Open-Minded Liberals?

[Michael Tee]

What is this Republican lowering of the deficit?  My understanding was that they inherited a surplus, ran up a huge deficit, which they may have finally started to make small dents in by now.

Ami seems to think that the Democrats kept two sets of books, only one of which showed a surplus (which it accomplished by excluding the long-term liabilities of social insurance) and that a proper accounting, including the SS long-term liabilities, shows a deficit already existing when the Republicans took over the Treasury.

Regardless, my current understanding, which seems confirmed by every newspaper editorial I can recall ever reading on the subject, is that Bush, through a combination of lavish tax breaks for the rich and hundreds of billions poured down the drain in Iraq, managed to run up a deficit of historic proportions that is why even the fiscal conservatives in his own party hate his fucking guts.

So what's with this alleged "LOWERING" of the deficit?  Is this just more of sirs' ludicrous bullshit or is there anything to it?  I was thinking this might be some kind of scam-artist BS where the guy runs up a deficit of $500 billion, then pays in $100 million and says, "Look, I just reduced the deficit by $100 million!"

[Amianthus]

You obviously never participated in Washington Watch Room during the Bill Clinton lynching. Some RW nut threatened to kill Bill almost hourly.

Like most of your posts, Knutty, I'm pretty sure that this is made up.

[Plane]

<<Every dollar taken by he government from the public is a dollar less availible for hireing work.>>

Whoah, that is a big pill to swallow.  First of all, every dollar taken from the public is a dollar to invest in early childhood development or better education and training or disease control, etc.  Your government doesn't take the dollars and buy drugs with them until they're all pissed away.

Second, your "dollar for hiring work" paradigm just doesn't work.  If a businessman sees the need for expanding his work force, he's not gonna postpone it until such time as the government sees fit to either cut taxes or rebate back, he just goes to the fucking bank with a plan showing what he can do with that extra payroll bulge in his line of credit.  If the bank believes the guy can turn a healthy profit on the new help, they'll advance it to him or increase his LOC accordingly.  The fact of the matter is that businessmen don't like to hire because it increases their liabilities and their bookkeeping in many different ways. 

A businessman handed an unexpected windfall in tax rebates or cuts would be much more likely to try to apply it to labour-saving technology that would enable him to lay off some of the existing work-force, than to go out and hire more workers.   He might decide to increase his advertising budget, but that's more or less taken care of the same way as work-force - - it's already been budgeted for the fiscal year and deployed.  There isn't much room for impulse buying in business advertising.  If he wanted to increase the current year's advertising budget, he would have gone to his bank with a plan outlining the projected benefits.  If he was struggling under a heavy debt load, he might apply the windfall to paying some of it down (a very likely application) but - - and I think there was a survey which actually bore this out once - - he would be most likely to pocket the windfall and use it for personal self-indulgence.  Which isn't all to the bad, as it puts more money into the hands of the service industry workers.

A dollar in the hands of our government might perhaps be spent wisely , lots of them are not . Some percentage is spent on child development and some percent is spent on redundant research on perpetual motion or ESP.

But every dollar removed from the public is absolutely and certainly removed from the pool which most effectively gets us hired.

I am flummoxed at your assertion that spending on infrastructure improvement is waste. One of the most well run and successfull compays in the world is 3M , which improves itself constantly and is an excellent employer , its improvements and growth have generally made it a better place to work.

I can imagine a competitor to 3M trying to outcompete 3M by treating its employees as disposeable , but would this really be a stronger compeditor?

In Mexico  the biggest employer is the government , if you don't count the USA as an "employer" that is. The problem with this is that the government can't have compeditors to itself , it is in effect an unchallengeable corporate monopoly.

[Michael Tee]

I don't know jack-shit about 3M but even assuming it's as successful as you say it is and as good to its employees as you say it is, the fact is that 3M must be taking advantage of automation or it wouldn't be able to stay in business.  Somewhere in 3M's world there are machines, computer programs and other instruments of automation that have probably eliminated thousands of jobs.  No matter how lovey-dovey they and their remaining employees may be.  Obviously no corporation can function without any employees and it makes sense to treat the ones you have remaining  with respect and decency.

