Poll: Government Spending Philosophy
 

* Cutting spending includes losing services and programs that you rely on and support and benefit you. It's not just cutting welfare to the lazy criminal, system-playing, drug-addicted minorities. It means you get shitty roads, less law enforcement, seniors eating cat food and dying through lack of healthcare, veterans losing benefits, etc.

The deficit is getting smaller every day because the economy is improving. Check out the debt clock to see it shrinking.

So another option is for the government to do things that help the economy grow so that tax revenues increase without increasing the tax rate.

That's long term, though, isn't it? If you cut taxes to entice business to come into your state, you have to do something until those increased taxes hit the bank. One or more of these options still has to occur, right?

What brought this on is that on Monday Pennsylvania borrowed $1.5 Billion. At the same time the Corbett administration is running campaign ads about how his opponent will raise taxes.

Keynesian economics, if the economy is shrinking then government should (probably) increase spending to alter the equation of moving money, and then, government should (probably) cut spending when the economy is growing.

Similarly there are conditions under which increasing the tax rate leads to no additional taxes being collected.

Oh it's state government you're thinking about?

http://cellar.org/2014/questionismoot.jpg

They still have to do something.

A race car driver is about to crash. Should the driver

A) speed up
B) slow down
C) turn*


* Turning with no other action means the driver will eventually hit the wall or spin out in the grass.

I think that's a poor analogy. There is nothing the driver needs to do while turning. While waiting for additional tax revenue to come in, a state must continue to pay bills, so must borrow, raise taxes, or cut spending.

That is the obvious solution when assuming economies are open loop. But reality is closed loop. What did Clinton do to later cause economic prosperity? He raised taxes.

Simplistic thoughts assume A results in B. We see this especially in electronics. When A caused B causes C causes D causes E causes A, then nothing is obvious anymore. A decrease in C causes an increase in A resulting in completely different reactions from A to B. A major difference always exists in open loop and closed loop solutions.

In economics, sometimes increasing taxes or spending can make things better or worse.

The massive late 1970s economics malaise created by 1968 Nixon and Vietnam was solved by massive interest rate hikes and a resulting removal of money from the economy. Unfortunately nobody had the balls to do that until Carter and Volker did it.

The massive 2007 economics malise created by George Jr's Mission Accomplished, et al was solved by massive monetary infusions resulting in money that had virtually disappeared.

Each economic malise is unique. Until details of a recession are known, then best is to inject more or less money. Nobody can say more without extensive details.

Bernanke saved our ass. He said he would not repeat mistakes of 1929 when government did so much harm by installing fiscal constraint. Sometimes injecting more money (ie 1970s) can make things worse. But Bernanke did the right thing so that 40% of jobs were not lost. He injected more money saving our economy. The devil is in those details.

Same applies to taxes. Sometimes tax cuts are good. Other times a tax increase is better.

This is true, BUT when I see the Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to paint the 1400 foot Sagamore bridge over the Cape Cod Canal for $12,390,000.00, it gives me pause. Yes Virginia, that's millions. :eek:

Doing it right is expensive. I don't have any context to compare bridge painting costs, but stripping paint, with lead abatement, is a labor-intensive and expensive process.

I wonder about this "new high performance paint system."

Every time a new construction material comes along, it's sold as zero maintenance, and lasts forever. And 20 years later we find out that it was all a lie, and we have to replace it with the next construction material.

Color me skeptical.

Like vinyl is final...

No. But then too, I am too smart to believe things Spexx believes in -- like that the Government is even supposed to be any part of the services industry. It is simply not designed to do it, and hence fails at it. You reduce the problems posed by government by reducing the governmental sphere, which is of course necessary if you want to actually have a pension you can enjoy.

The State is a weapon. It is as much my weapon as it is Spexx's, or BigV's, or Classicman's. Its functions are a weapon's; don't expect it to succeed doing anything else -- that's the beginning and the end of it. There's a reason they call it "enforcing" the law. I can figure that much out.

Trying to use Government and the political way for doing anything other than being a weapon is like trying to drive nails with an elephant gun. Sure, you might get that nail driven... but the hammer is the better tool.

That's what the Club of Rome thought, and Dr. Paul Ehrlich as well. Their modeling was consequently wholly inadequate, particularly in regard to India, which they predicted would be a depopulated desert solely due to population pressure followed by a population crash basically from economics. You could reread The Population Bomb to check their assertions.

