What's wrong with our economy?

[Joe Steel]

Because more Americans would be working and spending? That hardly seems possibly. Please explain.

dear, if you had to build your own house car and computer it would cost you a fortune, take all your time, and you'd be very very poor!!

I never said anything about doing it myself. Where do you get your crazy ideas?

if each country, state, or person builds a wall against trade people get poorer not richer. Do you understand?

That's tired, old nonsense. This is the 21 century. Things have changed.

 

[Joe Steel]

I never said anything about doing it myself. Where do you get your crazy ideas?

Little Eddy dear lives in LaLaLand.

He used to post some of the nuttiest things about China and he is unable to learn anything beyond his party line nonsense.

It's one thing to believe nutty things but having the political power to make them public policy is a tragedy. That's what conservatives have done.

 

[Joe Steel]

... The problem is that the United States is spending budget money on completely ineffective programs: military operations and engineering research of the Pentagon, social programs and health programs ...

No, the problem with the US economy is the productivity gap. Since the late '70s, productivity has been increasing but capitalists haven't been sharing their increased profitability with workers. Without that fair share, workers were able to maintain their consumption of goods and services only by working more hours and borrowing. Now they've hit their limit. They can't borrow enough and they can't work more hours. The economy will continue to stagnate until they get their fair share of the wealth they create.

Why stop at the 50 yard line instead of going all the way to the end zone? The 1965 Immigration Reform Act opened the floodgates and millions of immigrants were added to the labor market, thus driving down the bargaining power of labor and strengthening capital's power to drive down wages in relation to productivity growth.

I don't think it's a simple as that. We can't just blame immigrants. True, they increase the labor supply but they also spend their earnings here. That helps the economy.

 

[Rikurzhen]

... The problem is that the United States is spending budget money on completely ineffective programs: military operations and engineering research of the Pentagon, social programs and health programs ...

No, the problem with the US economy is the productivity gap. Since the late '70s, productivity has been increasing but capitalists haven't been sharing their increased profitability with workers. Without that fair share, workers were able to maintain their consumption of goods and services only by working more hours and borrowing. Now they've hit their limit. They can't borrow enough and they can't work more hours. The economy will continue to stagnate until they get their fair share of the wealth they create.

Why stop at the 50 yard line instead of going all the way to the end zone? The 1965 Immigration Reform Act opened the floodgates and millions of immigrants were added to the labor market, thus driving down the bargaining power of labor and strengthening capital's power to drive down wages in relation to productivity growth.

I don't think it's a simple as that. We can't just blame immigrants. True, they increase the labor supply but they also spend their earnings here. That helps the economy.

When your kid gets a paper route and donates his earnings to your household's budget, is he now a full and equal partner in the family finances?

The government spends money on behalf of citizens. A highway can only handle so much traffic per hour before it needs to be expanded, right? If a city doubles in size over a decade, then that city needs to expand it's roads, highways, water system, sewer system, school system, etc. All of this civic infrastructure costs money. Most of it comes from via government spending.

It costs about $11,000 per year to educate one child for one year in a public school

When you say that immigrants spend their earning here, how can you engage in only a one-sided analysis? Why not also examine the costs they represent? That minimum wage Mexican-American who is spending his earnings also has 3 kids in school. Right there we see a $33,000 per year cost to the taxpayers. He's sitting in rush-hour traffic with you. Right there he's consuming some of that highway traffic load capacity - that's an expense.

You know what helps the economy? Taxpayers who pay more in taxes than they consume in services. These guys are great because the surplus that they pay helps to subsidize all the services that we use. What helps the economy is when we have a ration is like 10 big tax payers / 200 middle class taxpayers. What causes problems for the economy is 10 big tax payers / 800 middle class taxpayers. Do you see why this causes a problem?

If you believe that simply adding workers helps the economy, then why don't we really boost the economy by importing 3 or 4 billion of the world's poorest people and shove them into American cities? Think of all the spending that they would do.

Lastly, and directly to my point, that immigrant who is helping the economy is also driving down your wages, increasing the bargaining power of Capital, and increasing income inequality. All the action on income inequality starts right there, in the labor market. Back in the 40s to 60s that labor market was tight, there were no immigrants, and that's when Joe Blow could be a bus driver and support his family on his income, when his kids could go to a good school, when he could afford a house, etc. He could do this because Labor was at its most powerful in relation to Capital and this was so because Capital didn't have a flooded labor market with many potential employees bidding for the same job and thus driving down wage levels and increasing profits.

You can't fix income inequality while simultaneously flooding the labor market with immigrants. Here is what is holding down wage gains:

Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population. Though there has been some recovery from the Great Recession, there were still fewer working-age natives holding a job in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000, while the number of immigrants with a job was 5.7 million above the 2000 level.​

You have no bargaining power.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Because more Americans would be working and spending? That hardly seems possibly. Please explain.

dear, if you had to build your own house car and computer it would cost you a fortune, take all your time, and you'd be very very poor!!

I never said anything about doing it myself. Where do you get your crazy ideas?

if each country, state, or person builds a wall against trade people get poorer not richer. Do you understand?

That's tired, old nonsense. This is the 21 century. Things have changed.

stupid illiterate liberal liar.
If its tired say why its tired or admit you lack the IQ to support the garbage coming out of your mouth.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

. Here is what is holding down wage gains:

​

and don't forget liberal unions and liberal taxes​

alone have driven about 30 million jobs off shore!! Then the liberals invited in 20 million illegals to compete and drive down wages for those jobs that remain.