You are living in a dreamworld if you think that ANY employer, if faced with the decision of how to spend a windfall, would not consider both the advantages and disadvantages of further hires, further off-shore outsourcing, further automation.  Since the growth in off-shore outsourcing and automation seems to be proceeding much more rapidly than the growth in employment, my bet is that it is extremely unlikely that any significant portion of any windfall, whatever the source, will be spent on new hires.

I was also somewhat bemused by the wonderfully tender and loving relationship between 3M Corp and its workers.  I think you'll find, in real life, employees are a responsibility and a burden that many employers would not only like to reduce to the absolute minimum, but have already done so.  Employees have their obvious good points, but they are also, realistically, a tremendous source of liability, of potential workplace safety issues, of grievances, legitimate or otherwise, of lawsuits, justified or not, for sexual harrassment wrongful dismissal, accidental injury, they take up expensive sqare feet of rental space, require sick leave, vacation benefits, health-care plans, workers compensation fund payments, education and training, customer complaints, family emergency leave, medical leave - - you name it, I've just scratched the surface.  You think the first reaction of an employer who receives a windfall is "Whoooopeee!  I just got a bundle, now I can go out and hire a whole buncha people?"  Not in this world, plane, not on this planet.

Some other things that seem unlikely:  (1) that any business that could use extra help would not already, without waiting for government windfalls of unknown amount and timing, have made the necessary arrangements, with their bank if necessary, to hire the needed help; (2) that the amount of the windfall will be large enough to cover the hiring of new help; and (3) that a substantial part of the windfall, if not all of it, would not be used to pay down over-extended credit margins.

[_JS]

You'd know 3M from their products of scotch tape and post-it notes. They are a Minnesota based company and currently run by a Brit, I think.

What amazes me...even baffles me, is this notion that private companies spend their money wisely. LOL. The stories I could tell.

[Knutey]

You'd know 3M from their products of scotch tape and post-it notes. They are a Minnesota based company and currently run by a Brit, I think.

What amazes me...even baffles me, is this notion that private companies spend their money wisely. LOL. The stories I could tell.

You got THAT right, JS,large corporations are usually more inefficient than large govt. Besides that their CEO's rape the stockholders daily with their exorbitant salareis. No govt official would dare that. They just get rewarded in the after-govt life by their corporate masters.

[Michael Tee]

I didn't mean LITERALLY that I knew absolutely nothing about 3M (Minnesota Mining & Metals IIRC) - - I knew them as manufacturers of Scotch Tape, of course.  Back in the 1950s, when my dad got the first reel-to-reel tape recorder I'd ever seen (a suitcase-sized box that weighed enough to anchor a fair-sized boat) I knew them as the makerS of the brown, oxide-coated tape that it recorded on.  I meant that I didn't know how it was presently doing or how it got along with its employees.

I also do not believe that all corporations act rationally.  IMHO the ones that don't are outnumbered by the ones that do, and there are thousands of forms of irrational corporate action.  Hiring unnecessary employees (apart from the ubiquitous "secretary who can't type" of legend and jokes) is not a form of corporate irrationality that seems particularly widespread.  "Downsizing" seems more like it.

[Amianthus]

I didn't mean LITERALLY that I knew absolutely nothing about 3M (Minnesota Mining & Metals IIRC) - - I knew them as manufacturers of Scotch Tape, of course.  Back in the 1950s, when my dad got the first reel-to-reel tape recorder I'd ever seen (a suitcase-sized box that weighed enough to anchor a fair-sized boat) I knew them as the makerS of the brown, oxide-coated tape that it recorded on.

Errr, do you have them confused with BASF?

[kimba1]

you want to know about company  irrationality!?!
hiring more managers instead of more production staff
and introducing work tracking systems to cut cost
translation-hire people who don`t actually make money for the company
increase workload for things not related to the job and quite possibly lower production.

what i just stated is a common occurence in companies

[Michael Tee]

<<Errr, do you have them confused with BASF?>>

Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik?  I don't think so.  I remember the MMM logo on the boxes of tape very clearly.