But the economy and the population seem both to be not closed, but open. Neither is zero-sum. Assuming an economy is zero-sum, which looks to be the rest of your argument, is what causes socialism and all the concomitant syndromes and flawed thought flowing from it. It's pretty bad when flawed thought's effects are lethal to the tune of 167.5 million souls dead untimely or by violence, isn't it?

Now if you reject socialist and zero-summed ideas, you do much better, yours do much better, and it naturally follows therefore that everyone does much better. Nothing seems to stop the creating of real wealth -- so there's damned little point to devoting general society-wide effort to organizing scarcity. You do need the breadth of vision and lack of obsessions to see that, though. You can get there by reading if you are'nt obsessed.:evil2:

Something worth bearing in mind during debates about how much should be spent on this or that - is that most of us don't really know the facts on the ground.

Unemployment figures for example. If lots of people grossly over estimate the numbers of people unemployed and claiming benefits, then that can have a profound effect on whether or not there will be support for a welfare safety net.

It is interesting, that many of the countries which least overestimate the rates of unemployment, are also the ones that probably have the least anti-welfare rhetoric in the public sphere.

The elite have done a serious number on us (Brit and US). The economic elite wrecked the economy through shady dealings, and their friends, the political elite secured them a raft of assistance, low taxes and greater freedom to make profit without having to consider petty little things like a decent wage and working conditions for the workforce, whilst convincing us all that we went broke paying for welfare and the country simply cannot afford to keep throwing money at the massed ranks of the poor and indigent - they convince us every year that there are hordes of workshy chancers and we go with that.

Meanwhile social mobility has never been lower.

When there was a bigge safety net in place - when there was greater levels of assistance available to various people in need, from low income families to the unemployed - there was greater social mobility. All this talk I hear about not wanting people to become reliant on welfare - its bollox. The percentage of claimants, certainly in the UK, who claim as unemployed for longer than one year is minimal and has been for a long time. There's always been a small core of people who stay on for years and years - but the overwhelming majority of people who claim unemployment benefits do so temporarily. And the vast majority of people who claim benefits at all are either old age pensioners or working people on low wages or low hours. And the rates for fraud are very, very low - and have been for as long as they've been recording estimates.

But we get sold the picture of generational dependency for unemployment, with kids whose parents never worked, and now they don't work - and it's a lie. It accounts for such a small fraction of the whole - but the entire lower income bracket gets shat on in the name of that lie. And stopping benefits doesnt inspire people to climb higher - it makes them double down on what they already have - it makes people scared of leaving the shitty low pay job because at least it's a job.

Better safety nets for the whole people and fewer perks for the ones who actually broke the bank.

The guy dressed in leather, with a tattooed face, and twenty piercings, who says people don't understand his art, is alien and likely offensive to a lot of people. That's probably why the press loves to find these stories, and of course they always add he's on the dole/collecting welfare.

These examples stick in peoples minds and quickly surface when the subject comes up, rather than the kindly widow with four kids, down the street.

Plus everyone has a friend/neighbor, who knows someone, who knows somebody, who's gaming the system.

Interesting read

Just How Wrong Is Conventional Wisdom About Government Fraud?

Interesting article.

I had to stop reading halfway through because I was just getting angrier and angrier :P

Take a breath, count to ten, tell your toes to relax, then your ankles....:)

hehehe


....Pretty sure an old boyfriend once said something like that to me....

I can't verify this is accurate as it was a stand alone with no reference.
Undoubtedly there's an encyclopedia's worth of explanation, details, and justification, if it is accurate.
But the basic numbers shown, make me say, holy shit.

One more idea to add to that list--some items just quit costing money when you get them or use them, like the boots, etc. But there are some, (planes and helicopters, I'm looking at you) that have a very long support chain, every link of which costs money, maybe a lot of money. That helicopter gunship out in remote area X is of no use unless it's there, so it has to be transported there, plus fuel, plus ammo, plus maintenance, plus personnel, etc. And all that takes effort and money to get there too. Like you said, it's not possible to fact check these numbers from this graphic alone, but we do know that this stuff has hidden expenses.

Come to think of it, healthcare is conspicuously absent from this list...

I read the C-17 takes 20 hours of maintenance per hour of flight time. I've also seen numbers for the cost per hour of air time, in fuel and routine maintenance, for different aircraft. The numbers at mind boggling, and don't even include major overhauls after so many hours of flight time.

OK, here's some from the Air Force at TIME...
I'd guess that's fuel, parts , and the people who do the work, plus maybe their bosses.