushers?

How extremely narrowly indoctrinated are you really?

Imaginos1892 wrote:The only way to create value is by making physical products that are worth more than they cost, and governments don't do that.

Actually, LOTS of governments do that, your ideological blindfolds just doesn´t allow you to see that.

Imaginos1892 wrote:The only way to create value is by making physical products that are worth more than they cost

So, you´re saying Microsoft has no inherent value beyond its physical products then?
Companies supplying you with electricity are worthless?
The shops where you buy food have absolutely no value?

Imaginos1892 wrote:Government spending is at best neutral to the economy; money is taken from here and spent there, it is not worth any more when the government spends it, and no additional value is created.

*sigh*

You really don´t understand either economy or society do you.

A blanket statement like "and no additional value is created" is so utterly ignorant and stupid that it´s just sad.
It ranges anywhere from barely true to ridiculously incorrect.

Haven´t you ever even wondered why economic climate is sometimes talked about as "economic activity"?

And the PRIMARY issue is, WHAT did the government spend the money on.
If for example it spends it on a railroad supporting a startup mining industry, then the value added can be HUGE.

I mean really, how stupid can you get with trying to claim that "the government" somehow is a black hole COMPLETELY UNCONNECTED to the rest of the economy?

Imaginos1892 wrote:Every dollar the government spends was either borrowed or taken from a taxpayer who got no value in return.

If it wasn´t so sad, your lack of understanding would be amusing.

Imaginos1892 wrote:I remember when the Russians tried to have everybody working for the government, and that didn't seem to work out very well.

First of all, Russia and USSR is not and never was the same thing. I´m not calling you a Brit or Frenchie am i?

Secondly, well you obviously know as little about the USSR economy and WHY it worked and didn´t work as it did, and since this subject is massive in its complexity there´s no point in me even trying to explain it.

Let´s just summarise simply with saying that whether people worked for the government or not had very little to do with either the parts that worked, nor with those that didn´t work.

As an example, the US military works EXACTLY like some of the unsuccessful parts of the USSR economy did, which of course is why the US military ends up with things like the F-35 or the original Bradley model(which was a poorly functional deathtrap waiting to happen until the fixes made for the Israeli´s were implemented, simplified at least).

biochem wrote:
Even if you tax them @100% there aren't enough of them to pay for all of the spending.

Tenshinai wrote:

biochem wrote:
Even if you tax them @100% there aren't enough of them to pay for all of the spending.

You should probably go check again just how much of total incomes/assets are controlled even just by the richest 1%, much less the richest 10%.

Hint, it´s more than the "poorest" 50% has together. Heck, unless i misrecall, the richest 10% has more than 60-70% of the people counted from the bottom up.

wikipedia wrote:The Pareto principle (also known as the 80–20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity)[1] states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.[2] Management consultant Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who, while at the University of Lausanne in 1896, published his first paper "Cours d'économie politique." Essentially, Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population; Pareto developed the principle by observing that 20% of the peapods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.[3]

Daryl wrote:A particular problem we are stuck with here is the luna scape left by large open cut mines, that brought their international owners billions. Nearing the end of these mine's lives the parent company sold them off to $2 shell companies. These promptly went broke, and thus couldn't be made to honour the original commitments for restoration.

Daryl wrote:A particular problem we are stuck with here is the luna scape left by large open cut mines, that brought their international owners billions. Nearing the end of these mine's lives the parent company sold them off to $2 shell companies. These promptly went broke, and thus couldn't be made to honour the original commitments for restoration.

Hopefully can't happen any more with legislation to prevent it, but I'd love to be a world dictator for a short time to prise these slimes out of their Geneva or Washington mansions and make them pay double to fix the problems their greed caused.
Believe me, the top 1% own most of the world's resources and have done so by tricks like this.
Google gives this - According to the New York Times, the "richest 1 percent in the United States now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent".

The E wrote:

Daryl wrote:A particular problem we are stuck with here is the luna scape left by large open cut mines, that brought their international owners billions. Nearing the end of these mine's lives the parent company sold them off to $2 shell companies. These promptly went broke, and thus couldn't be made to honour the original commitments for restoration.

Here's a fix (completely radical and probably unworkable though it is): Abolish all forms of limited liability companies. Abolish the concept of corporations as legal entities in their own right. The only reason schemes like that can work is because no single person involved in that business is legally liable for the corporations' failures; Once that safety net is removed and business owners become fully liable, this sort of stupidity rapidly disappears.

biochem wrote:With larger corporations, most of the stock is owned by small stockholders. Often through S&P500 index funds etc. So there isn't really an owner to go after. Quite often the CEOs and others who made the decisions weren't actually the owners. They just benefited from gigantic bonuses in the $10s or $100s of million dollars. But they don't actually own the company. Technically we do.

The biggest impact of your proposal would be on small business owners. They are already taking a huge risk in starting their own business and this would put their entire family at risk. Fewer of them would do it. They also can't afford the $$$ lawyers the big guys will use to get out of any kind of liability.

So we do need some sort of limited liability. The key word is limited. The kind of behaviour referenced by Daryl and other sorts of legal corporate malfeasance need to be excluded from the limit. Also in the case of corporations held by stockholders we need to hold the C-suite staff and the board responsible, not the individual stockholders (exceptions could be made for stock holders who hold a significant percentage of the company).

biochem wrote:So we do need some sort of limited liability. The key word is limited. The kind of behaviour referenced by Daryl and other sorts of legal corporate malfeasance need to be excluded from the limit.