[The_Professor]

<<Every dollar taken by he government from the public is a dollar less availible for hireing work.>>

Whoah, that is a big pill to swallow.  First of all, every dollar taken from the public is a dollar to invest in early childhood development or better education and training or disease control, etc.  Your government doesn't take the dollars and buy drugs with them until they're all pissed away.

Second, your "dollar for hiring work" paradigm just doesn't work.  If a businessman sees the need for expanding his work force, he's not gonna postpone it until such time as the government sees fit to either cut taxes or rebate back, he just goes to the fucking bank with a plan showing what he can do with that extra payroll bulge in his line of credit.  If the bank believes the guy can turn a healthy profit on the new help, they'll advance it to him or increase his LOC accordingly.  The fact of the matter is that businessmen don't like to hire because it increases their liabilities and their bookkeeping in many different ways. 

A businessman handed an unexpected windfall in tax rebates or cuts would be much more likely to try to apply it to labour-saving technology that would enable him to lay off some of the existing work-force, than to go out and hire more workers.   He might decide to increase his advertising budget, but that's more or less taken care of the same way as work-force - - it's already been budgeted for the fiscal year and deployed.  There isn't much room for impulse buying in business advertising.  If he wanted to increase the current year's advertising budget, he would have gone to his bank with a plan outlining the projected benefits.  If he was struggling under a heavy debt load, he might apply the windfall to paying some of it down (a very likely application) but - - and I think there was a survey which actually bore this out once - - he would be most likely to pocket the windfall and use it for personal self-indulgence.  Which isn't all to the bad, as it puts more money into the hands of the service industry workers.

Or, he could take the money to expand and make even MORE money, thereby hiring more workers.

[sirs]

Or, he could take the money to expand and make even MORE money, thereby hiring more workers.

A concept that jealous leftists/socialists so often actively ignore

[Michael Tee]

<<Or, he could take the money to expand and make even MORE money, thereby hiring more workers.>>

Why would he wait for the government to hand him the money before expanding?  And why does expansion depend on hiring more workers rather than outsourcing or automating to increase productivity?  And why wouldn't a businessman who was going to expand not just find the financing one way or another and expand instead of waiting around for a government rebate of unknown size and date of delivery?  Why wouldn't he pay down an over-extended credit and then have more in his LOC to draw on if and when he decides to expand?  Why would the decision to expand come just when every one of his competitors is also getting the same rebate?

The whole idea that rebates mean more jobs is more fascist wool-gathering.  It's bullshit.  Show me where it's ever happened.

There are so many alternatives, even for expansion-minded businesses, to just blowing a windfall on payroll and related expenses.  Where does all this certainty come from that the rebate money will go to new jobs when you don't have a clue whether all or any of it will?

[Rich]

>>A concept that jealous leftists/socialists so often actively ignore.<<

I don't think they ignore it, I just don't think they understand it. It's like the pie analogy. They think the pie is finite, when those of us who understand the American economy know the pie is limitless. In this case, they think that people who own businesses found them on the side of the road, or stole them from some minority, and they money they make is stolen from ... them I guess. What do they advocate? Why national socialism. Just like Hitler and Mussolini. Mind you, it's kinder and gentler, but it's the same thing.

[_JS]

>>A concept that jealous leftists/socialists so often actively ignore.<<

I don't think they ignore it, I just don't think they understand it. It's like the pie analogy. They think the pie is finite, when those of us who understand the American economy know the pie is limitless. In this case, they think that people who own businesses found them on the side of the road, or stole them from some minority, and they money they make is stolen from ... them I guess. What do they advocate? Why national socialism. Just like Hitler and Mussolini. Mind you, it's kinder and gentler, but it's the same thing.

Ignoring the poor understanding of 1930's politics for a moment, the pie is finite.

No economist worth his or her salt would suggest otherwise. I don't know why that is such a difficult concept for y'all to grasp.

If you open a restaurant in Manhattan, you hire a head chef, sous chefs, a wait staff, and a hostess. You start collecting revenue and you do a good job and pull in a few thousand dollars net profit a week. Now, the question is - is that brand spanking new money? Has Manhattan grown wealthier? Is the pie bigger?

Think on that. I'd like to hear some answers.