If liberals are for the middle class why have they destroyed it?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

We can't just blame immigrants. True, they increase the labor supply but they also spend their earnings here. That helps the economy.

they earn very little, send much of it home, and often don't pay taxes at all.

Ship them home tomorrow and tomorrow you'd have 10 million new jobs and upward pressure on wages to fill those jobs.

Democrats get away with screwing their constituency because their constituency is too stupid to see what their elected representatives are doing to them.

 

[Rikurzhen]

. Here is what is holding down wage gains:

​

and don't forget liberal unions and liberal taxes​

alone have driven about 30 million jobs off shore!! Then the liberals invited in 20 million illegals to compete and drive down wages for those jobs that remain.

If liberals are for the middle class why have they destroyed it?

The answer is politics. The same strategy was followed by almost all left-wing parties in the West.

If the Democrats can't appeal to voters, then simply import new voters who favor handouts and big government. Import a new people to dilute the existing population. Check it out.

Who wants a smaller government? 48% of the existing population, which includes blacks and present-day levels of Hispanics. Most of those Hispanic voters arrived here since 1965. This means that the people here in 1965 and those born to that group would represent a majority of the population who wants smaller government. The Democrats could NEVER win elections if that population was doing the voting, so they needed to import new voters who wanted bigger government and more welfare.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

If the Democrats can't appeal to voters, then simply import new voters who favor handouts and big government.

what seems really pathetic is that liberals get the immigrant vote and the middle class blue collar vote even when the middle class blue collar jobs are going to the immigrants.

The middle class blue collar vote is too stupid to see what is happening to them.

 

[Rikurzhen]

If the Democrats can't appeal to voters, then simply import new voters who favor handouts and big government.

what seems really pathetic is that liberals get the immigrant vote and the middle class blue collar vote even when the middle class blue collar jobs are going to the immigrants.

The middle class blue collar vote is too stupid to see what is happening to them.

Republicans capture the Core of America and Democrats appeal to the Fringe Groups of America.

 

[Uncensored2008]

I'm not a Liberal.
The software provided to Lenders was bypassed by rubber stamping managers who wanted more fees and commissions.
Auditing is still going on and I know one guy who does it.
He's a stauch Republican who says GW was a scumbag.

What the **** are you babbling about?

Software provided to lenders?

Another extremely low information voter.....

 

[Uncensored2008]

If the Democrats can't appeal to voters, then simply import new voters who favor handouts and big government.

what seems really pathetic is that liberals get the immigrant vote and the middle class blue collar vote even when the middle class blue collar jobs are going to the immigrants.

The middle class blue collar vote is too stupid to see what is happening to them.

Not really, Republicans dominate in two areas, the $70,000 to $200,000 earners, and white males.

democrats own the extremes. Those earning under $40,000 and above $500,000 a year are virtually all democrats. The gaps are where most actual independents reside.

Republicans have the middle class, democrats the poor and the rich. And the parties cater to these groups. Republicans are the party of the middle, democrats are at war to crush the middle.

 

[OnePercenter]

dear, we cant make better bananas than Peru or better autos than Japan, or better lithium than SA or better Iphones than the Chinese.

Do we have the climate to grow bananas?

The Tesla Model S is number one, 2014 Consumer Reports.

Do we have any lithium to mine?

Sure we can make a better iPhone. We thankfully don't have slave enough workers than China.

Quit dissing the US commie.

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Do we have the climate to grow bananas?

thats the point dummy illiterate liberal !! We could grow them in greenhouses at $10/lb or through free trade get them for $15 cents /lb.

Do you see how free trade makes us richer?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Those earning under $40,000 and above $500,000 a year are virtually all democrats. .

BS of course, the top 1% ($500k or more) are only 26% Democrat, not virtually all Democrats!!

http://content.gallup.com/origin/ga...roduction/Cms/POLL/4u2asbxtn0m_tvkapje3bq.gif

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

Republicans capture the Core of America and Democrats appeal to the Fringe Groups of America.

Most of the fringe groups were single people it seems. Good strategy- Democrats attack the idea of love and family thus creating millions of relatively poor single people who then look to the nanny liberal state rather than family to fall back on or support them.

 

[OnePercenter]

managed to ship 30 million jobs off shore!! Do you understand??

It's greed Eddy, or in business, how to squeeze a turnip and make it bleed.

Take Levi Strauss and company. A privately held company that in the mid 2000's took their manufacturing overseas to take advantage of child labor. Levi Strauss stated that the move is so they could compete in the pants market. Have you seen an appreciable drop in the price of 501's? No? And now you have your answer.

Why do you continue to paint a smiling face on the villains?

 

[EdwardBaiamonte]

. Levi Strauss stated that the move is so they could compete in the pants market.

dear, obviously they are more competitive with the lower wages from offshore labor!! Do you think they went to China or wherever for fun?

See why we say slow?

 

[william the wie]

Ed you are neglecting the huge wage increases in China and its shrinking Labor force fraction. Malawi, Zambia and Sierra Leona are in the process of eating them alive.

 

[bendog]

Arguing one party is the champion of small govt compared to the other party is at best naïve stupidity

Total Government Employment Since 1962